Foglight for Infrastructure 5.9.4 - User Guide

Using the UnixAgentPlus

The UnixAgentPlus is fully supported for use in monitoring Linux® and Oracle Solaris® systems.

While a UnixAgentPlus collects all the metrics collected by a UnixAgent, it also:

NOTE: If you need to monitor AIX or HP-UX platforms, then UnixAgent must be used.

Monitoring remote hosts

Unlike the previous generation of system agents, Foglight for Infrastructure agents can be set up to monitor hosts remotely. A single Foglight Agent Manager can host many Foglight for Infrastructure agents, remotely monitoring different hosts.

Foglight for Infrastructure agents are best deployed on a Foglight Agent Manager that is closely located to the monitored host, for example on the same subnet. This is especially important for WindowsAgents because the communication interfaces they depend on are not well-suited to a high-latency environment, performing many remote operations to gather data. UnixAgentPluss and UnixAgents are also affected. A high latency between the Agent Manager and the monitored host can result in collections being skipped, and observed as gaps in data.

NOTE: Monitoring remote Linux® and UNIX® hosts is possible using the SSH (secure shell) protocol. The Agent Manager does not support Telnet as a remote monitoring protocol because of potential security issues. For more information, see the Agent Manager Guide.

Foglight for Infrastructure agents can still be used locally in situations where remote operation is not possible.

Preventing memory leaks in Windows Server® 2008 R2 and Windows 7

Querying the Win32_Service WMI class can result in memory leaks when the agent monitors a Windows® Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 system. If you see that the amount of memory used by the Wmiprvse.exe process keeps increasing, and the system performance decreasing, this is likely caused by this known Microsoft® issue. To prevent memory leaks, install the Microsoft hotfix #981314 available from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981314.

Deploying Foglight for Infrastructure agents

When you install Foglight for Infrastructure on the Foglight Management Server, the installation process makes its agent package (HostAgents.gar) available for deployment.

Before creating Foglight for Infrastructure agents for the hosts that you want to monitor, you must have the Foglight for Infrastructure cartridge file installed on the Foglight Management Server, and the agent package deployed to one or more Foglight Agent Managers used to manage the remote agents.