Foglight for Databases 5.9.4 - User Guide

Selecting the Services You Want to Monitor

By default, no services are listed in the Service Operations Console dashboard. This is by design: it gives you the opportunity to customize the Service Operations Console dashboard to suit your needs. Select the set of services that you want to monitor so that they appear in this dashboard.

TIP: Use the search features to find services you are interested in. The search is per keyword, delimited by spaces. For example, if you want to search on “Global Service” (instead of “Global”), add quotes around “Global Service” to match that exact string.

NOTE: Columns for the Host and Agent tiers are always shown by default.

A service is a grouping of one or more components that interest you. The Service Operations Console is designed to assist with incident management workflows. Added functionality, from the Cartridge for Dependency Mapping, enables you to monitor application, database, and virtual machine performance using dependency data. You can group monitored resources into services, investigate whether any service disruptions have occurred, and edit existing services, as necessary. By reviewing service dependencies in your monitoring the environment, you can quickly triage service problems.

NOTE: Foglight for Applications Operations must be installed to use the Update Service from Dependency Data and Edit Service Dependency action panel options. By default, if Foglight for Applications Operations is installed, it installs the Dependency Mapping capabilities. Once installed, the Service Operations Console dashboard displays a number of additional tiles to assist you in investigating incident and problem management processes on multi-tier applications.

NOTE: To use the following functions, Foglight users require the Advanced Operator role.

You can update selected services you are monitoring in the Service Operations Console dashboard by clicking Update Service from Dependency Data found on the action panel. If you have the Cartridge for Dependency Mapping installed, this feature allows you to update a service by adding or removing components from that service, based on dependency data collected by the Cartridge for Dependency Mapping.

For example, if you have existing Quest Foglight services and you would like to update them based on new or changing dependency information, use this functionality to review the dependencies that exist between objects within your existing services. From here you can identify any objects that are external to these services, and have dependencies with other internal objects. You can update these services to include the newly discovered external objects that have dependencies. You can also use this functionality to periodically monitor changes in your service dependencies and update them, as necessary.

For more information about how to use this functionality, see the Managing Dependency Mapping User Guide.

You can manually add or ignore dependencies between components inside a selected service and external components using the Service Operations Console. To edit service dependencies for a selected service, open the Service Operations Console dashboard and click Edit Service Dependencies found on the action panel.

For more information about how to use this functionality, see the Managing Dependency Mapping User Guide.

Monitoring a Service

Once you subscribe to a service, you can drill down and view details about that service.

These sections describes workflows for monitoring the overall health of your critical services and investigating problems with them.

Investigating service level compliance and availability

You monitor services because you have a specific business requirement to ensure the availability of these components. The icons in the Service Level Compliance column reflect the availability of your services. Use this column as a starting point for investigating how problems with your services affect their service levels.

Quest Foglight automatically examines each service and establishes its availability and service level compliance. By default, a service is available if it does not have any fatal alarms.

In Quest Foglight, a service’s state is based on the worst state of the components it includes. For example, a MyApplication service contains services for its Web servers, application servers, and databases. The databases service is in a fatal state because it has a fatal alarm and the other two are in a warning state. MyApplication is also in a fatal state and is listed as non-compliant with its Service Level Agreement (SLA).

TIP: Both current availability and SLA measurements are; use them in different situations: • Use the current availability measurement to find and address immediate problems quickly. • Use SLA measurements to determine if you are meeting overall service level expectations.

Investigating alarms

Investigate a service’s alarms to get more details about the problems contributing to its non-normal state.