Foglight Agent Manager 7.3.0 - Foglight Agent Manager Guide

Downloading the Agent Manager installer

The below describe the different methods to download and run the Agent Manager installer on a target system:

Before you begin, review the matrix below to determine the appropriate installer for your platform. The following table lists the installers available for the platforms on which the Agent Manager is supported.

After deploying the FglAM-[all|<platform>]-<version>.car file on the Management Server, you can download the appropriate platform-specific installer to the target system from the Components for Download dashboard.

In situations where unauthenticated or headless access to the installers is required, you can download the appropriate platform-specific Agent Manager installer from a separate Components for Download page (after deploying the FglAM‑all‑<version>.car or FglAM‑<platform>‑<version>.car file on the Management Server).

NOTE: Components for Download is a stand-alone page. It does not provide access to any Foglight dashboards. If you click your Web browser's Back and Forward buttons while viewing this page, the pages you visited in your current browser session open; you do not navigate to Foglight dashboards.

3	On the Components for Download dashboard, in the row containing the Agent Manager installer for your platform, click .

TIP: For the appropriate installer name for your platform, consult the above table.

IMPORTANT: No login is required to access this page.

Installing the Agent Manager

After downloading the installer to the machine on which you want to install the Agent Manager, you can use the installer interface, run the installer from the command-line, or use the silent (non-interactive) installer.

Install the Agent Manager on each host that you want to monitor locally. Many agents allow hosts to be monitored remotely, from an Agent Manager installed on another machine. A local Agent Manager is not required on remotely monitored machines.

The Agent Manager should be installed in a directory that is local to the system. It should also run using a local account, not a network or domain account. This should also include a local user home directory. Because the Agent Manager monitors and detects problems such as network and disk failures, having the Agent Manager installed in a local directory and running it as a local user makes the Agent Manager more resistant to failures in those services and better able to detect and report those failures. Otherwise, having the Agent Manager installed on a network drive, could cause the Agent Manager to lock itself when the network drive fails, preventing this failure from being reported.

In some environments, the need for more efficient credentials management may require the use of domain accounts. In these environments, the use of gMSA (Group Managed Service Accounts) may provide additional security and efficiency. Refer to Planning for authentication with gMSA in the Foglight Installation and Setup Guide: Installing on Windows with an External Microsoft SQL Server Database.

Installing the Agent Manager using the installer interface

NOTE: On UNIX® platforms, if necessary, change the permissions for the installer file so that it is executable (as described in To download and run the Agent Manager installer using the Agent Managers or Agent Status dashboard: ).

IMPORTANT: If you want to configure the Agent Manager to accept upstream HTTP connections during the installation, start the installer on the command line with the --allow-unsecured option: FglAM-<version>-<platform>.exe --allow-unsecured

NOTE: If you want to install the Agent Manager as a Windows service, or as a Unix deamon, the installation interface appears with pre-selected options, indicating that the Agent Manager will start immediately after the installation. You can force these options to appear disabled by default (and enable them, if required, during the installation), if you start the installer executable with the --no-start-on-exit option: FglAM-<version>-<platform>.exe --no-start-on-exit For more information about these options in the installation interface, see Step 7: Install init.d Script (Unix) and Step 9: Windows Service .

IMPORTANT: On Windows® 7 and Vista, you must run the installer GUI as an administrator if you want it to automatically install the Agent Manager as a service. To do so, right-click the installer executable and select Run as Administrator.

The Agent Manager Installation and Configuration window opens, showing the Introduction step.

Read the information in the Introduction step and click Next.

NOTE: You must accept the license agreement before you can install the product.

NOTE: If you are using gMSA authentication, the gMSA account must have read & write permission on the Agent Manager installation directory.

The Host Display Name step allows you to configure the host name that the Agent Manager uses to identify itself. This is also the name under which the Agent Manager submits metrics to the Management Server.

By default, the Agent Manager uses the host name that is automatically detected for the machine on which it is being installed. This host name initially appears in the Host Display Name box.

There are certain cases in which you should explicitly set the host name in this box: for example, if the host name is already in use by another machine. If necessary, you can replace the host name with a different (non-host name) value that suits the needs of your environment; for example, WebServer (Unix Cluster 1) or 12345.example.com (Databases).

By default, the Agent Manager logs a warning when it starts if the host name you set differs from the automatically detected host name. This warning message appears in the console when you start the Agent Manager and in the Agent Manager log file. If you do not want the warning logged, clear the check box in this step.

TIP: If the machine on which you are installing the Agent Manager is configured with multiple IP addresses or host names, clear the check box to suppress the warning messages.

The Server URLs step provides multiple ways to configure the connection between the Agent Manager and the Management Server. For example, you can specify the URL of a single Management Server to which you want the Agent Manager to connect, or configure multiple Management Server URLs for failover purposes. You can also specify the URL of an Agent Manager concentrator to which you want the Agent Manager to connect.

NOTE: You can also configure Management Server URLs at a later time using the Agent Manager configuration interface. See Configuring the Agent Manager for information about launching this interface post-installation.

From this step, you can also add SSL certificates to the Agent Manager’s certificate store, or configure reverse polling.

TIP: To complete this configuration, you must clear the Connect Using HTTPS check box in Step 2.

TIP: You can also configure other Agent Manager connection options in this dialog. See Configuring Management Server URLs using the installer interface for information about these options.

TIP: This option is only available if you selected Allow Unsecured Connections in Step 1.

•	: The URL passed the connection test.

•	: The URL is not tested.

•	: The URL failed the connection test.

IMPORTANT: You can specify URLs for both Management Servers and Agent Manager concentrators. However, only Management Servers can have HA (High Availability) peers, not concentrators. Clicking Find HA Servers does not cause any concentrators to be added to the list of URLs.

NOTE: The alias must be unique.

UNIX® platforms only.

The Configure Secure Launcher step allows you to configure the external loader used by the Agent Manager to provide certain Foglight agents with permissions required to gather system-level metrics. See Configuring Agent Manager agent privileges for more information.

IMPORTANT: After the installation is complete, you must edit the sudoers file for your system. If you are using a privilege-escalation tool other than sudo (for example, setuid_launcher), you must make changes related to that application. Follow the instructions in Configuring Agent Manager agent privileges .

UNIX platforms only.

The UNIX init.d Script step allows you to configure the Agent Manager to run as a daemon. You do that by instructing the installer to installing an init.d-style script called quest-fglam in the init.d directory on your system. See Locating the init.d script for the location of this directory on your operating system.

The system calls the quest-fglam script when the host on which the Agent Manager is installed starts up or shuts down.

NOTE: This check box appears disabled if you are not running the Agent Manager installer as root.

NOTE: Even if you choose not to install the init.d script, or if you are not performing the installation as the root user, two scripts to perform the necessary setup are generated for later use. See Configuring the Agent Manager to run as a daemon for more information. If you are not installing the init.d script at this time, it is recommended to configure as many options as possible in this step. They are referenced when generating these scripts for a later use.

IMPORTANT: These numbers signify different run levels on different UNIX platforms. Consult your UNIX system administrator for more information.

NOTE: If the installer is started on the command line with the --no-start-on-exit option, this check box does not appear selected in the Install init.d Script step. Starting the installer without the --no-start-on-exit option causes the Start Foglight Agent Manager at the end of the installation check box to be selected by default. For more information, see Installing the Agent Manager using the installer interface.

Foglight Agent Manager can accept incoming connections and be configured as a concentrator that acts as an intermediary connection to aggregates one or more downstream Agent Manager clients. A concentrator configuration provides a single connection through either a firewall or proxy for all downstream clients, or as an aggregated connection directly to the server.

Configuring the Agent Manager to act as a concentrator involves configuring queue and heap sizes to adequately support accepting and transferring data from one or more downstream connections. You can configure downstream connections when the Agent Manager needs to accept connections from the Management Server and enable reverse data polling. This is useful when the Agent Manager cannot connect to the Management Server due to its location.

Using this installer step, you can configure:

User-provided certificates or keystores are supported, but can be configured after the installation.

If you are configuring the Agent Manager as a concentrator in order to enable connections from the Management Server, additional setup is required. For more information about this procedure, or to find out to configure non-SSL connections and user-provided certificates, see Configuring the Agent Manager to accept connections from the Management Server .

Windows® platforms only.

The Windows Service step allows you to specify if you want to install the Agent Manager as a Windows service. A Windows service operates in the background while the system on which it is installed is running. Installing the Agent Manager as a Windows Service causes the Agent Manager to start automatically on your system startup.

NOTE: If the installer is started on the command line with the --no-start-on-exit option, this check box does not appear selected in the Windows Service step. Starting the installer without the --no-start-on-exit option causes the Start Foglight Agent Manager Windows Service at the end of the installation check box to be selected by default. For more information, see Installing the Agent Manager using the installer interface.

The Summary step informs you that you can complete installation.

IMPORTANT: On UNIX platforms, if the Agent Manager installation is performed by a user without root privileges, the init.d-style script is not installed. One or more messages appear, informing you of this, and also of the location of the script installer and a copy of the script itself.

IMPORTANT: On some platforms, the Agent Manager Installer dialog might close automatically when the installation is complete or you might need to close it manually. If a command shell appeared while the installer was loading, this shell might also need to be closed manually.

IMPORTANT: The Agent Manager starts automatically when the installation is complete only when it is installed as a service on Windows. It does not start automatically at the end of an installation on a UNIX platform.

Configuring Management Server URLs using the installer interface

As described in Step 5: Server URLs of Configuring Management Server URLs using the installer interface, you can configure the Agent Manager connection parameters using the installer interface.

If the Management Server is configured to use HTTPS, then HTTPS can be used by the Agent Manager to connect to the Management Server.

NOTE: It is not recommended to enable this configuration in FIPS-compliant mode for security consideration.

You can specify whether the Agent Manager should connect to the Management Server using a proxy.

You can specify a local network address from which you want the Agent Manager to connect to the Management Server.

You can configure the Agent Manger to establish HTTP-compressed communication with the Management Server, if required.