Foglight Agent Manager 7.3.0 - Foglight Agent Manager Guide

By default, Foglight® ships with a self-signed SSL certificate. If you configure the Management Server to use an SSL certificate signed by a third-party Certificate Authority (CA), whose root certificate is already included in the JRE used by the Agent Manager, you do not need to add a new CA to the Agent Manager keystore. Instead, ensure that the Agent Manager connects to the Management Server using HTTPS.


	NOTE: If the root certificate for the third-party CA is not included in the JRE, follow the instructions in To add a new CA to the Agent Manager certificate store: .

You must add a new CA to the JRE used by the Agent Manager if:

•

You want the Agent Manager to communicate with the Management Server using an HTTPS connection.

and

•

The Management Server uses an SSL certificate signed by a private CA. This certificate must be checked for a valid signer.

The Agent Manager includes command-line options for managing certificates in the Agent Manager keystore.

You add a new CA by importing a new root certificate for the CA into the certificate store used by the Agent Manager, as described below.

To check if a third-party CA is included in the JRE:

Launch a command shell on the Agent Manager machine, and navigate to the <fglam_home>/jre/<jre_version>/jre/bin directory.

Issue the following command:

keytool --keystore ..\path\cacerts -storepass changeit -list | findstr

<3rd_party_signer>

For example:

keytool --keystore ..\lib\security\cacerts -storepass changeit -list | findstr

godaddy

godaddyclass2ca, Jan 20, 2005, trustedCertEntry,

godaddyrootg2ca, Jul 18, 2014, trustedCertEntry,

To add a new CA to the Agent Manager certificate store:

Launch a command shell on the Agent Manager machine, and navigate to the <fglam_home>/bin directory.

Import a new root certificate for a CA that you want to add. To do that, issue the following command:

fglam --add-certificate <alias=/path/to/certificate>


	IMPORTANT: The certificate file that you import should be the public certificate for the CA that signed the SSL certificate, not the SSL certificate itself.

Stop the Agent Manager.

Configure the Agent Manager to connect to the Management Server using HTTPS without allowing self-signed certificates (since the certificate from the server is no longer considered signed by a private CA).

Run the Agent Manager configuration interface. See Configuring the Agent Manager , Configuring Management Server URLs using the installer interface , or Step 10: Change service credentials [Optional] .

Configure the Agent Manager to connect to the Management Server using HTTPS.

If you are using the Agent Manager Installation and Configuration interface, select the Connect using HTTPS check box.

If you are using the command-line version of the configuration interface, set the start of the url parameter to https (for example, url=https://server1.example.com:8443).

Change the setting for self-signed certificates so that they are not allowed.

If you are using the Agent Manager Installation and Configuration interface, clear the Allow self-signed certificates check box.

If you are using the command-line version of the configuration interface, set ssl-allow-self-signed to false.

Restart the Agent Manager.

If this Agent Manager is a concentrator and you want the Agent Manager instances that connect to it to use HTTPS, follow the instructions in To create a secure connection between the concentrator and downstream instances: .

Configuring an Agent Manager instance as a Concentrator

A concentrator is an Agent Manager instance that functions similarly to an HTTP proxy. Configure it to accept connections from other Agent Manager instances (called downstream instances) and forward these connections to an upstream target, either the Management Server or another Agent Manager concentrator.


	NOTE: Concentrator ports can also be configured to optimize transmission of control messages from the Management Server to the Agent Manager. For more information, see Understanding how the Agent Manager communicates with the Management Server..

Figure 1. A simple Agent Manager concentrator configuration

You can configure one or more Agent Manager instances to act as a concentrator in situations where:

•

You do not want the Agent Manager instances on your monitored hosts to connect directly to the Management Server—for example, if you have a large number of Agent Manager instances running in your monitored environment and you want to reduce the number of connections to the Management Server.


	IMPORTANT: Using a concentrator reduces the number of connections to the Management Server, not the volume of data sent to the Management Server.

•

The Management Server is not co-located with the monitored hosts and you want to make only a single connection from the remote hosts to the Management Server—for example, if your Management Server is in Sydney and your monitored hosts are in Vancouver, and you only want to make one transpacific connection.

•

The Agent Manager instances cannot connect directly to the Management Server (as in the example below).

Example:

Your firewall configuration does not allow the Agent Manager instances on your monitored hosts to connect directly to the Management Server (running on ManagementServerHost). However, there is an intermediate host in your environment (IntermediateHost) that can accept connections from your monitored hosts and also communicate with the Management Server.

To allow connections from your monitored hosts to be forwarded to the Management Server, you install an Agent Manager instance on IntermediateHost and configure it as a concentrator:

While installing the instance on IntermediateHost (using the GUI installer), you specify the host name and port (ManagementServerHost and 8080) of the Management Server to which you want this concentrator to connect in the Configure Server URLs step.

When the installation is complete, you ensure that the instance is shut down and configure it as a concentrator by editing its fglam.config.xml file so that it listens for connections from downstream instances on a specified port (8081).

You restart the Agent Manager instance on IntermediateHost. This instance is now configured as a concentrator: it listens for connections from downstream instances on port 8081 and forwards data to the Management Server on port 8080.

Now that the concentrator is set up on IntermediateHost, you configure the Agent Manager instances on the monitored hosts to connect to the concentrator:

After stopping these Agent Manager instances, you run the Agent Manager configuration interface for each instance.

In the configuration interface, you specify the concentrator’s host name and the port on which it is listening (IntermediateHost and 8081) when setting the URL to which the instances connect.

Once the instances are re-configured to connect to the concentrator, you restart them.

The Agent Manager instances on the monitored hosts can now connect to the Management Server through the concentrator. You can also perform agent management tasks from the Management Server, such as deploying agent packages to the monitored hosts and creating new agent instances on them. There is no indication that the downstream instances are not connected directly to the Management Server.

Configuring the concentrator

This section describes how to configure the concentrator to connect to the upstream target (either the Management Server or another Agent Manager concentrator) and to listen for connections from downstream Agent Manager instances.

A concentrator’s upstream connection is independent of the downstream connections. For example, several Agent Manager instances on a local subnet can communicate to a concentrator using HTTP while the concentrator forwards requests over an non-secure network to the Management Server using HTTPS (or the other way around).


	CAUTION: Do not set up a concentrator to forward messages to itself or create any kind of loop or cycle. This causes the Agent Manager to indefinitely feeds messages through the loop.

To configure a concentrator to connect to the upstream target:

You can configure the concentrator to connect to the upstream target in different ways:

•

Using HTTP: Set the upstream target of the concentrator in the same way you typically set the Management Server URL:

•

During installation, use the Agent Manager Installation and Configuration interface, command-line interface, or silent installer. See Installing the Agent Manager for more information.

•

After installation, use the Agent Manager configuration interface. See Configuring the Agent Manager for more information.

•

Using HTTPS: To configure a concentrator connection to the Management Server using a secure connection, follow the instructions in Configuring the Agent Manager to use SSL certificates .

Between connections, the Agent Manager collects all upstream and downstream messages in queues. Queuing messages prevents them from getting lost in the event of a disconnection.

When running the Agent Manager as a concentrator, you must increase the default disk cache sizes.


	CAUTION: Increasing disk cache sizes is an advanced activity that involves custom tuning. The size of cache that you need depends on the number of hosts that connect to the concentrator and the type of load they put on the concentrator. The 1 GB value shown below is an example only.

To configure the size of the disk cache used to store messages:

Open the <fglam_home>/state/<state name>/config/fglam.config.xml file for editing.

Locate the <queue-sizes> XML element.

Edit the <upstream/> and <downstream/> blocks that appear after the <documentation> block:

•

Change the argument for the max-disk-space attribute in both the <upstream/> and <downstream/> blocks to a value larger than the default setting (1024 KB). For example, to change the default disk cache size to 1 GB, set the max-disk-space attribute in both the <upstream/> and <downstream/> blocks as follows:

max-disk-space="1048576"

The max-disk-space argument sets the amount of disk space (in KB) that can be used to store messages.

Save your changes to the fglam.config.xml file.

Restart the concentrator.

To configure a concentrator to listen for connections from downstream instances:


	NOTE: If you want to create a secure connection between the concentrator and downstream Agent Manager instances using HTTPS, follow the instructions in Creating a secure connection with downstream instances .

Open the <fglam_home>/state/<state name>/config/fglam.config.xml file for editing.

Locate the <http-downstreams> XML element.

After the <documentation> block, add an <http-downstream/> child element:

<config:http-downstream port="port_number" [address="network_address"]/>

Replace port_number with an available port number. This is the port on which the concentrator listens for connections from downstream Agent Manager instances.

Optional. If required, you can also bind the concentrator to single network address. To do so, include the attribute address="network_address" in the http-downstream child element (shown as an optional attribute in Step 3), replacing network_address with the network address where you want the concentrator to receive connections from the downstream instances.

The optional address attribute is useful when a machine has two or more network addresses, and you want the connections to the Management Server to go out from one, and the connections from the downstream instances to come in to another.

If required, configure the concentrator to listen for connections on multiple different ports by adding additional <http-downstream/> elements and setting the port number (and, optionally, the network address), as described above.

This is useful in situations where the concentrator machine has multiple network connections, and you want the concentrator to listen on different network connections with different ports. For example, the concentrator listens on network connection 1 with port 8081 and listens on network connection 2 with port 8082.

Restart the concentrator.