Bryan Wynns here. I am a Systems Consultant with Quest and I have worked with Foglight for several years now.
Over the years, I have worked with many different Foglight environments. Some are run very well while others are not. Here are some of the traits I have seen in the well run Foglight environments. Are you doing these things?
The good Foglight Administrators:
Are technically proficient. Ok, this is a given, but it needs to be mentioned. You cannot convey nor exploit Foglight’s value unless you understand what it can do.
Become the application management champion. Your users may not know all that Foglight can provide. Are you publicizing the value Foglight brings to your organization?
Understand the business they support. Do you understand the business impact if an outage or slow performance? Do your maps or dashboards present a clear picture of your environment?
Maintain their Foglight servers. Foglight is like any other application. The Foglight Management Server (FMS) must be maintained in order to continuously provide value. Are you tuning your FMS and database? Are you purging data you do not need?
Span silos. Foglight’s true value comes in presenting a common operating picture of your application environment. Are you working with the other domain experts (network, systems, application, database, etc.) to develop that picture? Depending upon the size of your environment, it might be unrealistic to expect one person to administer the whole thing. Thanks to Foglight’s role-based security, you can grant access to domain experts so they can manage their own dashboards and alerts without impacting other parts of the Foglight application.
Tune alerts. There is a fine line between too many and too few alerts. Too many and they all become noise. Too few and you miss critical issues. Are you reviewing alerts and tuning them accordingly? Do all of the alerts received by your users mean something to them? Users are not always forthcoming with problems. Are you talking to your user community to uncover problems they may not be sharing with you?
Constantly look for changes. Application management is an iterative process. Once you have your application management environment running the way you want, chances are real good that the business unit has changed how they do business. Are you periodically checking with your supported business units to make sure that the checks you have in place are what they need? Are the dashboards you provided still accurate? Are there new transaction recorder scripts you need to add to the system? Are there new systems or processes that need to be monitored?
Those are the big things that I have seen, but understand that every Foglight environment is different. What do you do to help manage your environment?