Here’s a question I’ve been asking prospects lately: how much time does your team spend preventing database problems versus reacting to them?
The answers are telling. Most teams spend 80% or more of their time in reactive mode, investigating incidents, explaining outages to stakeholders, and firefighting issues that could have been avoided with earlier intervention.
It’s not that they don’t want to be proactive. It’s that the tools and workflows aren’t built for prevention. They’re built for detection. And detection, by definition, means something has already gone wrong.
In a world where downtime costs between $14,000 and $22,000 per minute, a one second delay in page-load times causes 7% reduction in conversions, and where modern data platforms charge by the compute cycle, the cost of “detect and respond” keeps climbing. The organizations pulling ahead are the ones flipping that ratio: spending more time preventing potential problems and less time explaining them.
Put another way: what if your monitoring system didn’t just alert you to fires, but helped you fireproof the building?
That’s exactly what Foglight 8.1 delivers.
Introducing Foglight 8.1: Built for Proactivity
This builds on our Foglight 8.0 release earlier this year, which helps customers bridge visibility gaps left by traditional observability tools. Features like AI Alarms and Query Explorer helped teams move from “something’s wrong” to “here’s exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it.” Now, Foglight 8.1introduces three capabilities designed to shift your database operations from reactive firefighting to proactive optimization: AI Optimizer, Integration Hub, and playback. Together, they help you catch performance issues before they escalate, integrate database intelligence into your existing workflows, and accelerate root cause analysis (RCA) when incidents do occur.
Let’s look at what’s new.
AI Optimizer: Turn every query into an optimization opportunity
Here’s a stat that should make every DBA sit up: according to industry research, 80% of database bottlenecks are tied to recent changes and inefficient code. And with 30% of code now being generated by AI tools, the volume of potentially unoptimized queries hitting your databases is only going up.
AI Optimizer tackles this head-on. This new feature analyses your SQL queries and provides AI-powered suggestions for optimization, covering explain plans, schema design, indexing strategies, and query text improvements.
Why this matters:
- Close the developer knowledge gap. Most developers aren’t SQL performance experts. They write queries that work, but not necessarily queries that perform. AI Optimizer gives them instant, actionable guidance without requiring deep database expertise.
- Stay ahead of AI-generated code. Those “vibe-coded” applications and AI assistants are generating queries at unprecedented scale. AI Optimizer helps you catch optimization opportunities before they become production problems.
- Control cloud costs on modern data platforms. On platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, and Fabric, you pay for compute by the second. A query that runs twice as long costs twice as much. AI Optimizer helps you identify inefficient queries that are quietly burning through your cloud credits, so you can either reduce spend or reallocate that budget to workloads that actually need it.
- Shift left on performance. Instead of discovering a problematic query during a 2 AM incident, identify and fix it during development. Prevention beats cure, every time.
Try it yourself: Here’s an interactive demo of AI Optimizer in action:
(AI Optimizer is part of the Foglight AI add-on, designed with security and privacy at the forefront; query data is stripped of literals before being processed, and the feature is fully optional for organizations with strict data handling requirements).
Integration Hub: Meet your teams where they already work
Let’s be honest: nobody wants another tool to check. Your ops team lives in ServiceNow. Your developers track work in Jira. Your on-call engineers are paged through PagerDuty, and the business uses Teams to stay informed about the latest impactful information.
Foglight has always been powerful at surfacing database performance insights. But if those insights live in a silo, separate from your team’s daily workflows, they’re not as useful as they could be.
Integration Hub changes that.
This new capability provides bi-directional alarm synchronization with the tools your teams already use. When Foglight detects an issue, it can automatically create tickets, trigger pages, and update your ITSM systems. And when someone acknowledges or resolves that issue in ServiceNow, that status syncs back to Foglight.
The benefits are immediate:
- No more context switching. Your teams don’t need to leave their primary tools to stay informed about database health.
- Streamlined incident response. Performance alerts flow directly into your existing runbooks and escalation procedures.
- Centralized visibility. Database alarms sit alongside application, infrastructure, and security alerts, giving you one place to manage operational priorities.
The impact on incident costs is real. When database alerts automatically create ServiceNow tickets with full context, you eliminate the manual steps of copying information between systems, tagging the right teams, and updating status across platforms. That’s minutes saved on every incident, and money saved for a company.
Playback: Navigate time like a pro
Root cause analysis is a journey through time. You need to understand what was happening before the problem, during the problem, and how metrics changed as the situation evolved.
Playback is a deceptively simple UI enhancement that makes this journey dramatically easier. Instead of manually selecting time ranges and waiting for dashboards to refresh, you can now jump to any point in time within your selected window with a single click.
What this means in practice:
- Compare before and after. Instantly see how database behavior changed across hours or days.
- Scrub through incidents. Move through a performance event like scrubbing through a video, watching metrics evolve.
- Faster Root Cause Analysis. Reduce the clicks and wait times that slow down investigation.
Once you put this into practice, you’ll wonder how you ever worked without it.
The Bigger Picture: Proactive Beats Reactive
Foglight 8.1 isn’t just a collection of new features. It’s about the future of database management.
The organizations that win are the ones that prevent outages, not just respond to them. They optimize queries before they hit production. They catch capacity issues before they cause slowdowns. They integrate database health into their operational fabric instead of treating it as a specialist concern.
Our customers are already seeing the results of this proactive approach:
- 95% faster mean time to resolution (from 4 hours to 15 minutes)
- 30% reduction in cloud database spending
- 20% fewer performance escalations
With Foglight 8.1, we’re giving you more tools to prevent problems rather than just diagnose them.
Get Started
Foglight 8.1 is available now. Here’s how to explore the new capabilities:
- Contact us to discuss your specific requirements
