I've been looking into monitoring alternatives to Solarwinds. I am a big fan of Solarwinds but I don't like their super expensive licensing. I have recently discovered Quest's Foglight Network Management System and I am excited with what I've seen so far.

The most exciting thing about Foglight is their starting licensing agreement. Quest has made their product 100% free for the 1st 100 devices. 100 devices is unheard of for the quality and sophistication of the product. I've seen full product giveaways that limit the user count to 5, or 10 (i.e. Citrix) but 100 is borderline practical. This is something a small business can immediately implement and benefit without spending a dime.

Solarwinds Orion Network Performance Monitor provides a 150 device license. If I remember correctly the price was around $2500 for Orion, and an additional 25% per year, for the ongoing maintenance and software assurance. What's more is if you want to expand Solarwinds' functional use expect to pay more. Their netflow add-on was an additional $2500 for the 150 device license. If I wanted to monitor application services like Exchange, AD, or SQL, I had to shell out another $2500. The Solarwinds Engineer Toolkit was another $1500 and their Switch Port Mapper was another $1500.  That's almost at $10,000 for only a 150 user device license.



Quest's Foglight had incorporated all of the above mentioned services as part of their base monitoring product. Netflow, SNMP, Application Monitor, and their Tool Suite are included with the 100 user license. I spoke with someone from Quest regarding their pricing structure beyond the 1st 100 devices. As more devices are added it quickly gets expensive. $100 per device over 100 devices. 150 devices will cost $5,000. They drop the price to $49 per device, beyond 100, after you purchase 500 device licenses. 500 devices will cost $19,600 so that puts them more in line with Solarwinds.   Don't forget the 100 free device licenses!



Is Quest Foglight as good as Solarwinds Orion, Netflow, APM, etc..? Almost. From what I've seen so far the two offer very similar services. Orion is more intuitive and beats Foglight on aesthetics. Unless someone is familiar with Foglight they may have trouble pulling the right report. If price wasn't the only factor, and I was looking for a product to use on a larger network, I may still recommend Solarwinds. If a smaller network can get by with monitoring less than 100 devices (I suspect there are many out there) Foglight wins hands down.


1 more thing- I definetly plan to use this as my home monitoring solution.
http://www.quest.com/foglight-network-management-system/

Network Administration Network Monitoring