Foglight for .NET performance monitoring

We are trying currently to find the appropriate tool set to make supportability and maintainability of our applications better. One of the tasks is to find solution for applications performance monitoring that would be usable across development to the production environments. "Across development to production" effectively rules out development phase tools like VS2005 performance profiling, application test center, dotTrace from JetBrains. We need something with a dashboard, where non-development user can monitor the performance applications exhibit and if needed, drill down in to the single method invocation, line of code... Our performance architect Jason Barry, came up with very interesting product that seems to be satisfying our needs: Foglight for .NET. It seems to be reasonably priced and just gives us what we were looking for: - Distributed server/agents architecture - Web UI dashboard - Ability to monitor web applications and web services, windows services. - Ability to monitor SQL queries performance Comparing to CompureWare Vantage performance monitoring tool, we saw some important advantages in the Foglight for .NET: - CompuWare Vantage is more expensive. - CompuWare seems to proclaim the tool to be universal for Java and .NET, BUT reading through the materials of the Vantage we were not able to find how some features of the product apply to the .NET! The only advantage of CompuWare product would be integrated memory profiling, but again, it seemed to us that it is not available for .NET. Question of memory profiling seems to be very hard in the current .NET world and I'm leaving it for a dedicated entry. That is why we agreed with Jason that absence of it is only minor minus of the Foglight for .NET solution. After all of the testing, we fall short trying to install it on the integration test environment as installation on the x64 is not supported! We await the x64 version to be available in Q1 2007. I'm looking forward to use the Foglight side by side with VS2005 profiling tools and Microsoft Operation Management server (if management goes for MOM :). Expect more on the subject once we can play with the x64 version of the Foglight! Stan Added: Good overview of the current application performance management tools for .NET