Data is now the lifeblood of every modern organization. Ensuring the right data is available to the right people at the right time has become a strategic imperative. At the same time, businesses are under pressure to reduce costs while still enabling growth, maintaining high performance, and delivering exceptional customer experiences.

To achieve all this, organizations are taking a hard look at the performance and efficiency of their entire data delivery ecosystem. And this involves far more than just the database. Cloud adoption, infrastructure complexity, new data models, and increasing demand from internal and external data consumers have all dramatically changed the game. From analytics and eCommerce to AI—data pipelines have never been more critical, or more strained.

To keep these pipelines healthy, high-performing, and available, a powerful monitoring and observability solution is no longer optional—it’s essential.

---

New Realities Driving Change

Several trends are reshaping how organizations evaluate whether their current monitoring approach is “good enough”:

• Growing reliance on open-source technologies for cost savings

• Rapid expansion of NoSQL databases due to unstructured data growth

• Rising adoption of cloud data platforms

• ~75% of organizations actively migrating workloads to the cloud

• Microservice architectures requiring multiple database platforms per application

• Business units choosing and deploying their own data platforms

With this level of diversity and complexity, many “good” monitoring solutions fall short. They may solve for one area—but leave gaps elsewhere.

So the real question becomes: Is a tool that’s only good in some areas still good enough for your future needs?

---

Three Critical Questions to Ask

1. Can the solution support the scale and unique needs of your enterprise?

Most organizations today face similar challenges:

• Do we have the right skills to manage the growing number of database platforms?

• Are we minimizing DevOps risks and ensuring safe database changes?

• Can we maintain a high-quality customer experience as infrastructure evolves?

• Are we able to monitor cloud databases effectively?

• Can we see what’s happening at the virtualization and infrastructure layers?

• Are we empowering data consumers with the insights they need?

With 90% of DBAs now supporting multiple database platforms—and most supporting at least two—organizations cannot afford blind spots. A solution that only monitors SQL Server, Oracle, and MySQL is no longer enough.

Foglight® by Quest continually expands its support for new platforms, adding three more in just the past few months. It combines platform breadth with deep diagnostic capabilities:

• Change tracking

• Baseline comparisons

• Multi-dimensional performance analysis

• Query insights

• Workload comparisons for DevOps safety

Foglight not only identifies performance issues—it helps teams find the cause and determine the fix, even without deep expertise in each platform.

Foglight also extends beyond databases to monitor:

• Cloud environments (IaaS & PaaS)

• Virtualization layers

• Cloud cost and capacity management

This unified view reduces risk, eliminates waste, and ensures your full data ecosystem is healthy.

---

2. Does the solution deliver true observability?

Observability is more than just collecting logs, metrics, and traces. It’s about turning that data into actionable insights.

Strong observability has been shown to reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) by 25% or more.

Foglight applies observability at both the database and infrastructure layers, connecting the dots across environments to:

• Highlight root causes

• Show downstream impacts

• Recommend remediation paths

This gives teams the context they need—fast.

---

3. How quickly can you get value?

Monitoring solutions should accelerate problem-solving, not slow teams down with complex setups or steep learning curves.

Foglight delivers fast time-to-value through:

• Quick deployment

• Easy customization

• Immediate actionable insights

• Even faster onboarding with Foglight’s cloud-managed option

With Foglight, teams spend less time firefighting and more time innovating—something every modern organization demands.

---

Conclusion: Foglight Isn’t Just “Good”—It’s Best of Breed

Foglight’s strength lies not in doing one thing well, but in excelling across all the areas that matter:

• Breadth across platforms

• Depth in diagnostics

• Robust observability

• Reduced total cost of ownership

• Cloud, virtualization, and on-prem support

• Fast time to value

• Proactive problem identification and resolution guidance

Foglight delivers clear, immediate value with insights such as:

• Top-impact queries across all database instances

• Instances with the highest number of issues

• Resource consumption and KPIs outside normal baselines

• Long- and short-term performance trends

• Correlation of system changes to performance fluctuations

• Cross-environment performance comparisons

With 25+ years of leadership in database performance management, Quest continues to invest in new platform support to stay ahead of the market—ensuring Foglight grows alongside your data ecosystem.

Foglight isn’t just “good enough.”
It’s purpose-built to help organizations thrive in a world where good is no longer enough.