vFoglight vs vCenter Operations manager

azjag

Has anybody had any experience with either of these products. My company is doing a POC and has narrowed down the finalists to these two.

I'm leaning towards vFoglight but found that creating dashboards has a steep learning curve. Whereas vCenter Ops (formally Integrien Alive) is easier to use, but doesn't feel like an enterprise application yet and has some bugs to work out.

If anybody is using either of these apps in their environment please drop me a line. I would like to get the facts from somebody other than a salesman.

arickels

We've owned vFoglight for years and are POC'ing Operations Standard as well. I'm with you - the dashboard creation with vFoglight leaves much to be desired.

We've also encountered performance problems with Foglight, even with 6 servers back-ending it. Granted, we also use various other cartridges within the Quest Foglight suite.

We are heavily leaning towards the purchase of vCenter Operations. So far it does what we are looking for - faster problem resolution. Of all products we've tried, it seems easiest to identify environmental variances and determine problem cause.

azjag

First off, Welcome to TE.

Thank you for your input. We are POC'ing both products right now. We are running both products as virtual to monitor our VM environment. Are you running both foglight and vfoglight?

arickels

Thanks for the welcome. We're not really running both. It's the Quest Foglight application server with the "Virtual-VMware" 5.5.5 cartridge. From what I've seen, vFoglight is basically the same, just a standalone version of Foglight. It's a fairly large implementation and we weren't able to effectively run virtually.

azjag

Our plan it to put it on physical boxes for production deployment. That and there is no need for the software to be causing alerts in the environment it is monitoring. Which both pieces of software have done.

arickels

Besides dashboard creation (which vCenter Ops does not offer anyhow), which other features stand out to you with both products?

Bottom line for me has been:

Foglight -
Pros: Custom dashboard and report creation can be scheduled to run and emailed. Application owners can be delivered their own dashboard. Is useful for generating data to determine abandoned VMs, highest/lowest resource utilization. Good retention of historical events.
Cons: Sometimes unusably slow. Does not scale well to large environments. Difficult to identify trends.


VC Ops -
Pros: Great for troubleshooting. End to end detection of issues and faster TTR. Good insight into both network and storage. Shows impact of outside influences on environment.
Cons: Would like the Analysis page to be more customizable. Most metrics are limited to a point in time.

Note, we do not use alerting capabilities of either product.

bertieb

I'm loving vCenter Ops at the moment mostly because it's pretty on the surface (and makes it obvious to spot issues or problems in the making) but it also helps to makes sense of an awful lot of data for skilled-techies, beginner-techies and non-techies alike.

It has its flaws and minor irritations at the moment (i.e. one appliance per vCenter instance, lack of customisable dashboards) but the main point for me is it'll help my team hand over the more routine support to offshore teams and will also compliment our existing monitoring systems perfectly. i.e. The basic premise being "if it's marked as 'red', go and investigate/ research as much as you can." Our management team love this idea as they can (and will) get increased utilisation from us on other projects whilst knowing the vSphere estate(s) are still monitored, issues are resolved quickly - potentially more swiftly due to the simple yet thorough information presented - and you don't need to be an expert to spot a problem. It's worth mentioning that I'm not paying the licensing fees though.....

Set-up and configuration was a doddle, no noticeable performance issues on the several appliances I've deployed so far and it's been reliable (granted, a couple of weeks is hardly enough time to confirm if that is the case )

I haven't used vFoglight, and doubt I will as vCenter Ops does the job for my environment

azjag

What version of vCenter Ops are either of you using? We are doing the bake off with 7.2 enterprise at the moment.

We have the ability to create dashboards using pre-configured templates monitoring the information we input in vOps. As far as creating custom dashboards or "widgets" not so much.

We found that "cartridges/modules" for vCenter would have to be engineered if they don't exist. This would need to be done with 7 of the 12 applications we use in our environment. Where as vFog is only missing one or two.

Cost: Nickel and diming products and features for the application.

I found both products easy to install with minimal calls to support.

Support for the monitoring/managing/trending of Hyper V, physical boxes and other devices.

Useful dashboards for all levels of environment and POC's.

Ability to do knowledge transfer in the event an employee who is the SME for either product leaves. What is the learning curve to effectively manage the system.

At this point it is hard to say in which direct we will go. I know it will come down to one or two items in a long list that are more important for our environment.

contentpros

Have you check out hyper9 which is now part of solarwinds? Good product and pricing is solid. I think the url is hyper9.com

astorrs

In a purely virtual environment it usually comes down to Quest vFoglight (quite powerful, but a resource hog and slow to the point of unusable at times) or Veeam Monitor (pretty basic feature wise, but snappy and now bundled with Veeam Reporter) - it depends on what you're looking for.

I'm inclined to let vCenter Ops bake a little more, the 3 Ops versions (Std, Adv, Ent) are essentially different products bundled together with minimal integration and given the price jumps for each it can quickly become quite expensive to get the alerting, dashboards, etc.

blargoe

I evaluated vFoglight last year. I found the management to be overly cumbersome for our environment... me being the only VM admin at the time and only having about 150 VMs and 8-10 hosts. It just seemed the overhead that I would take on managing the product (relative to my workload and other IT responsibilities outside of VM management) outweighed any benefits gained over another product such as Veeam Monitor.

We are currently evaluating Solarwinds' Orion for monitoring our VM environment. We recently learned that we were recently entitled to virtual infrastructure monitoring as part of the network monitoring that we already owned, but were only using for Cisco monitoring. The reporting dashboards blow Veaam out of the water, that's for sure.

vCole

Never liked vFoglight. Check out vKernel, I find Veeam's Monitor to be lacking as well.

azjag

After 4 months of POC testing in our environment, meetings, virtual training, and it came down to price.

vfoglight started out at $230k four months ago and ended at ~90k for 150 sockets plus 1 week of onsite professional services/training and the first year of maintenance.

vC Ops mgr enterprise started at $1.2 million and came down to $135k. No professional services or training. Add 22% of list price per year for maintenance. So the final cost is still unknown.

We liked both products and as stated before vC Ops won in several categories. But at the end of the day, initial and long term costs were the deciding factor.

I have a question for those of you that are current/previous customers of vFoglight. Since we have Quest coming onsite to install and train for a week are there any topics we should focus on while they are here? Besides dashboard creation. I want to make sure identify and address any difficult areas or large learning curves with the product.

Now onto "fixing" the HP SIM infrastructure that hasn't been managed in 18 months. <--sarcasm

Zaits

Can anyone comment with their experiencing using vCenter Operations alerts and reporting?