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Foglight for Application Operations 5.9.8 - Dependency Mapping User Guide

Introduction to this Guide

This User Guide provides configuration steps, conceptual information, and instructions on how to use the Dependency Mapping functionality. It includes the following sections:
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Dependency Mapping Administration: provides procedures for creating and deploying agents to monitor the dependencies in your environment.
This section is intended for Foglight System Administrators, to configure and administer dependency mapping in Foglight for Application Operations.
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Creating and Maintaining Services: provides information that helps you monitor your enterprise using Foglight for Application Operations. It presents workflows for grouping monitored resources into services, for investigating whether any service disruptions have occurred, and for editing existing services, as necessary.
This section is intended for Foglight users who have been assigned the Operator or Advanced Operator role, and who need to perform tasks such as monitoring the environment, working with alarms, and creating reports.
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Exploring Dependencies: presents how to explore the list of dependencies observed in your environment, from different perspectives (by host, or by service).
This section is intended for Foglight users who have been assigned the Operator role, and who need to review the dependency changes in their environment.
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Appendix: Configuring Monitoring of Non-English Windows OS Hosts: provides a solution to issues that may arise when using a Foglight agent to monitor a non-English Windows OS host remotely.
 
 

Dependency Mapping Administration

This section provides procedures for creating and deploying agents to monitor the dependencies in your environment. It assumes that Foglight, the Agent Manager, and the Foglight for Application Operations cartridge (.car) file are already installed. For installation instructions, see the Foglight Installation and Setup Guide set, the Foglight Agent Manager Guide, and the Foglight Administration and Configuration Guide.
This section also presents how to explore the list of dependencies observed in your environment, from different perspectives, and manually edit service dependencies.
To access the Dependency Mapping Administration dashboard, in the Foglight navigation panel, under Dashboards, click Dependency Mapping > Dependency Mapping Administration.
Figure 1. The Dependency Mapping Administration dashboard.
Related topics:
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Configuring dependency monitoring
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Editing service dependencies
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Managing global dependencies
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Editing process-tier mappings

Configuring dependency monitoring

Foglight for Application Operations uses various agents to collect information from the monitored hosts. Agents communicate with the Management Server using the Agent Manager. When you install this cartridge on the Management Server, the installation process makes the Netstat agent package available for deployment.
The Netstat agent collects process network usage information from Windows and Linux hosts in your environment, as well as host-level usage information from Solaris systems, and uses that information to report dependencies. The Netstat agent can be configured to aggregate this data across multiple hosts, so that the dependencies can be mapped between processes on different hosts.
 
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IMPORTANT: Remote hosts that are found by the Netstat agents and are not excluded from the dependency mapping, are populated into Foglight’s host model if a dependency is reported against them.
To start collecting dependency data from an environment, you must create, configure, and deploy one or more Netstat agents for the set of hosts that are part of that environment. You can later re-configure, activate or deactivate, modify the agent collection schedule, or delete an agent, as needed.
The Configure Dependency Monitoring dashboard helps Foglight administrators to create and manage Netstat agents. To access this dashboard, click Configure Dependency Monitoring in the Dependency Mapping Administration dashboard.
 
Table 1. Configure Dependency Monitoring dashboard data
Column Name
Column Description
Agent Name
Name of the Netstat agent.
Type
Type of the deployed agent. Not displayed by default.
Agent Host
Host on which the agent is deployed.
Credential Alarms
Credential alarms generated by the Agent Manager while processing and handling credential requests.
The alarms may have one of the following severity levels: Fatal, Critical, or Warning. To see detailed information about the alarms generated for a Netstat agent, click in one of the alarm fields, or hover the mouse over it.
For a list of credential events that the Agent Manager generates based on actions that occur while processing and handling credential requests, see section Credential events generated by the Foglight Agent Manager in the Foglight Administration and Configuration Guide.
Status
The status of the agent.
Scanning Progress
Dependency progress tracking link.
Use to access the Dependency Progress Tracker dashboard. For details, see Tracking the progress of dependency scans .
Collection Schedule
Data collection interval (default value is 30 minutes).
 
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NOTE: Many Foglight agents, including the Netstat dependency agents, require access to the WinShell services — specifically, to the DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) — to implement remote monitoring of a Windows machine.

Create a Netstat agent

When you create a Netstat agent, you define the minimum configuration settings for your agent so that it can collect dependency data from a specific environment.
Goals of configuring the Netstat agent
The Netstat agent should be configured to monitor all the hosts in a single application. More agents can be configured to monitor hosts from other applications.
To collect process-to-process details of a dependency between two hosts, the agent must connect to both endpoints of the conversation in the same scan. For a host to be monitored by an agent, it must be configured in that agent’s Scan these hosts list or in the Referenced List in the advanced setup (for details, see Configuring the referenced list ). The “referenced hosts” list is ideal for including groups of hosts which vary and can be identified by naming convention, or which may only be part-time participants in an application.
Dell strongly recommends that you exclude end-user access from Netstat collection. This can be configured in the Create a New Agent dialog, through the Exclude these hosts list (generally by entering an IP range) or by excluding ports accessed by end users. You can exclude dependencies to common end-user ports 80 and 443 from all hosts for a single agent by using the check box provided in the Create a New Agent dialog. You can exclude ports on specific hosts by editing the agent settings after creating the agent. For details, see Configuring the scanning list .
Related topics:
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Creating a Netstat agent
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Configuring dependency monitoring
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