Foglight 6.3.0 - High Availability Field Guide

Welcome to the Foglight® High Availability Field Guide. This Field Guide provides step-by-step instructions on how to configure your Foglight 5 environment to use High Availability (HA) Mode. Use it to enable, configure, and tune Foglight Management Server(s) in HA Mode.

This guide is intended for technical audiences and Quest SC/PSO (System Consultant/Professional Services Organization) personnel working in the field.

High Availability mode is a configuration of multiple Foglight Management Servers in a cluster where one Management Server is the primary server and the others are standby servers. If the primary server stops responding, one of the standby servers in the HA cluster takes over monitoring responsibility. HA mode uses redundancy and failover to ensure that Foglight monitoring continues uninterrupted.

High Availability mode provides different functionality than Federation. Federation is a Foglight feature that addresses the needs of customers who monitor large-scale environments that are naturally partitioned into logical units. Each partition is traditionally served by one Management Server instance and its distributed clients/agents. For more information, see the Federation Field Guide.


	NOTE: The vFoglight Cartridge for Automation is not supported with Foglight when Foglight is configured to use the High Availability feature. This limitation will be addressed in a future release. For more information, see the Foglight Release Notes.

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Capabilities

Configuring multiple servers using HA mode offers the following capabilities:

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Automatic restart: The restart process (FoglightHA Daemon) runs on the same host that the Foglight® Management Server it is monitoring and monitors the state of the server. If the server stops responding or has a fatal error, then the restart process stops and restarts the server automatically. The process can also send out email notifications about the server condition.


	NOTE: The default value for the restart process is ten minutes (600 seconds). Machines with a slower processing speed take longer to reboot. You can modify the default time by editing the startup.grace variable in the <foglight_home>/config/restart_monitor.config file.

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Redundancy: To reduce outage times, a standby server instance is created (for a particular Management Server). One server becomes the primary server and communicates with the agents, receives and processes data, and processes rules. All other servers are standby servers. If a primary server stops responding, one of the standby servers resumes service and becomes the primary server.

Use cases

High Availability is a Foglight® feature that addresses the needs of customers to ensure that a Management Server is always available, even in the event of a primary server failure.

HA mode has been tested in the following Common configuration scenarios:

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Running on Oracle RAC

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Running behind an HTTP proxy

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Running in a cluster