Foglight for Databases 5.9.3 - Administration and Configuration Guide

Schema Browser

The Schema Browser dashboard shows the structure of the data model and allows you better understand the database schema and the existing object dependencies.

Database Overview

Use the Database Overview dashboard to see the state of the Foglight database and its activity. This dashboard contains several views that show the row operations, database buffer pool, and/or the number of inserts, deletes, and/or updates. Its appearance depends on the database type in use. For MySQL databases, this dashboard shows four different views: Row Operations, Database Buffer Pool Status, Database Data I/O, and Database Page I/O. For Oracle, PostgreSQL and MS SQL Server databases, the dashboard shows only the Row Operations view.

NOTE: If Choose a Foglight Server does not contain entries for Oracle or MS SQL Server, databases, you might need to grant additional permissions to the database user. For more information, see Grant permissions to explore database activities.

The name of the metrics that contain database reads, inserts, and updates depend on the type of the supported database that Foglight uses to store information, as indicated in the following table.

To populate the database charts that are available for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server on the navigation panel under Dashboards > Management Server > Servers > Database Overview, you need to grant the special permissions on the back-end database for the Foglight Management Server. For a MySQL or PostgreSQL database, special permissions are not required.

Where fmsdbuser is the name of the Foglight database user, as defined by the foglight.database.user parameter in <Foglight_home>/config/server.config.

NOTE: You may need to restart the Management Server service to ensure that the permissions are updated. This is because database connections to the external database are already established.

Persistence Handler Overview

The Persistence Handler Overview dashboard contains charts that display information about the persistence handler such as the number of rows in the table, data length, index length, batch insert time, and query time.

Data Management

Use the Object Cleanup dashboard when you need to inspect, purge, and delete data objects, and particularly for removing objects that are no longer needed.

As an example, deleting agent instances from the Services dashboard removes the agent definitions. However, you can still view the agent entries in other dashboards such as the dashboard for Oracle. To remove the agent entries from these dashboards, you need to delete the agents using the Object Cleanup dashboard to remove the services and OracleModel Instances that were created for the Oracle dashboard.

Foglight builds topology models at run-time using the data collected from your monitored systems, and keeps information related to monitored types indefinitely. Global Default setting can be used so objects are not kept indefinitely. Objects that are not expected to change or update are considered stale. These stale objects consume monitoring resources and can be cleaned up. If you have a very large number of stale objects, this may indicate a misconfiguration of your monitoring environment.

Use the Object Cleanup dashboard to remove stale objects, and to reconfigure your URL transformation rules if necessary.

CAUTION: Editing the topology model is an advanced procedure that can significantly impact your Foglight environment. Quest Software strongly recommends that you contact Support for guidance before attempting to use this dashboard.

The following walkthrough demonstrates how to locate and manage stale types based on the default settings provided. In this example, we are using Catalyst Servicability Object as the type with too many objects.

IMPORTANT: After you type a new number in the since box, you must press Apply to ensure the value is updated.

TIP: The time range includes the last full week/month/year, and the days between the end of that time range and the current date. For example, if today is Thursday, and you select Inactive since 2 Weeks ago, then the time range starts at the third Monday previous, and includes two complete weeks (Monday to Sunday), plus 3 more days.

IMPORTANT: After you type a new number in the since box, you must press Apply to ensure the value is updated.

TIP: The time range includes the last full week/month/year, and the days between the end of that time range and the current date. For example, if today is Thursday, and you select Inactive since 2 Weeks ago, then the time range starts at the third Monday previous, and includes two complete weeks (Monday to Sunday), plus 3 more days.

The object table populates with objects. All are selected for deletion. Review the list.

a	Click the customizer icon to the right of the Search box.

IMPORTANT: The object is removed from the topology. However, any data collected for the object remains in the database. If the object is recreated (for example, by reinstalling a cartridge), the data becomes available again.

NOTE: In previous releases you could add object types to the list on the dashboard. Beginning with Foglight 5.9.x, the cartridge monitoring policy specifies which types appear in the list.

You can configure the number of days each type object is allowed to remain inactive before being automatically deleted.

Use the Retention Policy dashboard to set system-wide policies for managing database growth through automatic data aggregation and data purges. You can use standard policies (for example, short-term, long-term, or managed roll-ups) or create a custom retention policy.

When a specific retention policy has not been defined, the system-wide retention policies are used by default.

NOTE: The default retention policy is set to purge data after 13 months. To change this setting, create a custom retention policy.

If you find that the standard retention policies do not meet your needs (that is, long-term policy retains granular data for a longer period than what is required) you can create a custom retention policy.

For example, if you want to change the retention policy to have more granular data (that is, for at least one day) such as for capturing reporting data. After a day, you want to roll up that data to an hourly average and kept for a week. Beyond that, you want to keep a daily average for 15 months.

You can also navigate to an advanced dashboard to set rollups per object, using the Manage Retention Policies dashboard in the Administration module. For more information, see Manage Data Retention.

To create a custom retention policy:

Use the Manage Monitored Objects table to look at some of the common objects (organized by domain) in Foglight. For example, you can see that some old host and agent objects should be removed as they were part of the early testing of deployment. For each object you can see the amount of data for that object and its children in the total size. This is a handy breakdown as it gives you an idea of what data is returned.

Use the Delete, Purge for objects, or Purge for types options in the header of the table to manage data objects.

Delete — Use this option to immediately delete the object, the object metric, or delete the object tree. You can choose whether to delete an object individually or delete its tree and also choose whether or not to delete the metrics associated with an object. For example, if you choose to delete a host, all data associated with the host is deleted.

Purge for objects — Use this option to schedule the removal of the observations for a selected object during the database off-hours maintenance cycle. By default, this maintenance is scheduled at the end of the month. For more information, see Purge data objects.

Purge for types — Use this option to schedule the removal of objects by types during the database off-hours maintenance cycle. By default, this maintenance is scheduled at the end of the month. For more information, see Purge data objects.

Use the Direct Database Size area to evaluate the current storage allocation for each object in the system and to purge/delete unwanted objects from the system. For example, you can figure out where space is used by viewing how much and where the space is being used.

By viewing the size of the direct database you can see immediately how much space is being consumed by the database, as well as the number of metrics. You can also see a breakdown of space by metric age. For example, from the table you can tell there is a lot of old data and you can decide if you want to keep some old data, or which data to delete or purge.

Use the purge feature if you want to keep the topology object for a nightly cycle. Within a 24 hour period, the data object should be gone from the topology tree.

TIP: You can use the Search feature located at the top of the Manage Monitored Objects table to find the data object such as by using regular expressions.

5	Click Purge for objects or Purge for types, as necessary.

NOTE: If there is more than one observation purge applied to the same object, the longest purge age will be used. NOTE: All previously defined observation purges for the object are overwritten.

When you delete an object, you actually remove the topology object immediately from the tree, including all of its children. For example, you may want to delete a data object if you have old data on a decommissioned host and want to remove the topology objects. If you delete an object that is still active, it will be re-created.

NOTE: Metrics are always preserved and deleted as part of this topology maintenance operation.

4	Click Delete beside the object to remove the object and all of its children.