Foglight 5.9.8 - User Guide

Online-Only Topics

You can use the Manage Reports dashboard to download and view details about generated reports. If you have the Advanced Operator role, this is also the dashboard from which you perform report-management tasks.

You can also use the Manage Reports dashboard to quickly generate and schedule new reports using an existing set of reports. From this dashboard you can run a report (see Online-Only Topics) and you can filter which reports are displayed in the table by selecting a template, module, or role.

If you have the Operator role, the Generated Reports table appears on this page. If you have the Advanced Operator role or Report Manager role, the Scheduled Reports table appears as well.

TIP: Show or hide columns in the views using the dialog box that appears when you click the Customizer icon ().Quickly find a report in one of these views using the Search field. You can also click the Search menu to perform an advanced search or use regular expressions.

Filter the list of reports to find reports listed in the Generated Reports and Scheduled Reports views more easily. You can filter these lists to show only the reports associated with a particular template, module, or role.

NOTE: If you selected the Templates by Module or Templates by Role tab: expand the items in the list to locate the template you want to use.

The reports that Quest Foglight has generated appear in the Generated Reports view. Use this view to download generated reports and to see details about a report such as its name, format, and the date on which it was generated. Report details are listed in the table and in the popup that appears when you click the row for a report.

TIP: The icons in the table show you at a glance what type of report it is: the icon represents a one-time generated report and the icon represents an instance of a scheduled report.

If you have the Operator role, you can delete reports that you generated. If you have the Advanced Operator role, you can also delete reports that other users generated.

TIP: If you have the Advanced Operator role, you can also delete generated instances of a scheduled report: click the row for the report in the Scheduled Reports view and then (in the popup) select the generated scheduled report from the Generated From Scheduled Report table and click Delete.

Use the Generated Reports view to create a scheduled version of a generated report. For example, you view a one-time report and decide it should be generated automatically at the end of each month.

You can also use this view to create a new scheduled report using a previously generated scheduled report. For example, you want to create a new scheduled report using the same template and the same schedule as your "End-ofDay" report, but the new report is tailored to a different service and emailed to a different group of recipients.

NOTE: In certain cases, the XML output format contains more information than the other output formats. For example, the XML format can provide all the metric information for a given time range, whereas the Excel format only displays the current average value. This is because the Excel output is limited to what can be placed in a cell.

NOTE: Your Administrator must configure Foglight to direct outgoing mail through your mail server before you can use this functionality. Contact your Administrator for details.

NOTE: If the schedules listed on this page do not meet your requirements, ask your Administrator to define a new schedule.

TIP: If you have a long list of schedules, use the Search field to narrow it down. Start typing the schedule name into the Search field. You can also click the Search menu to perform an advanced search or use regular expressions.

NOTE: The report is automatically generated and displayed in a browser window. The report is also listed in the Scheduled Reports View on the Manage Reports dashboard.

NOTE: In certain cases, the XML output format contains more information than the other output formats. For example, the XML format can provide all the metric information for a given time range, whereas the Excel format only displays the current average value. This is because the Excel output is limited to what can be placed in a cell.

NOTE: Your Administrator must configure Quest Foglight to direct outgoing mail through your mail server before you can use this functionality. Contact your Administrator for details.

When you schedule a report, it appears in the Scheduled Reports view on the Manage Reports dashboard. Use this view to download a generated scheduled report to see details such as its name, the schedule and template on which it is based, and the user who created it. You can also view report details in the popup that appears when you click the row for a report, such as the recipients to whom Quest Foglight emails the report.

Use the Scheduled Reports table to:

You can select a previous scheduled report to view or download it.

When you delete a scheduled report, you also have the option to delete any generated reports that are associated with it.

When you create a scheduled report, you choose whether you want it to be enabled (runs automatically at the scheduled times) or disabled (does not run at the scheduled times until it is enabled).

You can change these settings at any time from the Scheduled Reports view.

You can create a new scheduled report by copying or editing an existing scheduled report.

NOTE: In certain cases, the XML output format contains more information than the other output formats. For example, the XML format can provide all the metric information for a given time range, whereas the Excel format only displays the current average value. This is because the Excel output is limited to what can be placed in a cell.

NOTE: Your Administrator must configure Foglight to direct outgoing mail through your mail server before you can use this functionality. Contact your Administrator for details.

NOTE: If the schedules listed on this page do not meet your requirements, ask your Administrator to define a new schedule.

TIP: If you have a long list of schedules, filter the list of templates by typing the first few letters of the template name or module in the Search field. You can also click the Search menu to perform an advanced or regular expression search.

Online-Only Topics

The Agents on All Hosts dashboard lists the agents that are available for each host. It is useful for monitoring from the perspective of hosts and agents. If you want to look at agents and the hosts where they are running, you will find this the most helpful dashboard.

You can also create a filter to display only certain groups of hosts. See Monitoring Remote System Agents for more information.

NOTE: The Agents on All Hosts dashboard is similar to the Monitored Hosts dashboard except that you can use the Monitored Hosts dashboard to view agents for one host at a time. For more information on the Monitored Hosts dashboard see Viewing Details about a Single Host.

TIP: Visit http://eDocs.quest.com to watch our learning videos. See introduction to Managing Agents.

The Monitored Hosts and Agents and the Outstanding Alarms views are displayed. The type of information contained in each column is described in the following table.

TIP: Hover over a column to cause a dwell with more detailed information to appear.

Table 16. Drilldowns for the Agents on All Hosts View:

Select	To display
Agent or host	A popup that provides a summary of the agent/host, service, or application. This summary includes the number of alarms by severity, health status, and related links. This is a common view in Quest Foglight. For a description of the host summary popup, see the topic: Online-Only Topics.
Type	Lists the type of agent. For example, WindowsAgent, or UnixAgent.
Health icon	Links to: • health of all alarm sources • health of current alarm source • all outstanding alarms for that alarm source
Alarm icon	A list of alarms for components that are being monitored. This is a common view in Quest Foglight. For information about working with alarms, see Viewing, Acknowledging, and Clearing Alarms.
Health History	A popup that focuses on the state history of a host condition such as fatal. Click on the colored segment that corresponds to the severity state to get information about the alarms contributing to this particular time interval. For more information, see Viewing an Agent’s Health History.
State	A popup that allows Administrators to activate or deactivate the agent as well as start and stop data collection.
Health State	Alarms for the host or agent selected in the Monitored Hosts and Agents view. This is a common view in Quest Foglight. For information about working with alarms, see Viewing, Acknowledging, and Clearing Alarms.

You can filter the hosts by clicking Agent Filter in the Action panel to open the Agent Filter dialog box.

The health history represents the state history of a host condition for specific periods of time, over the time period of the dashboard. You can click on any “state period” in the health history bar to drill-down on a list of the specific alarms that are associated with the host during that time period. This is useful in situations where the host condition frequently changes and a colorful health history bar is shown. By selecting a colored segment on the health history bar, you can get a closer look at what particular alarms are indicating a non-normal state severity.

NOTE: By default, the Health History column in the Hosts dashboard is hidden. To view it, click the Show/Hide icon . In the Show columns popup that appears, select Health History and then click Apply.

You can group remote system agents to monitor Linux and Windows hosts using the Agents on All Hosts dashboard.

Use the Agents on All Hosts dashboard if you are interested in viewing a set of hosts rather than viewing the actual service.

When you create a group of agents or hosts to monitor, you are actually creating a global service which is a single service that can be reused in multiple places. For example, if you have a service that monitors legacy systems that are used in many places, you can define a single global service called LegacyService, then re-use it wherever you need it.

Editing a group of monitored agents takes you to the Service Builder dashboard.

NOTE: You can only edit user-created groups of agents or hosts.

NOTE: You need to add at least two services to the current service in order to configure a relationship. Once a relationship between two services is configured, the system disables that particular combination in order to prevent possible duplicates.If you need to add a service to your current service, see Creating a Service Contained by Another Service 148. Once done, see Editing a Service 151.

NOTE: You can only delete a user-created group of agents or hosts.

Online-Only Topics

A service is a grouping of one or more components that interest you. Use the Service Builder dashboard to group monitored resources into services.

If you have the Advanced Operator role, you can use this dashboard to create a new service and edit existing services. When you create a service, a corresponding service level is automatically created.

In addition to the My Services dashboard, services appear in other dashboards (such as Hosts and Agents), as well as in reports. Defining a good set of services makes other dashboards more useful and easier to understand.

For more information, see the following topics:

When you create a service, you add different elements that compose its structure:

For example, you want to create a top-level service called Applications that contains your Banking Application and Customer Survey Application. First, you need to create a category, then add the services and components you want it to contain.

You classify the services you create as a global (common) service or a local (custom) service.

Use a global service if you want to define a single service and use it in multiple services. Since a global service is a common service, it must have a unique name in Quest Foglight. For example, if you have a service that monitors legacy systems that are used in many places, you can define a single global service called Legacy Service, then re-use it wherever you need it.

A local service is local to the parent service. It is also known as a custom service. Use a local service if that service is unique to the parent service. When a service is local to its parent, its name must be unique under its parent, but you can use the same name to create other local services in other parents. For example, you might create a local service called Database in several parent services.

A category is a top-level service. Create a new category to contain a hierarchy of related services if an appropriate category has not already been defined in your Foglight installation. You can create categories for a department, application set, business function, even a team or individual user.

For example, create a service called Accounting to monitor the performance of an accounting system. This accounting system has a web front-end for data entry and uses a Weblogic server and a SQL server in the back-end. The data collected on the end user response time, the Weblogic server, and the SQL server are added to this service as three separate components. By selecting Let Foglight Decide as the Tier, these components are assigned to their default tiers. Also, by setting Select components used to determine the availability of this service to Only components in selected tiers and selecting only the User tier, only the end user response time (for example, time spent posting transactions using the web interface) is used to determine the availability of this service. This is reflected in the Service Level Compliance column in the My Services dashboard.

NOTE: You can change the name of a service at a later date, without losing all history for a service. See Editing a Service.

TIP: Tiers allow you to structure services in a way that best represents your monitored environment. By default, Foglight organizes data into a set of tiers, that includes User, Web, Application, and Database. You can create your own tiers. To learn more, see the “Associating Service Objects with Groups and Tiers” topic in the Administration and Configuration Guide.

NOTE: Descriptions for the Domains are display if the Cartridge for Infrastructure is installed. Domains with no activity are not displayed in the Cartridge for Infrastructure until an activity is detected. For more information about the Infrastructure dashboard, see the Managing the Infrastructure Cartridge User and Reference Guide.

You can specify the service components to monitor.

You can create your own object groups to collect instances for a specific object type. For example, you may be only interested in examining only CPU data for all instances in your environment.

Add services to a category or nest services within other services to create a hierarchy that corresponds to your needs. For example, add a service called Production Servers to your category Server Room. You can then add services to Server Room that reflect the different server operating systems they run or the different applications they host.

NOTE: If you are unsure of whether to create a Local or Global service, choose Local. Choosing Local avoids name clustering with other Global services. In most cases, new users should use Local service.

NOTE: A Global Services link is provided in the Actions panel of the Service Builder. This link takes you to the “Service Builder: Global Services” dashboard, which works the same way as the existing Service Builder. The only difference is that it is for adding, modifying, or deleting Global Services.

NOTE: You can change the name of a service at a later date, without losing all history for a service. See Editing a Service.

Adding a rule-based group to a service allows you to manage the components monitored by a service dynamically. If a component is added or removed, the service is automatically updated to handle the addition or removal of the component from the service.

For example, if you are monitoring an application that runs four WebLogic servers, you can create a service and specify a rule to add WebLogic server instances for a particular domain so that the service is updated when more servers are added or deleted. After adding the rule, you can see that the new WebLogic servers appear automatically in the service after adding more WebLogic servers. Likewise, if the original WebLogic instances running on Windows are decommissioned, they automatically disappear from the service.

In another example, if you create a service called “FX” on the infrastructure that monitors a Web service, you can create a rule to include another infrastructure that is used for extra capacity during peak times. When the other infrastructure for high capacity is used, it shows up in the service.

A service can contain many rule-based groups.

By clicking the Edit button on the Service Builder dashboard, you can:

NOTE: This functionality is for advanced users. Consult your Administrator if this functionality is not configured.

You can remove a service, category, or a monitored component from its related service.

NOTE: Depending on the component that you select, a dialog box may appear or you may be prompted to confirm the deletion. Click Proceed to remove the item.

You can associate a list of email addresses with a service. Use this feature if you want Quest Foglight to send notifications to a set of email addresses about the alarms that affect one of your services.

NOTE: Your Administrator must configure Foglight to direct outgoing mail through your mail server before you can test this functionality. Contact your Administrator if the Test button is disabled.

NOTE: A service might be configured to ignore certain alarms. Quest Foglight does not email notifications when they are fired.

You can define alarm filters for any service in the Service Builder. Use alarm filters to specify alarms that are relevant to a given service as a way to keep an irrelevant alarm from falsely causing a service outage, rather than have all alarms impact the state of a service.

For example, alarm filtering can be used to ignore a certain state for a component with a high CPU usage. Quest Foglight is monitoring an application that runs on a WebLogic server and you create a service called “Retail” that includes the server and the host. The “Retail” service is shown as being unavailable when the host has a CPU usage greater than 90%. However, generally this is not considered a true service outage for this service. If you look at the host alarms, none of the alarms apply to the Retail service. As a result, you can use an alarm filter to filter out all host rules.

In another example, you can use an alarm filter to ignore the state of a service that appears as unavailable when the file system component for the D: drive fills up. Quest Foglight is monitoring an application that uses a host for the Siebel database and you want to filter out the Oracle database. The database is configured so that it uses only the C: drive, not the D: drive. A service was created to monitor the application that includes the Oracle agent and the host instance for the Oracle host. However, the service shows as unavailable if the D: drive fills up. Since the D: drive does not contribute to the availability of the application, you should add an alarm filter to exclude the monitoring of the D: drive. You can restrict the filter by choosing the FileSystem alarm, then specifying a Groovy script to refine the filter to apply only to the D: drive.

By specifying an alarm filter, you can decide what alarms impact the availability of a service.

NOTE: The Add Alarm Filter dialog box lists alarm rules that are applicable to all components added to the service.

NOTE: If both Include and Exclude filters are defined, Foglight includes alarms that are specified in the Include filters as long as they are not excluded by the Exclude filters. If only Include filters are defined, all alarms are excluded except those specified in the Include filters.If only Exclude filters are defined, all alarms are included except those specified in the Exclude filters.

IMPORTANT: Alarm filters that were added for filtering alarms fired on a component in a service, are not deleted automatically if the component is removed from the service.

For example, to include only alarms fired on processor 0 by the CPU_Utilization rule, you select the following parameters in the alarm filters dialog box:

 

Online-Only Topics

In Quest Foglight, services are automatically monitored for availability. By default, a service is considered available if it does not have a fatal alarm.

The Service Details page provides details about the service levels that are being monitored by Quest Foglight and measuring the availability of a service. Quest Foglight automatically examines the service and calculates its current availability. Then a percentage availability is calculated and used as the basis for service level evaluation, including alarms.

Service levels are monitored in the My Services dashboard. If you select the SLA name you are able to drill down to a more detailed summary of the service level performance. The Service Levels dashboard shows availability graphs on SLA performance in the last week and last month.