Foglight for VMware 5.8 - User and Reference Guide

Accessing the Administration tab

To open the navigation panel, click the right-facing arrow on the left.

Configuring monitoring agents for data collection

Foglight® for VMware uses the VMware Performance Agent to collect information from monitored environments. Creating a VMware Performance Agent instance creates the agent process on the Agent Manager host. Activating the VMware Performance Agent starts that agent process while starting an agent instance’s data collection enables the agent to start collecting data from the monitored vCenter® and to send it to Foglight for VMware.

When the VMware Performance Agent package is successfully deployed, create one or more agent instances, activate them, and start their data collection. To perform these steps in a single operation for one or more monitored hosts, use the Agents view on the Administration tab.

Each VMware Performance Agent monitors a single Virtual Center. When you create a VMware Performance Agent instance and the Agent Setup wizard determines that the Virtual Center was not previously monitored by this Foglight instance, it starts importing historical data into Foglight. This data is not immediately available as it takes some time to collect it. This process can import data collected over 30 days or less, depending on the amount of data available in the Virtual Center. This allows you to explore VMware metrics as soon as the data is imported, instead for waiting for the agent to collect some data from the Virtual Center. The Metric History column in the Agents table indicates the progress of the historical data import. Historical data is intended for charting, trending, and general presentation purposes. It does not cause any alarms to fire.

To import vCenter historical data, the minimum recommended vCenter Statistics Levels must be at least 2 in the samples that are collected for one month for the agent to populate 30 days of historic collections. The following table lists the minimum Statistics Levels for all collection frequencies. For more information about vCenter Statistics levels, see your VMware® documentation.

IMPORTANT: Before creating your first VMware Performance agent, you must configure a Virtual Center user with sufficient privileges. For more information, see “Enabling VMware Performance Agents to Collect Data from a Virtual Center” in the Foglight for VMware Installation Guide.

IMPORTANT: The Virtual Center user account must have sufficient privileges. For more information, see “Enabling VMware Performance Agents to Collect Data from a Virtual Center” in the Foglight for VMware User and Reference Guide.

Viewing the overall system status

The VMware VirtualCenters dashboard has just one view that displays a Status view for each vCenter that exist within the virtual infrastructure. This dashboard and its embedded status views can be used to take a quick look at the status of each of the vCenters within the infrastructure.

Each vCenter Status view provides an alarm summary for the objects contained within the vCenter. If you click any of the alarm indicators in the alarm summary, an Alarms popup appears showing a list of alarms for the object type that is associated with the alarm indicator.

To access this dashboard, from the navigation panel, under Dashboards, choose VMware > VMware VirtualCenters.

For reference information about the data appearing on this dashboard, see VMware VirtualCenter views .

Exploring your VMware environment

A typical virtual environment contains a set of ESX® host and virtual machines. An ESX host can be a part of a cluster, and can have one or more virtual machines associated with it. Other components of a Virtual Center include datacenters, resource pools, and data stores. You can view the overall state of these components on the VMware Environment dashboard.

Selecting an object or group of objects, such as clusters, servers, or virtual machines, shows additional information about your selection. For example, selecting all ESX hosts identifies the top three consumers of CPU, memory, network, and disk resources and shows the related alarm states. Selecting a specific ESX host shows the CPU, memory, network, and disk usage for the selected ESX host, along with high-level hardware and software configuration.

When you navigate to the VMware Environment dashboard for the first time, the Monitoring tab appears open. This tab provides an overall summary of your virtual environment. Other tabs are also available. This topic describes the Monitoring tab. For information about other tabs, see the following topics:

Choosing a specific virtual environment from the list in the top-right shows the information about the selected environment.

The list shows a list of services. Each service can contain a different combination of monitored components.

NOTE: The VMware Environment dashboard is service-based. The VMware service created by Foglight for VMware for a particular vCenter does not contain template virtual machines (VMs). The VMware Explorer dashboard is inventory-based. The VMware Explorer dashboard counts all VMs, including template VMs, for each vCenter. Therefore, the number of VMs for a particular vCenter is different when you view it through the VMware Environment dashboard than the number that appears when you view it through the VMware Explorer dashboard.

The VMware Environment dashboard is made up of the following views: the Virtual Environment Overview and Quick-View. Selecting an object type and its alarm state in the Virtual Environment Overview shows the summary information for your selection in the Quick-View. For reference information about the data appearing on this dashboard, see VMware Environment views .

For example, when you select the Normal state on the ESX Hosts tile, the ESX Hosts that are in the Normal state are listed in the ESX Hosts view, and summary information for those ESX Hosts appears in the ESX Hosts Summary view.

In the example below, the ESX Hosts tile is selected. The ESX Hosts view is populated with all monitored ESX Hosts regardless of their alarm state. Summary information for those ESX Hosts appears in the ESX Host Summary view.

From there, clicking a specific object instance on the left shows additional summary information about the selected object. The Inventory view, for example, shows all of the objects related to the selected object, along with their respective alarm state counts. All objects in the object relationship hierarchy, including the selected object, are shown in the Inventory view, so that you see the entire relationship hierarchy for the selected object. Each level in the hierarchy is labeled with the corresponding object type name. When there is only one object at a particular level in the hierarchy, the object name is displayed instead of the object type name.

The next example shows a number of virtual machines that are associated with a selected Virtual Center. Clicking that number shows a popup with the list of virtual machines. You can click any object in the popup list to quickly navigate to the VMware Explorer dashboard, and review detailed information about that particular object.

The Inventory view also provides several alarm state icons with counts. Clicking a state icon or the number below it to view a popup that shows the alarms of that state for the corresponding object type. For example, clicking the Warning state shows a dwell with a list of related objects against which Warning alarms are generated.