Foglight for Exchange 5.7.1 - User and Reference Guide

Exploring the Foglight for Exchange dashboards

Foglight for Exchange includes dashboards which aid in the monitoring, analysis and investigation of an Exchange environment’s health and performance.

These dashboards provide real-time views into the present state and relationships of the major components in your Exchange environment, including:

•	Exchange Server Roles. There are five Exchange server roles that allow administrators to split up the functions of an Exchange server and place each role, or a combination of roles, on different servers. The views provided allow you to monitor the health of the servers hosting these Exchange roles.

•	Exchange Servers. An Exchange server is any server that has Exchange services installed on it.

•	Sites. A site is a logical grouping of computers within Active Directory® that have reliable connectivity. The views provided allow you to monitor the health of the sites that are hosting Exchange servers.

•	Clusters. A cluster is composed of individual servers running cluster software which enables these computers to work together as a computer cluster, to provide failover and improve performance and availability over that of a single computer.

This section explains how to access the Exchange dashboards, describes the layout of each dashboard, and explains how to navigate through the embedded views of each dashboard:

•	Accessing the Foglight for Exchange dashboards

•	Exchange Alarms dashboard

•	Exchange Environment dashboard

•	Exchange Explorer dashboard

•	Exchange Rule Management dashboard

For a description of the metrics captured in each of the embedded views, see Foglight for Exchange views.

Accessing the Foglight for Exchange dashboards

To access the dashboards:

1	On the navigation panel, under Dashboards, click the expansion state box to the left of Exchange.

2	Click one of the dashboard items.

•	Click Exchange Alarms to display a list of the current alarms triggered within Foglight for Exchange.

•	Click Exchange Environment to display the Exchange Environment dashboard, which includes the following tabs:

•	Monitoring: displays a summary of the Exchange servers being monitored and their current state.

•	Health Check: displays the health state of clusters and servers in your environment.

•	Administration: allows you to perform administrative tasks, including:

•	Deploy the Exchange agent package, create and activate Exchange agents, and start or stop collecting data.

•	View and manage rules that exist in your environment.

•	View a list of diagnostic tests that are available, as well as run a test immediately or define a schedule for when a test is to be run.

•	View, edit and enable/ disable the optional metric collections that are configurable for Exchange agents.

•	Reports: allows you to build, view, and manage custom reports.

•	FAQts: displays questions relating to a selected object.

•	Click Exchange Explorer to display performance metrics and alarms for an Exchange server or group of servers.

•	Click Rule Management to view and manage Foglight for Exchange rules.

Exchange Alarms dashboard

The Exchange Alarms dashboard shows the alarms that have been triggered but not cleared within Foglight for Exchange. It can be used to isolate alarms specific to your Exchange environment.

Figure 6. Exchange Alarms dashboard

The Alarms List on this view is a sortable list that displays the outstanding Foglight for Exchange alarms. Each alarm row in the Alarms List contains the following information.

 

Table 2. Alarms List information

Severity	The icon in this column indicates the severity of the alarm.
Server	Displays the name of the Exchange server where the alarm occurred. Clicking the server name displays a popup menu where you can choose to view details about the selected server in either the Exchange Explorer dashboard or Quick View in the Exchange Environment dashboard.
Time	Displays the date and time when the alarm occurred.
Cleared	Displays whether the alarm was cleared.
Cleared by	For cleared alarms, displays the users who cleared the alarm.
Instance	Displays the topology object instance name that triggered the alarm.
Alarm Message	Displays the alarm message.

Clicking an alarm’s severity icon, object icon, alarm message, or time displays a popup where you can acknowledge or clear the alarm. This popup provides pertinent information about the selected alarm, such as the rule of origin of the alarm, the history of the alarm, and all of the notes attached to the alarm. For more information about managing alarms, see the Foglight User Guide or online help.

Exchange Environment dashboard

The Exchange Environment dashboard includes the following tabs:

•	Monitoring: displays the health state of clusters and servers in your environment. For details, see Exchange Environment > Monitoring tab.

•	Health Check: displays clusters and servers health state. For details, see Exchange Environment > Health Check tab.

•	Administration: allows you to perform administrative tasks, including:

•	Deploy the Exchange agent package, create and activate Exchange agents, and start or stop collecting data.

•	View and manage rules that exist in your environment.

•	View a list of diagnostic tests that are available, as well as run a test immediately or define a schedule for when a test is to be run.

•	View, edit and enable/ disable the optional metric collections that are configurable for Exchange agents.

•	Run a script for configuring Exchange agent settings.

 

NOTE: In a federated environment, the administrative tasks and Agents view are available only on the Federated Children and not on the Foglight Federation Master.

For details, see Exchange Environment > Administration tab.

•	Reports: allows you to manage custom Exchange reports. For details, see Exchange Environment > Reports tab.

•	FAQts: displays questions relating to a selected object. For details, see Exchange Environment > FAQts tab.