Blog

Author:	Foglight Product Management Team	Created:	1/21/2009 3:55 PM
The PM team responsible for the roadmap, function and overall business of Foglight will share their thoughts – some new ideas that will require more exploration, some more solid plans in the roadmap, and how interesting things in the marketplace relate to the Foglight strategy. The team looks forward to your questions and interaction.

Improving IT Efficiency: Start With the Right View

By Foglight Product Management Team on 7/27/2009 3:08 PM

There are some new dashboards now available in Foglight that show the health of your applications & services from the different perspectives of SLA compliance, user activity, and infrastructure tier status - all in a single view. These dashboards are designed with the needs of the Level 1 support team in mind, giving them an easy way to prioritize incidents and identify their source.

Improving IT Efficiency – A Hypervisor for People?

By Foglight Product Management Team on 7/6/2009 8:01 AM

In a tight economy, getting more out of existing resources is essential -- both hardware and people. The post discusses the idea of how expanding IT staff responsibilities can result in a more efficient IT organization.

Why Request-Based Java Performance Management is Better than the Alternative - Part 2 of 2

By Foglight Product Management Team on 4/7/2009 1:12 AM

Quest's philospohy for monitoring Java applications is different from that of some other companies. Here, the Foglight PM for Java explains why. Part 2 of 2.

Why Request-Based Java Performance Management is Better than the Alternative

By Foglight Product Management Team on 3/27/2009 2:34 PM

Quest's philospohy for monitoring Java applications is different from what some other companies do. Here, the Foglight PM for application performance explains why. Part 1 of 2.

2.0 SERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE

By Foglight Product Management Team on 10/23/2008 7:47 AM

2.0 SERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE

A layered Service Level Management (SLM) architecture recognizes the many management functionality requirements, goals and policies of every customer and presents them in a single management view. It then performs the many and varied management functions through cooperative management entities, working together in a collaborative manner to achieve consistent, high availability, service level management objectives.

The plan unfolds (Intro)

By Foglight Product Management Team on 10/12/2008 6:13 PM

With the addition of a single point of view management interface technology issues (I.e. alerts and performance exceptions) as well as Service Level Management policies will be presented to technical operations personnel and business leaders in terms that they can understand and apply to their objectives. They will have an opportunity to take control of the IT linkage to their business by adding Service Level Management capabilities to its offerings.

More Architecture

By Foglight Product Management Team on 9/16/2008 5:46 PM

As background, the traditional role of management systems has typically been perceived as either operational overhead or a necessary burden with an unfortunate technology centric point of view. This is because the language and presentation of “technology” issues has, up until this point, not been articulated in terms that business leaders are able to understand.

The Plan - architecture

By Foglight Product Management Team on 7/21/2008 2:35 PM

There are a couple of different approaches to creating your architecture.

The traditional approach and most widely used is the bottom up. The bottom up approach followed an isolated domain scheme. You know the one, where the guy in the network group says we need to monitor our network without any concerns for other domains.......

Foglight in 1H08

By Foglight Product Management Team on 7/18/2008 12:20 PM

Every quarter at Quest, we go through a series of business reviews with executive management. Each business unit prepares a summary of the business, key findings, and action plans for the coming quarter. We take three full days to review each business individually with stakeholders representing a cross-section of the company from R&D to sales to PSO to finance and everything in between.

SLM Plan part I

By Foglight Product Management Team on 6/19/2008 8:43 AM

It’s been very exciting here in Quest land in these last few weeks. I’ve officially been with Quest for 1 year and I’m as excited as I was the first day. The breadth and depth of the offerings around Foglight is simply amazing.

Building on the last post, Service Level Management also has a few definitions in the Industry.

What happened at Quest’s European Tech Briefings last week

By Foglight Product Management Team on 6/9/2008 3:06 PM

Quest Software holds frequent customer briefing events all over the world – where we talk with our customers about their challenges, explain our own thinking and hopefully agree on mutually-beneficial areas to explore.

The most recent took place in beautiful Amsterdam and Hamburg last week. Prospects and customers from all over Europe and the Middle East came together to discuss application/database management and Windows infrastructure management. Their profile was varied – representing finance, manufacturing, telcoms, retail and transport.

So what were the ‘hot topics’ in applications & database management?

The Cost to Manage a Metric

By Foglight Product Management Team on 6/3/2008 9:13 AM

In my last post, we started to talk about a performance management roadmap. In this post, I’d like to share some of my thoughts around the nature of the APM problem that we are trying to solve and the economic implications of that.

We’ve been working around this theory that the goal of APM is to identify the root cause of any issue whether it has happened, is happening, or will happen, and then take protective measures to prevent it from repeating. One approach to solving this problem says that it’s key to have every possible metric generated by an environment collected and kept historically. While this is impossible from a number of dimensions, let’s exercise this philosophy a bit. Disregarding the frequency of collection, what are the implications of capturing every metric that is potentially capable of being captured?

Virtualization Review Webinar

By Foglight Product Management Team on 5/30/2008 5:32 AM

Over the last month or two I have been delivering a presentation highlighting the challenges of monitoring a virtual infrastructure, especially when it comes to the application workloads running within the virtual environment. This presentation has been very well received, and I can honestly say that with the assistance of a solid marketing team, may be one of the best presentations I've delivered.

End User Monitoring and Ajax Part 2

By Foglight Product Management Team on 5/20/2008 12:54 PM

Well, it’s been a while since my last post but we’ve been working hard on our Ajax project and I think I can share some of the challenges we will be tackling along the way. Here is a summary of the challenges with a brief explanation of each.

When analyzing traffic flowing into an Ajax application you generally see some page request and then you see a series of Ajax calls with the page as the referrer some time later. So the unit of work that used to be a page is no longer very useful for these app types.
When you see an Ajax hit you don’t know what was done by the user to initiate the call so if there is an error, performance problem, or general need to understand the context of the hit you can’t do it. This was very straight forward when the web was synchronous.

The Performance Roadmap

By Foglight Product Management Team on 5/9/2008 9:49 AM

Over the past few months, we have been working on a performance management roadmap. An industry-level view of how enterprises have viewed performance management, what they are doing with it today, and where it's going in the future. I wanted to share some early thoughts we've had in how we are characterizing the problem and the types of solutions the market is going to need in the future to solve the problems facing us.

What about BSM?

By Foglight Product Management Team on 5/4/2008 7:55 PM

What about BSM? I’ve had a few persons asking where the BSM blog is. If you are like me, it’s been quite a challenge keeping up with the definitions in the Industry these last few years. Take the industry’s twists and then talk to several customers that have been blasted by vendor interpretations and you’ll even be more confused.

Last year Quest purchased Magnum Technologies and almost immediately we had integrated the two products. This created a solution that customers could use to gather low-level technical metrics and alarms and then, using internal models, seamlessly roll up those details to higher level services that the application owners could use to measure IT’s positive effects on ...

Oracle E-Business: connecting Oracle IT guys with the business

By Foglight Product Management Team on 4/30/2008 1:04 PM

This week, I wanted to talk about the management of Oracle E-Business (OEB) applications, as it’s something we’re getting asked about a lot at the moment. ...and let's quickly discuss how Foglight has advanced its capabilities in this area.

End User Monitoring and Ajax Part 1

By Foglight Product Management Team on 4/24/2008 1:07 PM

Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. In the end user monitoring world this translates to the good old days of basic single web page requests and web server responses going away. Today you can spend an hour or more working in an Ajax application and all you will see on the wire is one page request followed by hundreds of asynchronous calls, which in the case of a monitor are seemingly issued on behalf of that initial page. Before Ajax and other asynchronous technologies we had pages and hits where a bunch of hits made up a page that a user would see in their browser. These hits and pages were sent over http so our products would gather the hit requests and wait for the hit response before reporting the collected metrics back to the monitor. There was a bit of interpolation magic that we did to differentiate a page from a hit but for the most part our hit processing could group those together pretty well. With Ajax havin Read More »

Foglight Launched at Gartner ITExpo and Symposium

By Foglight Product Management Team on 4/9/2008 9:46 AM

We have spent the week at the Gartner ITExpo and Symposium taking place at Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas.

A New Blog for a New Monitoring Requirement: Virtualization Management

By Foglight Product Management Team on 4/4/2008 9:23 AM

Hi, I’m Scott Herold and I will be the host of this blog on Foglight.org. Some of you may know me from my book or my personal blog www.vmguru.com. Whereas, on vmguru, I get deep into general virtualization technology and the overall market, I’ll focus this blog more on monitoring VMware.

Welcome to Foglight.org! Let's Discuss Application Management.

By Foglight Product Management Team on 4/3/2008 8:12 PM

My name is Tyler Jewell and I head product management for Quest’s application management business. For Quest, application management includes systems management solutions for application environments and solutions targeting enterprise database deployments. This blog will focus on markets trends, common challenges, possible solutions...and more...

This Blog is about End Users and your ability service them better

By Foglight Product Management Team on 4/3/2008 11:27 AM

Hi and welcome to the blog about managing end users and the services delivered to them.

My name is John Spirko and I am the product manger of Foglight’s End User Management component and will be the host of this blog.

Welcome to the Service Level Management blog...

By Foglight Product Management Team on 4/3/2008 11:20 AM

My name is Greg Crow and I’ll be your blog host. Since this is my first blog on Foglight.org, I’ll take a little space to introduce myself, and let you know why we're talking SLM in our App Management site.