Foglight : A Single Window to Monitor Apps

Foglight presents you with a 360 degree view of all critical applications running in your enterprise by collating data and presenting it in a graphical format, to help you identify root-cause of problems related to them

Saturday, August 01, 2009

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An enterprise is dependent on wide array of IT applications, such as databases, application servers like WebSphere or JBoss, platforms like Java or .NET and other business applications. If any of these applications fail even for a minute, it leads to tremendous loss to the organization. That's why it becomes necessary for an IT manager to use event consoles and monitoring tools to manage these applications for proper functioning. However, the limitation of these tools is that they alert you to events and leave you to decide how that event will impact your business applications or services. Foglight is an application management solution that gives a 360 degree view of your applications, ranging from end user to databases and from service levels to infrastructure. It collates data from various applications and helps you identify the root-cause of problems of business services that are being affected.

What's new in Foglight
Foglight is an application management solution from Quest Software and has two components: Foglight Management Server and Foglight Agent Manager. Each application like WebSphere, Oracle Database, MS SQL Server and even operating systems like Windows 2003 or Linux have some parametric values for different functions, which are used to monitor the stress load on them. Foglight has installable cartridges that can be integrated with Foglight Management Server (FMS) to manage these applications. The Foglight Agent Manager on the other hand is the client that resides on the host machine that has the application which has to be monitored by FMS. The Agent Manager captures the metric values of the monitoring parameters from the application on the host machine and sends them to the FMS periodically.

The FMS can be installed on a tiered architecture or on a single server as well. It is likely that in an enterprise, applications such as databases and servers are hosted on different machines and on different platforms. Foglight can be installed on a dedicated server and linked via cartridges to different client agent mangers to monitor disparate applications that reside on the same machine or on different networked machines. The FMS gives a console view of the consolidated data gathered from different applications on the monitored environment that helps you decide the stress junctions that could become critical for any application's functioning and hence letting you take the necessary action to ensure smooth functioning of the business applications without any hassles.

Most of Foglight's monitoring tasks can be handled from the left dashboard pane. To create an OS monitoring agent, select Windows_System as agent type

Getting started
Before you start, you need to choose the monitoring environment for applications and what platform you will be installing FMS and agent managers on. Also, you need the cartridges for each application that you intend to monitor. For the demonstration implementation of Foglight version 5.2.5, we will use an Intel Quad Core 2.6 MHz processor based machine with 4GB RAM and having Windows 2003 as the operating system to install FMS. And we will be using the operating system monitoring cartridge to monitor the host machine on which FMS is installed.
Before starting the installation of the FMS installer for Windows 32-bit platform, make sure that Java Runtime Environment is installed as FMS and the Foglight Agent manager. Now using the installer for the specific platform, we proceed with the installation of FMS. It offers two installation options: Standard and Custom. With the Standard options, the default embedded MySQL database is installed, whereas with custom installation you can choose an external database that will be used by FMS for its own functions. Once the installation is complete, you can go to Start Menu items and start the Foglight service and then open the Foglight console to proceed with the configuration settings and also with installing the license for FMS.

Installing cartridges
As we intend to monitor the host operating system, we'll have to install the cartridge for the same and it's agent manager so that they can feed the system's monitoring values to the FMS. To install a cartridge, go to the Foglight console that opens up in a browser, and from the dashboard pane on the left navigate to the Administration node and expand it. Now click on the Cartridges Inventory link by expanding the Cartridges node. In the Install Cartridge pane, choose the appropriate .car file meant for Windows 2003 Server from Foglight's DVD. Do ensure that 'Enable on Install' checkbox option is selected and then click on the Install Cartridge button. Upon successful installation, the cartridge list is populated. As we also need an Agent Manager, we will upload another .car file meant for Foglight Agent Managers and install it using the same procedure. Now go to 'Components for Download' link under the Cartridges node from the dashboard panel, and there on the main pane you can download the fglam-windows-i32.exe file and install it. This is the Agent Manager for Windows platform.

FMS shows real-time monitoring of the host system. It shows that a high network usage is happening by showing huge transfer rate values.

Creating monitoring agents
Once the Agent Manager and cartridges have been installed, we have to deploy the agent packages. Go to the Agents node under the Administration node in the dashboard pane and then click on 'Agents' Status' link. From the main pane, click on 'Deploy Agent Package' and when the pop-up window opens, select the host name and the package, named as OSCartridge_ Windows _2003 _ 5_2_5. Select this cartridge and click on Create button.

Now upon deployment of this package, you need to create an agent that will perform the monitoring function. As soon as the pop-up window opens, click on the Create Agent button and select the Agent_Type as Windows_System. Name the instance as Win2k3_Monitor and click on Create button. Now select Win2k3_Monitor from the 'Agents List' pane and click on Activate to start monitoring the operating system.

Upon expanding the Host's node and after you've clicked on the Host's Monitor link, you can get real-time graphical representation of the host machine and the various tasks or activities taking place.

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