Foglight 7.3.0 - Administration and Configuration Guide

Suspending Alarms and Data Collection

A blackout is a period where normal monitoring activities are suspended due to some administrative preference. Blackouts are commonly created to prevent frequent alerts during scheduled maintenance periods.

Foglight® collects data about your system and dynamically builds topology models at run-time. A topology model consists of nodes, where each node is a topology object instance. A set of blackout management dashboards allow you to disable alarms and data collection for a specific period. Suspending alarms involves assigning blackout periods to topology objects. Suspending data collection is slightly different in that it involves assigning blackout periods to specific agent instances. An agent blackout is a scheduled event during which the agent does not collect data. Unlike agent blackouts, topology object blackouts do not interrupt the data collection for the object to which the blackout is assigned. Blacking out a topology object means that no rules analyze that object during the blackout. For more information about topology models, see the Data Model Guide.

Blackouts can be applied to dynamic managed components or services. If an object becomes part of a blacked out dynamic managed component or service, it is included in the blackout, even if the blackout is already in effect. Similarly, if an object is removed from a blacked out service or dynamic managed component during the blackout, it ceases to be blacked out.

IMPORTANT: In addition to the features available on the blackout management dashboards, topology and agent blackouts can also be configured using the command-line interface. However, the mechanism for creating blackouts from the command line is independent. It is not recommended to use both methods on the same Foglight Management Server. If you choose to use the command line for creating blackouts, delete all blackouts created with the command line before using the browser interface. If you want to switch from the command line to the blackout management dashboards, use the conversion script to convert the existing blackouts created with the command line. This way all blackouts can be managed in one location. To see a list of existing blackouts that were created using the command line, issue the topology:blackouts and agent:showschedule fglcmd commands. For more information about these commands, see the Command-Line Reference Guide. For more information about the conversion script, see the Foglight Upgrade Guide.

You can configure blackouts as recurring events, by associating them with an existing schedule, or as one-time events. Existing blackouts can be deleted or edited, as required.

To access the Blackouts dashboard, from the Administration dashboard, click Blackouts.

Managing Support Bundles

Foglight® allows you to gather diagnostic data and save it as a collection of files, called a support bundle. Support bundles can be forwarded to Quest Support, upon their request. There are two types of support bundles: server support bundles and Foglight Agent Manager support bundles.

Each server support bundle contains a diagnostic snapshot of the Management Server, log files, and a list of cartridges installed on the Management Server. The logs contain information specific to the operating environment like IP addresses, host names and user actions that have caused changes to the monitoring environment. The bundle is a simple zip file and can be expanded to view the contents which consist of plain text and PDF files. Foglight saves support bundles as ZIP files in the <foglight_home>/support/<user_name> directory on the machine hosting the Management Server.

The Support dashboard allows you to create server support bundles, and to download, or delete Foglight Agent Manager and server support bundles. You can also use this dashboard to generate and download host (Agent Manager) support bundles.

To access the Support dashboard, from the Administration dashboard, in the Support column, click Support Bundles.

For more information, see the following topics:

Viewing Client Connection Status

Foglight® tracks connections to the Management Server for security purposes. The Connection Status dashboard lists browsers that are connected to the server. For each browser instance, the list shows the client’s IP address, login time, request name, and request time.

To access the Connection Status dashboard, from the Administration dashboard, in the Server column, click Connections.

For more information, see View the host connection status.

Viewing Audited Entries

Foglight® generates security and change logs that contain information about the users who are authenticated upon logging in to Foglight, and user management or configuration changes, such as changes to Foglight registry and rules. You can use the View Audit Information dashboard to look at individual log entries.

Each entry shows:

To access the View Audit Information dashboard, from the Administration dashboard, in the Server column, click View Audit Information.

For more information, see the following topics: