Quest Software Inc. is extending its Foglight systems monitoring software line to support containers with real-time and historical analysis features that can be used to quickly identify problems in container implementations spread across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Foglight is an application and website monitoring platform that’s commonly used in risk assessment, diagnostics, user management and server monitoring cases.

Containers are platform-independent, self-contained operating environments that include all the services an application needs to run. 451 Research LLC estimates the market for containers will reach $4.3 billion in 2022. Containers have become a popular alternative to virtual machines, but they need to be managed differently, said Adrian Moir, lead technology evangelist at Quest.

“The onboarding process can be difficult,” he said. “Understanding the underlying infrastructure is a struggle.”

For example, containers weren’t designed to store information in a persistent manner as VMs do. Their performance is also affected not just by memory, storage and networking resources but also by dependencies between containers.

Because of their black-box nature, containers can be difficult to troubleshoot once they’re deployed. And because containers arrived on the information technology landscape only recently, they’re easily misunderstood as replacements for virtual machines and managed as such. “You don’t want to replicate VMs in containers,” Moir said.

The massively successful Kubernetes orchestration platform is intended to provision and manage containers but not monitor them, Moir said. That’s where Foglight Container Management is targeted. The software collects inventory, infrastructure, operating system, host, cluster, node, pod and orchestration data via remote application program interfaces that work both on-premises and with popular cloud services.

Users can get a “heat map” of their entire environment that includes the health of individual containers and clusters. “Rather than just looking for problems we can show you how your entire container environment is running,” Moir said.

Foglight Container Management can’t currently be used to actively manage containers, as the company’s related tools for VMs can, but Moir said such features may be added in the future. When used with Quest’s Foglight for Virtualization, administrators can capture performance metrics for both VMs and containers, enabling them to more quickly pinpoint the source of performance problem. The heat map also provides a view of real-time and historical usage of resources.

Pricing hasn’t yet been determined.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Quest as a subsidiary of Dell Technologies Inc. Dell divested Quest in 2016. 

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