Foglight 5.9.1 Release Notes

Foglight™ 5.9.1

Release Notes

September 2017

Contents

Contents

Welcome to Foglight

New in this release

Resolved issues and enhancements

Known issues

Third party known issues

Upgrade and compatibility

System requirements

Product licensing

Getting started with Foglight

About Us

Welcome to Foglight

Welcome to Foglight

Quest's 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 those still focused on technology-centric monitoring to those 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.

These Release Notes cover the resolved issues, known issues, workarounds, and other important information about the 5.9.1 release of Foglight. Review all sections before starting the installation.

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New in this release

New in this release

Foglight Version 5.9.1 includes a number of critical changes which require particular attention, especially regarding the upgrade. Specifically, three primary functional capabilities (server side data handling, Federation, High Availability) that used legacy JBoss components in versions prior to 5.9.1 have been re-written to improve Foglight Management Server security. This has the following specific impacts:

• Foglight Management Servers must be upgraded to version 5.7.5.8 before they can upgrade to 5.9.1. If the Foglight Management Server is not at 5.7.5.8, the installer will fail and display the appropriate error message.
• All Quest or Quest partner delivered cartridges that have a dependency on the changed components in the data submission handler must be upgraded prior to upgrading to 5.9.1. A complete list of cartridges is available in the upgrade guide. If there are incompatible Quest or Quest partner delivered cartridges, the installer will fail and display the appropriate error message.
• Other custom cartridges MAY have a dependency on the server side data handling component that has changed. A pre-upgrade analysis tool has been developed to identify any custom cartridges that might need changed.
• Customers running High Availability or Federation will be required to contact support for instructions and consultation on how to upgrade.

As a result of these changes, it is critical that all customers review the upgrade instructions in detail. Customers are encouraged to contact support with questions or concerns.

Management Server upgrade

• Redesigned the Management Server upgrade process to reflect the removal of JBOSS Server. (FGL-19198)
  Before upgrading to 5.9.1, Quest recommends you create a Management Server Support Bundle to facilitate future communications with support regarding upgrade failures. 
  • Provided the Cartridge Compatibility Check tool, to evaluate the existing environment and identify cartridges that may be incompatible with this 5.9.1 release. Contact support if you need further information about this tool. (FGL-19309)
  • Support for upgrading to Management Server 5.9.1 is limited to Management Server versions 5.7.5.8 or later. If you are running a Management Server version older than 5.7.5.8, you must perform an intermediate upgrade to 5.7.5.8 before upgrading to 5.9.1.
  • If the following cartridges are installed on your Management Server, you will need to upgrade them to a version compatible with Management Server 5.9.1 before upgrading the Management Server.
    • Foglight for VMware: must be upgraded to 5.7.3
    • Foglight for DB2 LUW: must be upgraded to 5.7.5.41
    • Foglight for SQL Server: must be upgraded to 5.7.5.41
    • Foglight for Sybase: must be upgraded to 5.7.5.40
    • Foglight for Oracle: must be upgraded to 5.7.5.41
    • Foglight for Application Operations: must be upgraded to 5.9.8.5
    • Foglight for Microsoft .NET: must be upgraded to 5.9.12
    • Foglight for Java EE Technologies: must be upgraded to 5.9.12
    • Foglight ActionPacks: must be upgraded to 5.6.3.5
    • Foglight for Automation: must be upgraded to 5.6.3.5
    • Cartridge Builder: must be upgraded to 5.6.6
    • MySQLAgent: must be upgraded to 5.7.5.90
    • PostgreSQLAgent: must be upgraded to 5.7.5.90
    • MongoDBAgent: must be upgraded to 5.7.5.140
    • CassandraAgent: must be upgraded to 5.7.5.50
    • TIBCOAgent: must be upgraded to 5.7.5.16
  • The following cartridges do not have a version compatible Foglight 5.9.1. If you must move to 5.9.1 now, then contact support for the latest information on when compatible cartridges are expected.
    • Foglight for Transaction Recorder and Player
    • Foglight APM for End User Experience
    • Foglight for SQL Azure

JBoss dependency removal

• JBoss Server 4.2.3 has been removed from the Foglight Management Server. (FGL-15960)
  • Removed JBoss bootstrap. (FGL-18892)
  • Changed to use Narayana as the transaction manager.
  • Dropped the SAR file deployment and other unknown deployment types. (FGL-18998)
  • Changed the deployment type to WAR, and added the support for converting the JBoss Artifacts deployment type to the WAR deployment.
  • Removed the jboss-web.xml file.
  • Removed org.jboss and its sub namespace package classes. Only a few of .jar files have been kept and worked as third party libraries.
  • Changed to use MBean server provided by JDK.
  • Removed JBoss dependency in HA and Federation environments.

Federation

• Redesigned the Federation implementation based on Spring remote call, as JBoss Server has been removed in this 5.9.1 release.
  • Used Spring remote call over RMI, to replace JBoss remote call used in the Federation environment previously.
  • Added the support of SSL communication between Federation Master and Children.
  • Added the support of authentication through certificates between Federation Master and Children.
  • Removed the previous security token configuration, as the authentication through certificates is now being used in the Federation environment. (FGL-19217)
  • Provided a more concise procedure to generate Keystores for both Federation Master and Children.
  • To improve the synchronization performance in the Federation environment, only the modified topology objects will be synchronized between the Federation Master and children. (FGL-19120/FGL-18967)

High Availability (HA)

• Redesigned the HA implementation based on JGroups, as JBoss Server has been removed in this 5.9.1 release. (FGL-18829)
  • Use the standalone JGroups library to support HA.
  • Provided the secured communication between nodes using secretKey. (FGL-18983)

REST APIs

• Auth-Token has been replaced with Access-Token in this 5.9.1 release, but Auth-Token is still supported. Quest recommends that you change to use Access-Token as the request header for REST APIs, as Auth-Token will be deprecated in future product release.  (FGL-19352)
• Added the customization support for publishing REST APIs. (FGL-18989)
• Added a new pushData API (POST) to push data into the Management Server. (FGL-18876)
• Added a new pushAlarm API (POST) to push alarms into the Management Server. (FGL-18875)

IPv6 support (Preview)

• Added the support of IPv6 protocol on the Management Server, Foglight Agent Manager, and Infrastructure cartridge. (FREQ-837)
  Note: Only link-local address is verified and supported on the Management Server. For more information about platforms supported by the Foglight Agent Manager, refer to the Foglight Agent Manager 5.9.1 Release Notes.

Administration dashboard

• Management Server Configuration
  • Removed JBoss related ports from the Ports table on the Administration > Support Bundles > Management Server Configuration dashboard. (FGL-18958)
  • Removed ORB ports from the server.config file. (FGL-18997)
  • Removed ORB (IIOP) and ORB (IIOP) SSL information from the Ports table on the Administration > Support Bundles > Management Server Configuration dashboard. (WCF-15909)
  • Added a new Import New Language For PDF option on the Administration > Support Bundles > Management Server Configuration dashboard. (WCF-15881)
• Email Configuration
  • Added the StorageAdministrator and OpenStackAdminInvalidated variables in the Email Routing table on the Email Configuration dashboard. (WCF-15797)

Report Management

• Added the capability to export a custom report as the .csv file. (FREQ-981)

Supported platform

• Add the support of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2. (FGL-19209)

Third party libraries

• Upgraded HttpClient to version 4.x. (FGL-18356) 
• Upgraded Spring Core to version 4.3.5. (FGL-17712)

Foglight Agent Manager

The Foglight Agent Manager (FglAM) was upgraded to version 5.9.1. For more information about the Foglight Agent Manager 5.9.1, refer to the Foglight Agent Manager 5.9.1 Release Notes.

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure cartridge was upgraded to version 5.9.1. For more information about the Foglight for Infrastructure 5.9.1, refer to the Foglight for Infrastructure 5.9.1 Release Notes.

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