Skills 101: Foglight

Ever chase a performance issue only to realize something changed, but no one knows exactly what, when, or why? In this Skills 101 session, we’ll focus on how Foglight’s Change Tracking and Comparison capabilities within Performance Investigator help teams move from suspicion to proof when performance deviates.
Designed for existing Foglight users, this session shows how time-aligned visibility enables faster, evidence-driven root cause analysis.
Topics include:

• Using Change Tracking to align configuration, schema, execution plan, and system changes with performance timelines
• Correlating performance degradation with specific environmental or workload changes
• Applying Comparison to identify new, missing, or altered SQL, users, and workloads across time periods or instances
• Combining Change Tracking and Comparison to validate root cause using evidence rather than assumptions
• Reducing investigation time by focusing analysis on what changed and what is different

By the end of the session, you’ll have a clear, repeatable approach for diagnosing performance issues using Foglight’s Change Tracking and Comparison tools.

In this practical Skills 101 session, we’ll show you how to take control of Foglight by building custom UI queries that surface exactly what matters. You’ll learn how to shape Foglight into a clean, focused command center tailored to your role.

You will:
· Explore how UI queries work and how they drive customizable, dynamic Foglight dashboards
· Build queries that highlight your critical metrics across databases, apps, and infrastructure
· Reduce dashboard noise while boosting clarity, accuracy, and real-time insight
· Align monitoring views with business priorities, whether you're supporting SLAs, troubleshooting performance, or keeping leadership calm during quarterly peaks

If you’ve ever wondered, “Can Foglight just show me what I need without yelling at me about everything else?” this Skills 101 session has your answer.

Foglight covers a lot out of the box, but as environments grow more complex, standard metrics don’t always tell the full story. In this advanced Skills 101 session, we’ll show how User-Defined Collections (UDCs) let you bring custom data into Foglight and turn it into meaningful dashboards, rules, and services.
You’ll see how to:

• Create and configure User-Defined Collections
• Use SQL queries, intervals, and key vs. metric columns effectively
• Understand how Foglight agents collect and store UDC data in the FMS
• Build actionable dashboards and alerts from custom data
• Handle multi-row and multi-column queries using UI Queries
• Design advanced dashboards with richer visualizations

We’ll walk through real-world examples, highlight common pitfalls, explain what’s happening behind the scenes, and leave time for live Q&A.