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Foglight Evolve 9.3 - User Guide

Getting Started

This section provides instructions for logging in to Foglight and describes the Welcome page you see when you log in with the Operator or Advanced Operator role. It also introduces you to navigating the Foglight browser interface and discusses best practices for navigation.

Perform these steps before following the instructions in this section:

Logging in to Foglight

This topic describes how to log in to the Quest Foglight browser interface.

where localhost is the name of the machine that has a running instance of the Management Server.

If you are a user who has a role or a role combination assigned to you that does not provide sufficient privileges to do anything useful in Foglight, a warning page is displayed. Contact your Quest Foglight Security Administrator to get additional roles assigned to your account or to request that a different home page be configured for you.

Starting from the Welcome Page

An Operator’s welcome page lists the following commonly-performed tasks:

View Your Enterprise Health: Choose one of Foglight's pre-defined views to summarize the overall health of your IT infrastructure.
View, Acknowledge, and Clear Recent Alarms: View the state of all alarms across the entire Quest Foglight installation in the Alarms dashboard so you can take immediate action on them. The Alarms dashboard shows alarm counts by time, allowing you to identify excessive alarm counts or outage events. This link takes you to the Alarms dashboard. Another way to access this dashboard is by choosing Alarms under Homes on the navigation panel. See Viewing, Acknowledging, and Clearing Alarms .
View Enterprise Health Organized by Monitoring Domain: View an end-to-end, top-level summary of all domains in the Domains dashboard and drill down to view their managed instances. This link takes you to the Domains dashboard. Another way to access this dashboard is by choosing Domains under Dashboards on the navigation panel. See Monitoring Your Domains .
View the Health of Critical Services: Choose a level of service as a focal point by subscribing to services of interest and viewing their dependencies. This link takes you to the My Services. Another way to access this dashboard is by choosing My Services under Dashboards on the navigation panel. For more information, see Monitoring Your Services .
View the Health of the Monitored Hosts in Your Enterprise: View alarms and a high-level summary of performance on your monitored hosts. This link takes you to the Hosts dashboard. For more information, see Monitoring Your Hosts .
Configure Alarm Reporting and Blackouts: Configure the mail server and assign email routing for Foglight alarm notifications. Configure blackout period to suspend monitoring activities.
Configure Email Settings: Configure the mail server and assign email routing for Foglight alarm notifications.
Blackout Configuration: Configure blackout period to suspend monitoring activities.
Report on Your Enterprise: View reports that are scheduled, run a report using a report template, create a custom report, schedule a report to run at a specific time, and manage reports. This link takes you to the Reports dashboard. Another way to access this dashboard is by choosing Reports under Homes on the navigation panel. For more information on reports, see Reporting on Your Enterprise .
Build a Custom Report: Build a report template from components or specify parameters to produce reports.
Run a Report: Generate a one-time report based on a template and schedule a report to run at a specific time.
Manage Reports: Manage the schedule reports and generated reports.
Do More with Foglight: Create custom services, build new dashboards and access other administrative functions in Foglight.
Administer Foglight: Manage users, define data retention policies, install or remove functionality, and manage licensing.
Build a Dashboard: Use the Foglight dashboard editor to create your own view onto your enterprise infrastructure.
Define Services: Create and edit services to organize your monitoring data along business lines. Create custom SLA policies which track the health of your infrastructure from a service perspective.
View Agent Status: View the status of the agents which are monitoring your enterprise, configure existing agents, or create new agents to monitor more of your infrastructure.
Contact Supportlink: Get help and technical support through Quest Software's official support website.
Explore Foglight Documentation: View the on-line help and detailed documentation to learn more about Foglight.
Tap into the Foglight Community: Takes you to the foglight.org Web site, which discusses topics related to Application Management and Foglight.

The Welcome to Foglight page is your default home page. For instructions on changing your home page to a dashboard of your choice, see Choosing a Home Page.

When you log in to Foglight Evolve for the first time, the Getting Started tab of the Environment Overview page appears in the display area.

This tab displays tiles based on the products that are installed.

From this tab, you can quickly perform a number of activities:

Explore Hyper-V—access the Hyper-V Environment Overview page.
Explore VMware—access the VMware Environment Overview page.
Add Monitoring—add Hyper-V or VMware agents to your environment.

You can also obtain information about the status of your license for Quest Foglight. This status is indicated by messages displayed on the tile of the installed products. For more information on licenses, see the Administration and Configuration Guide.

In addition, the Getting Started provides several video tutorials and the Evaluation Guide which is intended for anyone who wants to perform a quick evaluation of the power and ease-of-use of Quest Foglight.

To access the Perspective views for any of the installed vFoglight cartridges, open the navigation panel, expand the Dashboard module, and click Perspective Selector > Perspective.

The Perspective dashboard provides a summary view of the different parts of your environment. Each perspective summarizes the key information related to a particular area of interest. Each perspective contains a section on the right side that shows the total number of alarms for each severity. Most perspectives also include a detailed view that list the number of objects (VMs, Hosts, and so on) within that environment, broken down by the entity’s alarm status. If a single object has multiple alarms, each alarm is counted. For this reason, the total number of alarms frequently exceeds the total number of objects with alarms.

Each perspective contains an Explore button. Click Explore to investigate the full details displayed in the VMware Environment dashboard.

Navigating Foglight

In addition to the links on the Welcome page, use the navigational aids described in the sections below to navigate Foglight.

TIP: Visit http://eDocs.quest.com to watch our learning videos. See Introduction to the Foglight User Interface.

Use the left-hand navigation panel to move between dashboards. This panel lists all dashboards that are available to you based on your roles. Expand a module and select a dashboard to view it in the display area (for example, Dashboards > Services > Service Levels).

Quest Foglight remembers the state of the navigation panel between logins, so if you collapse the navigation panel when you log out, it is collapsed the next time you log in.

The name of the current dashboard is displayed in bold at the top of the dashboard, at the end of a path called the breadcrumb trail.

When you move directly from one dashboard to another, the names of the previous dashboards are displayed in a breadcrumb trail.

Use the links in the breadcrumb trail to return to previously-viewed dashboards in a workflow or series of drilldowns.

Use the graphical and text links in views to drill down to additional details that help you diagnose problems. Depending on the link, you drill down to a different dashboard or a smaller view called a popup that appears above the dashboard you are currently viewing.

You can drill down from many different parts of a view, including names of monitored components (such as hosts or services), the Explore links in a popup, and items like charts, tables, cylinders, and icons.

For example, in the My Services dashboard, click the icon will drill down further into the detailed information of that service.

Use bookmarks to keep track of dashboards and views that you want to revisit or access quickly, without having to drill down several levels. A bookmark can be a snapshot of data that is “frozen” at a specific point in time, or it can be updated with current data when you access it. For example, you could create a bookmark to quickly access the System Overview on a particular host from last Wednesday.

You create a bookmark by navigating to the dashboard you want to bookmark, selecting Bookmark from the action panel, and then selecting options from the Bookmark dialog box. See the online help for the Bookmark dialog box for details.

The bookmarks you create are listed in the Bookmarks section of the navigation panel. When you select a bookmark, it appears in the display area.

2
Select Email from the action panel. An email window opens, containing a link to the bookmark.
3
On the confirmation dialog, click Delete to delete the bookmark.

Opening a new window instead of using the current browser is useful, for example, when you want to open a link or print a document, such as a PDF. When you use a new window, the document downloads or prints in the background and you are prevented from accidentally closing the browser window when closing the PDF.

1
Click the New Window link in the action panel to open a new browser window and change the URL to create a sub-session.
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