My name is Golan Shem-Tov, I am a Solutions Architect in the Quest presales team.
Working with Foglight on a daily basis we get exposed to beautiful functionality in Foglight that may not be as visible to new users as it is to those who have seen Foglight evolve. I decided to write this article to try to expose some of these nice features and functionality that I like seeing in Foglight.
Let's call this my favorite, cool and interesting features in Foglight:
- Zoom in on a graph - Pressing the control key and dragging the mouse over a graph zooms in on a specific area in the graph, you can repeat this action to zoom in further. I am still amazed that this functionality is actually possible in a web page that doesn’t use an applet or a plug-in. Interesting enough after a zoom in you can choose between the icons on the top left to reset zoom, previous zoom or apply zoom time range to the entire page.
- Customizer icon on the top right side of graphs - Clicking on the customizer will open a small pop up that lets you change the graph type or export the graph information in the form of pdf or a csv.
- Hide/Show column – The same icon as the customizer exists on the right side of tables allowing users to show or hide columns as well as export the table information in the form of a pdf or a csv.
- Changing themes on the fly - At the bottom of the right side of the action pane there is the ability to change themes on the fly. A darker background may be easier on your eyes when you are looking at your personal screen but a lighter background may be more visible when presenting to a larger audience. Foglight lets you switch themes in a click of a button.
- Bookmark with state, time range and send email in one window – Bookmarking a page is a common task with Foglight, just choose “bookmark” from the actions pane and it is done. But Foglight takes it a step further, you can also bookmark with current state, time range and even choose to email the location of a bookmark with a couple of simple clicks. Pretty useful when you pinpointed a problem to a specific time/view and want to share it with the team.
- Reusability – Foglight was built with a lot of thought about reusability
o You can reuse existing views in a new dashboard.
o You can build a new view and use it in another dashboard or a report.
o You can reuse a report as a part of another report.
o You can reuse variables in rules, messages, actions and other variables.
o You can reuse a scheduler with rules, registry variables and reports.
Foglight is evolving to be a great tool, it has a lot of out-of-the-box functionality and the ability to extend and personalize it. This list of cool and interesting features is partial and far from being final.
I hope you find this article useful.
Golan Shem-Tov