Foglight 6.0.0 - Installing Foglight on a UNIX System with an External PostgreSQL Database

Before Installing Foglight

This guide provides instructions for installing, configuring, and starting Foglight®. Before you begin, see the System Requirements and Platform Support Guide.

This section provides setup information and an initial overview of installing Foglight:

IMPORTANT: See the Release Notes for Foglight, the Foglight Agent Manager, and any cartridges you are installing. These documents contain important information about the latest versions of these components, such as information about late-breaking changes, updates, and known and resolved issues.

What is Foglight?

Foglight solution simplifies application performance monitoring and reduces the skills and effort required to manage applications, the user experience, and the supporting infrastructure.

Unlike other solutions, Foglight uses a single code base, and has a model-driven design that couples fast deployment and accelerated time-to-value. It offers the modular flexibility required to deliver a range of capabilities and sophistication to meet the needs of any organization, from organizations focused on technology-centric monitoring to organizations that have completed the transition to application-centric or transactional monitoring.

Foglight performs equally well in physical, virtual, and mixed infrastructure environments, providing visibility into issues affecting the application and end user experience. Intuitive workflows help you quickly move from the symptom to the root cause in the application, database, infrastructure, or network to resolve issues, reducing mean time to resolution. Predefined and drag-and-drop dashboards provide insight that is tailored to each stakeholder. By offering comprehensive visibility into your monitored environment, Foglight helps ensure that cross-functional teams collaborate on and prioritize issues that matter most to the business.

Foglight includes several different components, which are described in the Getting Started Guide.

Hardware requirements and guidelines

The hardware requirements to run Foglight can vary widely, based on a number of factors, including:

Before doing a production implementation, conduct a proper scoping and sizing exercise with a qualified Quest Software Inc. representative. Arrange for a sizing analysis by contacting your Quest Software Inc. Sales Representative.

Running Foglight requires the following components:

These components can be installed on a single tier or on multiple tiers. It is critical to realize that both the Management Server and database repository require dedicated resources to support them. In order to help facilitate sizing, the resources required to support each component are addressed separately. They can either be summed to support a single-tier installation, or treated independently as the requirements for each server in a two-tier installation.

For the current single- and multi-tier hardware requirements, see the System Requirements and Platform Support Guide.

Planning your installation

Before you install Foglight, review the components that you are going to install. Ensure that you have the necessary information, such as port numbers and server names, and the locations where you are going to install the components.

NOTE: This guide provides instructions for installing new instances of Foglight only, not for upgrading Foglight. For best practices for upgrading Foglight, an overview of the upgrade process, and upgrade procedures, see the Upgrade Guide.

NOTE: You can choose to use an embedded database or an external database. The instructions in this guide are for external database installations only.

The following list summarizes the main stages involved in installing and configuring Foglight:

Stage 1: Install the Management Server and configure the Management Server and database. The Management Server is the data collection and processing server.

Stage 2: Install, configure, and initialize the database, then start the Foglight Management Server and log in.

NOTE: If you are using an external database, the database must be initialized successfully before you can run Foglight.

Stage 3: Install and configure cartridges. Cartridges extend the functionality of Foglight, and are installed on the machine hosting the Management Server. A cartridge contains one or more cartridge components, such as agents for deployment, communication capabilities, modifications to the way that data is transformed or handled, rules, reports, and views.

Stage 4: Install, configure, and start the Foglight Agent Manager. The Agent Manager is a client that manages agents installed on monitored hosts. See the Foglight Agent Manager Guide for details.

Stage 5: Install and configure agents. Agents are deployed on machines in your monitored environment and send data to the Management Server. There are several types of agents. One or more instances of each type of agent managed by the Agent Manager can be deployed per host. For example, there is an agent that collects metrics from the operating system of the host machine. There are also agents that are embedded into systems or the software that they monitor.

IMPORTANT: Install and configure the Agent Manager before deploying agents that are installed on a monitored host.

For more information, see these topics: