Foglight for VMware 5.8 - User and Reference Guide

Sortable lists

In certain Foglight® for VMware dashboards, some levels of views contain sortable lists. An example of this is the VMware Explorer dashboard Related Objects view displayed below.

It is possible to sort this list by column using any of the column headings. Click a column heading once to sort the list in ascending order. The list is redrawn according to your specification. Click the column heading again to re-sort the list in descending order.

This is handy when you want to have an organized view of virtual machines or host objects sorted by name, status, or some other criterion.

Alarms and their status indicators

Foglight® for VMware uses status indicators to show the alarm states of the objects within the virtual infrastructure. Four status indicators (fatal, critical, warning, and normal), similar to those displayed in the following image, are used throughout the Foglight for VMware dashboards.

The Foglight for VMware alarm types respond to thresholds that are defined within the Foglight for VMware rules. As metrics change and move through thresholds, alarms are raised. As a metric moves through thresholds, the severity of an alarm changes, which causes the associated status indicator to change.

For detailed information about the rules included with the product, see Rules .

It is important to note that any events that trigger an alarm for an object do not trigger an alarm for any of the object’s parents. For example, a single virtual machine running at a high CPU utilization does not trigger an alarm for its parent ESX® Server. An alarm would only be triggered for the parent ESX Server if the server itself was running at a high CPU utilization.

Mouse-over actions

Many items within the Foglight® for VMware dashboards display additional information when you hover the cursor over them. For example, when you hover the cursor over a graph you are likely to see a specific value or values that correspond) to the position of the cursor. When you hover the cursor over an individual metric, you are likely to see a small descriptive popup.

Interacting with Foglight for VMware

When you deploy Foglight® for VMware, a set of predefined dashboards enables you to view the performance of your virtual system at a glance. They allow you to ensure consistent application performance by drilling down for details from higher-level components such as clusters, hosts, and virtual machines, to viewing detailed specifics about each component, such as CPU utilization and network I/O.

First, familiarize yourself with roles needed to access different parts of the browser interface included with the product (see About VMware roles). Then, ensure your monitored agents are configured for data collection. You do that by navigating to the Administration tab of the VMware Environment dashboard. This tab lists the available agents and shows their status, and provides access to other administrative tasks. For more information, see Exploring administrative tasks and Configuring monitoring agents for data collection .

Start by looking at the status of your integrated system by navigating to the VMware VirtualCenters dashboard. This dashboard shows the status of each of the Virtual Centers within the infrastructure and the related elements such as datacenters, clusters, hosts, resource pools, and virtual machines. For more information, see Viewing the overall system status.

From there, navigate to the Monitoring tab of the VMware Environment dashboard. Select a specific object or group of objects, such as monitored clusters, servers, and virtual machines, and look at the detailed metrics about the CPU load, network I/O, total memory, or disk space consumed by that specific component or group of components. To see more details about the selected server or virtual machine, use the VMware Explorer. For more information about these dashboards, see Exploring your VMware environment and Investigating performance metrics .

Next, review the alarms that are generated against your environment and, if required, set their sensitivity level. The Administration tab on the VMware Environment dashboard enables you to configure the level of alarm sensitivity. The alarm sensitivity reflects the level of alarms the system stores and displays. For more information, see Exploring VMware alarms.

The VMware Explorer’s Administration tab provides access to common administrative tasks that you can use to manage monitored servers and virtual machines directly from the Foglight for VMware browser interface. For example, use this tab to shut down or reboot monitored servers, create virtual machines, and grant them access to system resources, create virtual machine snapshots or automate system workflows. For more information, see Administering monitored ESX hosts and virtual machines.

To read about additional features, such as planning for virtual machine migrations, creating OS mapping rules, or reviewing topology object instances and expired data, see Additional features .