Dell vMonitoring Foglight for Virtualization Demonstration with Thomas Bryant

In this demonstration from Tech Field Day 9, Thomas Bryant, Principal Architect at Dell, showcases Foglight for Virtualization, a comprehensive monitoring and analytics solution for virtualized environments. He walks through the product’s capabilities in monitoring virtualization platforms, physical infrastructure, applications, and storage environments, emphasizing proactive problem detection and ease of data interpretation. Key concepts include intelligent data aggregation, customized dashboards, performance baselines, and root cause analysis, providing a unified solution for varied infrastructure management and business needs.

During the session, Bryant explains how Foglight’s approach to monitoring is differentiated by its emphasis on making the collected data useful and actionable, rather than merely gathering metrics. He highlights how the platform offers instant visibility into issues using intuitive visuals like traffic light indicators and spinning discs, and supports adaptive baselining for metrics that vary across environments. Further, Foglight integrates multiple facets of infrastructure—such as storage arrays, networks, and hypervisors—enabling root cause analysis by establishing relationships across components. For example, users can drill down from a high-level view of a virtual machine to underlying SAN disks, showing which elements are overburdened and impacting performance.

The demonstration also delves into the system’s ability to manage heterogeneous environments including VMware, Hyper-V, and physical infrastructure like Windows, Linux, AIX, and even UNIX systems. Bryant discusses capabilities such as chargeback, where businesses can allocate IT resource costs to departments based on consumption or fixed rates, and the customizable dashboard feature, which presents performance and usage data tailored for various stakeholders. Foglight supports agentless monitors, easy deployment, compatibility with various browsers, and integrations with external systems including firewalls, routers, switches, and databases like SQL Server and Oracle. A modular architecture allows customers to deploy and license only the pieces they need, further adapting the tool to suit unique organizational environments.