Foglight 5.9.4 - Administration and Configuration Guide

Administering Foglight

This section focuses on recommended maintenance tasks that ensure optimal Foglight® performance. It also describes the starting points in Foglight administration.

The following standard maintenance tasks should be performed to ensure a stable Foglight system. This simple guidance can help Foglight administrators to optimally and consistently perform their administrative tasks. Successful ongoing management of an enterprise-class Foglight implementation requires formal Foglight administrator training from Quest professional services.

As a starting point, this topic assumes a stable installation which, at minimum, contains the following configuration components:

Finally, this topic addresses the ongoing maintenance tasks required to ensure your Foglight Management Server stays operationally healthy.

Generally speaking, most of the tasks required to ensure a stable installation can and should be automated. For example, there is not much value in asking a Foglight administrator to log in only to ensure it is running or check to see if there is enough memory when rules and automated emails can be generated to notify administrators of potentially worrisome conditions. As such, the first part of this topic identifies the automatable self-monitoring options that should be configured. The rest of the topic covers:

For more information, see the following topics:

Recommended Self-Monitoring Automation

A separate Remote Monitor process can be configured to watch the Foglight® High Availability (HA) process and notify an administrator in the event that the Foglight Management Server process unexpectedly shuts down. Configure the Remote Monitor process to ensure that an administrator is notified when the Foglight Management Server shuts down. For more information about the Remote Monitor process and running Foglight in HA mode, see the Foglight High Availability Field Guide.

A set of rules covering the critical health items for a Foglight Management Server is delivered with the Core-Monitoring Policy cartridge, included with the server install.This cartridge is installed and enabled during the server installation. Email notifications should be set-up for each of the rules delivered in this cartridge. To configure email notifications, use the Email Configuration dashboard. To access this dashboard, from the Administration dashboard, under Support, click Email.

Cyclic Maintenance

Each of the following tasks helps to ensure that the Foglight® Management Server is stable and is operating normally.

Assuming you automate self-monitoring as described in Recommended Self-Monitoring Automation, there is no need to perform the checks described below.

If you do not have automated self-monitoring in place, you must use the manual technique below, performing each item at least once daily.

For context on the key resource requirements and their effect on the Foglight Management Server, see the Foglight Performance Tuning Field Guide.

Perform the following tasks once every week:

Perform the following tasks manually, once every month:

For more information about these dashboards, see the related online help topics.

Using a single pane of glass for your administration needs

The Administration dashboard can be used as a front-end for most Foglight® administration tasks. This dashboard contains links to most of the administration dashboards and shows configuration specifics that may be critical to your day-to-day operation. If your Foglight role involves daily administration, this is probably the best place to start as it gives you a quick insight into the system complexity and its health, along with close-at-hand links to most administration dashboards.

You can access this dashboard from the navigation panel, by clicking Homes > Administration.

In addition to the administration dashboards accessible from the Administration home page and the Administration node on the navigation panel, Foglight includes another set of administration-level dashboards that can be used to analyze logs, monitor the server performance, and service levels. These dashboards are described in this section.

For more information, see the following topics: