We recently added two new pieces to the Foglight community. They will focus on helping you extend your Foglight installation by building new collectors to cover items we do not natively monitor. More specifically:
- We are adding a custom agent forum where community members can ask questions about building custom agents.
- We are adding a new blog area (this one!) where product managers, developers and other Quest technical staff will provide tips and tricks and examples for how to write custom agents.
As a primer, anyone interested in writing custom agents should first understand that there are two types of custom agents supported by Foglight. They are:
Script Agents: A script agent is a special type of agent that is used to execute a script on a monitored host. The script can be in any language, but it must be written such that it provides specifically formatted output to stdout. The script agent is the easiest mechanisms for bringing custom data into Foglight. Once the script agent data are in the system, they become first class citizens, and can be used in rules, derived metrics, dashboards, etc.
Full documentation on script agents is available in the Administration and Configuration Guide.
Agent Manager SDK Agents: The Foglight Agent Manager middleware comes with an SDK for writing custom agents. Nearly all of the native Foglight agents use the Agent Manager SDK . SDK agents are far more complicated that script agents and require strong java development skills, however, they provide a more robust agent framework with capabilities like the ability to easily handle paramterized inputs, the ability to run without an additional runtime (i.e. perl), and access to all of the features in Agent Manager.
The agent manager SDK, including its documentation, is available in the repository on the custom agents forum page, from Supportlink (https://support.quest.com), or from your installation disks.
I hope that you will find these new tools helpful.
Sincerely,
Rick Schiller
Senior Product Manager