Foglight 5.9.2 - User Guide

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.

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:

Logging in to Foglight

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

NOTE: For a list of browsers supported by Foglight, see the System Requirements and Platform Support Guide.

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 Quest 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

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

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.

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

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

This tab displays tiles based on the products that are installed. For example, when you install Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition, a trial version of Foglight Storage Manager is also installed. The Getting Started tab displays both Foglight for Virtualization and Storage Manager tiles.

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

You can also obtain information about the status of your license for Storage Manager and Quest 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 Quest 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.

Navigating Foglight

In addition to the links on the Welcome page, use the navigational aids described in the sections below to navigate Foglight.

NOTE: Foglight displays dynamic data that is updated regularly. For this reason, avoid using your browser’s navigation buttons, as this may display cached views or result in an error message. Use the links in the navigation panel and display area instead.

TIP: Visit http://eDocs.quest.com to watch our learning videos. See Introduction to the Foglight User Interface.

Use the left-hand navigation panel to move between dashboards. This panel lists all dashboards that are available to you based on your roles. Expand a module and select a dashboard to view it in the display area (for example, Dashboards > Services > Service Levels).

Quest Foglight remembers the state of the navigation panel between logins, so if you collapse the navigation panel when you log out, it is collapsed the next time you log in.

The name of the current dashboard is displayed in bold at the top of the dashboard, at the end of a path called the breadcrumb trail.

When you move directly from one dashboard to another, the names of the previous dashboards are displayed in a breadcrumb trail.

Use the links in the breadcrumb trail to return to previously-viewed dashboards in a workflow or series of drilldowns.

Use the graphical and text links in views to drill down to additional details that help you diagnose problems. Depending on the link, you drill down to a different dashboard or a smaller view called a popup that appears above the dashboard you are currently viewing.

You can drill down from many different parts of a view, including names of monitored components (such as hosts or services), the Explore links in a popup, and items like charts, tables, cylinders, and icons.

For example, in the Service Operations Console dashboard, click the icon in the Host tier column that indicates that the tier is in a fatal state (). An Outstanding Alarm(s) popup appears that lists the hosts in the tier. Drill down further into a host’s health or alarms to diagnose problems.

Use bookmarks to keep track of dashboards and views that you want to revisit or access quickly, without having to drill down several levels. A bookmark can be a snapshot of data that is “frozen” at a specific point in time, or it can be updated with current data when you access it. For example, you could create a bookmark to quickly access the System Overview on a particular host from last Wednesday.

You create a bookmark by navigating to the dashboard you want to bookmark, selecting Bookmark from the action panel, and then selecting options from the Bookmark dialog box. See the online help for the Bookmark dialog box for details.

The bookmarks you create are listed in the Bookmarks section of the navigation panel. When you select a bookmark, it appears in the display area.

1	Place the cursor over the dimmed delete icon beside the name of the bookmark. The icon turns red: .

Opening a new window instead of using the current browser is useful, for example, when you want to open a link or print a document, such as a PDF. When you use a new window, the document downloads or prints in the background and you are prevented from accidentally closing the browser window when closing the PDF.