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Foglight 7.1.0 - User Guide

Getting Started with Foglight

The Quest Foglight User Guide helps you monitor your enterprise from a variety of perspectives using the Alarms, Domains, My Services, and Hosts dashboards. It presents workflows for drilling down and investigating problems in your monitored environment using these dashboards.

This guide also introduces you to navigating the Foglight browser interface and using reports to share data from Foglight with others in your organization.

This guide is intended for users who have been assigned the Operator or Advanced Operator role and who need to perform tasks such as monitoring their environment, working with alarms, and creating reports.

 

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NOTE: This guide uses terminology that is specific to the Foglight browser interface. For more information about these terms, see the Foglight User Help (navigate to Help > Help Contents > Using Foglight > User Help > Getting Started with Foglight > Working with Dashboards in the action panel and then click Working with Dashboards).

Getting Started

Getting Started

This section provides instructions for logging in to Foglight and describes the Welcome page you see when you log in with the Operator or Advanced Operator role. It also introduces you to navigating the Foglight browser interface and discusses best practices for navigation.

 
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NOTE: Your Administrator may have configured Foglight so that the actual displays are different from those described in this chapter. The following information is intended as a general guide.

Perform these steps before following the instructions in this section:

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Obtain your Foglight user name and password from your Administrator.
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Ensure that your Web browser has JavaScript functionality enabled.
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Ensure that your account has the Console User role. This is required to view the new Foglight interface components.

Logging in to Foglight

Logging in to Foglight

This topic describes how to log in to the Foglight browser interface.

To log in to Foglight:
1
Open a Web browser instance.
 
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NOTE: For a list of browsers supported by Foglight, see the System Requirements and Platform Support Guide.
2
Navigate to a URL that uses the following syntax:
http://localhost:8080/
where localhost is the name of the machine that has a running instance of the Management Server.
The Foglight login page appears.
3
Enter your user name and password in the login page.
This guide assumes that you are a user with the Operator or Advanced Operator role, in which case the Welcome to Foglight page is the first dashboard you see when you log in to Foglight.
 
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NOTE: The appearance of the Welcome page and the range of dashboards you can access from this page vary depending on your user role. If you have Administrator-level permissions, you can access advanced dashboards and configuration workflows. See the Administration and Configuration Guide. Users with the Operator role (but not the Administrator role) have permission to access a smaller set of dashboards.

If you are a user who has a role or a role combination assigned to you that does not provide sufficient privileges to do anything useful in Foglight, a warning page is displayed. Contact your Foglight Security Administrator to get additional roles assigned to your account or to request that a different home page be configured for you.

Starting from the Welcome Page

Foglight Users:

An Operator’s welcome page lists the following commonly-performed tasks:

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View Your Enterprise Health: Choose one of Foglight's pre-defined views to summarize the overall health of your IT infrastructure.
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View, Acknowledge, and Clear Recent Alarms: View the state of all alarms across the entire Foglight installation in the Alarms dashboard so you can take immediate action on them. The Alarms dashboard shows alarm counts by time, allowing you to identify excessive alarm counts or outage events. This link takes you to the Alarms dashboard. Another way to access this dashboard is by choosing Alarms under Homes on the navigation panel. See Viewing, Acknowledging, and Clearing Alarms .
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View Enterprise Health Organized by Monitoring Domain: View an end-to-end, top-level summary of all domains in the Domains dashboard and drill down to view their managed instances. This link takes you to the Domains dashboard. Another way to access this dashboard is by choosing Domains under Dashboards on the navigation panel. See Monitoring Your Domains .
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View the Health of Critical Services: Choose a level of service as a focal point by subscribing to services of interest and viewing their dependencies. This link takes you to the My Services. Another way to access this dashboard is by choosing My Services under Dashboards on the navigation panel. For more information, see Monitoring Your Services .
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View the Health of the Monitored Hosts in Your Enterprise: View alarms and a high-level summary of performance on your monitored hosts. This link takes you to the Hosts dashboard. For more information, see Monitoring Your Hosts .
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Configure Alarm Reporting and Blackouts: Configure the mail server and assign email routing for Foglight alarm notifications. Configure blackout period to suspend monitoring activities.
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Configure Email Settings: Configure the mail server and assign email routing for Foglight alarm notifications.
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Blackout Configuration: Configure blackout period to suspend monitoring activities.
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Report on Your Enterprise: View reports that are scheduled, run a report using a report template, create a custom report, schedule a report to run at a specific time, and manage reports. This link takes you to the Reports dashboard. Another way to access this dashboard is by choosing Reports under Homes on the navigation panel. For more information on reports, see Reporting on Your Enterprise .
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Build a Custom Report: Build a report template from components or specify parameters to produce reports.
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Run a Report: Generate a one-time report based on a template and schedule a report to run at a specific time.
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Manage Reports: Manage the schedule reports and generated reports.
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Do More with Foglight: Create custom services, build new dashboards and access other administrative functions in Foglight.
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Administer Foglight: Manage users, define data retention policies, install or remove functionality, and manage licensing.
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Build a Dashboard: Use the Foglight dashboard editor to create your own view onto your enterprise infrastructure.
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Define Services: Create and edit services to organize your monitoring data along business lines. Create custom SLA policies which track the health of your infrastructure from a service perspective.
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View Agent Status: View the status of the agents which are monitoring your enterprise, configure existing agents, or create new agents to monitor more of your infrastructure.
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Contact Supportlink: Get help and technical support through Quest Software's official support website.
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Explore Foglight Documentation: View the on-line help and detailed documentation to learn more about Foglight.
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Tap into the Foglight Community: Takes you to the foglight.org Web site, which discusses topics related to Application Management and Foglight.

The Welcome to Foglight page is your default home page. For instructions on changing your home page to a dashboard of your choice, see Choosing a Home Page.

Foglight Evolve Users:

When you log in to Foglight Evolve for the first time, the Getting Started tab of the Environment Overview page appears in the display area.

 
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NOTE: The General Access role is required to see the Foglight Welcome page.

This tab displays tiles based on the products that are installed.

From this tab, you can quickly perform a number of activities:

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Explore Hyper-V—access the Hyper-V Environment Overview page.
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Explore VMware—access the VMware Environment Overview page.
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Add Monitoring—add Hyper-V or VMware agents to your environment.

You can also obtain information about the status of your license for Foglight. This status is indicated by messages displayed on the tile of the installed products. For more information on licenses, see the Administration and Configuration Guide.

In addition, the Getting Started provides several video tutorials and the Evaluation Guide which is intended for anyone who wants to perform a quick evaluation of the power and ease-of-use of Foglight.

To access the Perspective views for any of the installed vFoglight cartridges, open the navigation panel, expand the Dashboard module, and click Perspective Selector > Perspective.

The Perspective dashboard provides a summary view of the different parts of your environment. Each perspective summarizes the key information related to a particular area of interest. Each perspective contains a section on the right side that shows the total number of alarms for each severity. Most perspectives also include a detailed view that list the number of objects (VMs, Hosts, and so on) within that environment, broken down by the entity’s alarm status. If a single object has multiple alarms, each alarm is counted. For this reason, the total number of alarms frequently exceeds the total number of objects with alarms.

Each perspective contains an Explore button. Click Explore to investigate the full details displayed in the VMware Environment dashboard.

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