This blog talks about building complex schedules with Foglight.

 Solutions Architect Pontus Rydin discusses the use and implementation of derived metrics and how then can help in refining and analyzing raw data in Foglight.

The Analysis Repository (AR) feature of Foglight Experience Viewer (FxV) opens up a rich set of options to analyze the web site data captured by the Foglight End User technology. This blog will walk through the high level design considerations and steps to configure the Analysis Repository.

I'm Pat Adee with Quest Software and I’ve been asked several times how to forward Foglight Network Device Management (NDM) Exception Alerts to Foglight 5.

This article walks you through the process of creating a Foglight user who can only access a single dashboard

Foglight 5.5.4 has many UI improvement that make building a customer dashboard much easier than before. You can create a dashboard, use a background image for it and drag text, metrics and alarm indicators with quick and easy steps.

While the service builder provides a great way for creating individual services, something is missing when it comes to mass creation of services. As usual with Foglight, Groovy scripting fills in the gap. In this blog, we'll see how a simple Groovy script can be used to create smart services.

This article shows you how to create a rule that applies to a specific host or set of hosts with related hostnames.

Foglight allows anything to be grouped into a service. A service level will measure the availability of that group. How does this work, under the covers? And how can you customize it?

The Windows_System agent has a rule called EventLog. This rule is based on data packaged as an observation. This means the rule is a little less transparent than other Foglight rules. This blog covers how this rule works, and how to customize its behaviour.

There have been a lot of questions about grouping of behaviours. While we have cool features coming, there are decent grouping mechanisms in Foglight 5 today. At the very least, many of the grouping options you had in Foglight 4 are available. Sadly, not many people realize this, and even fewer take advantage.

Quest strongly recommendations the use of Network TAPs for all Foglight Experience Monitor (FxM) installations!  During evaluations (POC) and FxM only deployments (non-SSL environments) will a SPAN port be reasonably acceptable to use.  But Quest’ experience is you will get the best results with the use of Network TAP’s.

In very heavy trafficked environments, balancing load among Foglight Experience Monitor (FxM) probes is crucial, as not to overload our probes or their network interfaces. This article references a third-party appliance called Gigamon which enables some very creative features to move packets around more efficiently.

Creating a Composite, Synchronized View in Foglight using .NET Dashboard Components

If you're a Foglight or vFoglight customer, chances are you've heard many times that Foglight is model based. But what does that mean, and how can you take advantage of it? Well, start by adjusting your thinking a little. When you bought Foglight, you didn't get just a monitoring server. You got something closer to an application server - and I'm not talking about the JBoss base. I'm talking about something a lot cooler.

The ability to chart actual revenue abandoned on a eCommerce site over time is a powerful tool for not only executive dashboards, but also for making sure resources are focused on the items that most directly affect the business.  This blog details the steps to set one of these types of charts up.

With Foglight 5.5 trace with criteria as a possible action on alert, we are seeing Foglight java cartridge adding even more value in finding the source of Java performance issues. in this article I will explain how we automate the tracing using single trace with criteria as an action on the right rules so you can run traces on an unattended system.

In this blog, Zac Ng, Regional Applications Performance Management Consultant of APACJ, shows you how to create derived metrics using groovy scripts to extract relevant metrics from a Foglight 4-migrated data model. The newly created derived metrics can then be dragged and dropped into a user-created dashboard for powerful historical trending visualization and/or correlation during root-cause analysis.

In my last blog I introduced Script Agents. Script Agents are a great way to get data into Foglight quickly. Foglight 5 extends the script agent data format in some interesting ways. In this blog, we're going to look at data modeling, units and reserved words

Hi, this is Darren Mallette from Quest Software. I’m a Solutions Architect on the database solutions team. In this posting, I’m going to show the steps I took using Foglight in order to investigate a poor response time alert.

Hi, this is Darren Mallette, a Solutions Architect with Quest Software. Today I have a couple VMWare related questions answered by Thomas Bryant III, Senior Product Architect with Vizioncore.

We have added sections on the community to help Foglight users extend their Foglight installations through custom agents.

There are some new dashboards now available in Foglight that show the health of your applications & services from the different perspectives of SLA compliance, user activity, and infrastructure tier status - all in a single view.  These dashboards are designed with the needs of the Level 1 support team in mind, giving them an easy way to prioritize incidents and identify their source.

With the introduction of Foglight Agent Manager, Foglight 5 has a fully functional development kit for creating agents. This blog will cover some of the getting started details for the dev kit.

Script agents are an underused and somewhat misunderstood feature.  This blog will cover how the script agent format from Foglight 4 is supported in Foglight 5, and how we've extended that format to so some interesting new things.

This is Darren Mallette, a Database Solutions Architect with Quest Software. In this blog post, I’ll show how you can become more proactive with tuning the critical SQL statements in your application.

More often than not, large organisations tend to rely on multiple sets of software vendors to provide them with the technology platform to the run their business. Therefore, expecting or relying on one systems management or monitoring vendor, to provide the coverage across an entire enterprise, can often result in minimal superficial coverage.  This can lead to what I call “The green light syndrome” - Monitoring tells you the enterprise is healthy and meeting SLAs, yet end users are calling to complain about outage or poor performance.

In reality, to get the coverage and depth of monitoring across a diverse technology stack, you often have to go with a variety of monitoring vendors.  The challenge now becomes one of integration – getting multiple disparate technologies to provide you with a holistic view of your enterpris Read More »

I don’t need to tell you how popular Cloud-based services are becoming. Chances are you probably have at least one Cloud Service Provider (CSP) in your life already; and if so you’ve probably already come across the question of how to make sure that your CSPs are providing good service. You may have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with your providers; this becomes especially crucial if you are employing CSPs such as Amazon Web Services or Google App Engine who are hosting your production applications for you, because then it’s not just about providing service to you, but to your customers as well. But how can you make sure that those SLA’s are being met?

Being able to extract information such as a cart value right off a web page is a powerful feature in Foglight Experience Viewer (FxV).  It is the underpinnings of the "Lost Revenue" graphs popular with application owners.  This blog walks through the details of how regular expressions are used to achieve that capability.

I am an Oracle DBA by trade and know that there is one package to deploy whether you are monitoring 9i, 10g or 11g.  This got me to wondering why there are different packages for SQL 2000 and SQL 2005.  My name is Doc O'Connor, I am a Solutions Architect for Quest and here is what I found.

In a tight economy, getting more out of existing resources is essential -- both hardware and people.  The post discusses the idea of how expanding IT staff responsibilities can result in a more efficient IT organization.

Foglight 5.2.4 added direct installer download access. Combine this capability with silent command line installs, and you have a mechanism run a script that automatically downloads, installs and starts Foglight clients on Unix in less than 30 seconds per monitored host! Here's some examples...

This blog is talking about the importance of monitoring virtual infrastructure when monitoring an application

You have probably heard people from Quest mention Custom Agents as means of solving various data integration issues. While this all sounds really great in theory, how does it work in a real-life situation?

A lot of users are moving from Foglight 4 to Foglight 5. This is great news because it will unlock a lot of fantastic new capabilities. Unfortunately, this transition requires a little bit of reorientation.

In this Dark Corners blog, I'll be talking about how Foglight 4 users can find their familiar workflows.

No, there is not a typo in the title of this post.  I use Foglight to monitor my cousin’s newborn baby.  Yes…that’s kind of weird.  I admit it.  But, I love my job and my family…so it was kind of cool to see how they could come together in a useful way. 

Foglight has a good selection of icons that are used to show state (normal/warning/critical/fatal) but in some cases you want to use your own icons or maybe larger icons. After reading this blog you will be able to add your own state image to the dashboard you built in Fun with Foglight part 2.

Many customers have asked us about using a project or an application diagram in Foglight and adding alerts to that image, in this blog entry we will learn how to add alerts with drill down to an image or a diagram for a dashboard that is meaningful to your applications monitoring.

This is Darren Mallette from Quest. I'm a Solutions Architect on the Foglight team. This blog entry will show how to setup Foglight Agent Manager (Fglam) on one host as a connection concentrator for other monitored hosts.

Your customer-facing online applications require optimal, consistent response times to keep customers happy and coming back. If a slowdown is being caused by a database problem, the DBA staff needs to address it as quickly as possible. In this post, learn how Foglight and its diagnostic counterpart, Spotlight, can help you tune your DB2 LUW buffer pool strategy - often a painfully time consuming effort or, worse, a neglected opportunity. The built-in metric collections and the Foglight/Spotlight workflows lead the DBA to the correct action to eliminate the bottleneck.

This is the first in a series of blogs talking about custom work with the foglight user interface, in this blog we will learn how to add and use our own images in foglight. This posting will take you through the process, step by step and is meant to be used as a 15 to 20 minutes mini tutorial.

Quest's philospohy for monitoring Java applications is different from that of some other companies. Here, the Foglight PM for Java explains why. Part 2 of 2.

Quest's philospohy for monitoring Java applications is different from what some other companies do. Here, the Foglight PM for application performance explains why. Part 1 of 2.

Here are some of the traits I have seen in well run Foglight environments.  Are you doing these things?

This blog teaches you one way to get reports automatically sent to a file system destination.  There are different ways to accomplish this, this one is done through an event driven rule.

One of the most remarkable things about Foglight 5 is its scripting capabilities. In this Dark Corners entry, we'll explore the degree to which scripting is incorporated in Foglight 5.

The soon to be released 5.3.2 version of FxM allows for better configuration and setup options and out-of-the-box protocol support.

Out of the box, reports sent via email all have the same filename (report.pdf).  How can I change that?  Let me show you.

This blog entry will help you troubleshoot a common problem when you can't connect to the Foglight server via your web browser. The steps are written for an FMS on Windows.

Foglight is full of great features. Unfortunately, some of those features are easy to miss. We add so many little things that it is hard to get the word out. In this article, I'll be talking about some Foglight "dark corners" related to performance. These features are handy for monitoring the monitor.

New features in Foglight 5.2.4.5 Java cartridge make it easier to find root cause of problems.

One new feature that reduces the need to log into your management server to see what is being written to the log files is the LogAnalyzer.

Foglight has a lot of beautiful built in features that are just waiting to be discovered, this article is trying to describe some of these nice features.

A blog describing the use of Java Single Trace with Foglight 5 to pin point the source of slowness, time-outs and exceptions.

Foglight manages many different domains and there's always something new to learn about how Foglight addresses real-world problems in those domains. There's plenty of interesting videos covering applications, databases, virtualization, infrastructure, and more linked from http://www.quest.com/newview.

One of the benefits of the Foglight 5 Oracle instance agent is to identify those Oracle sessions that have performed the most I/O or consumed the most CPU at each collection interval.   The text of the session's most recently executing SQL statement  (the SQL Hog) can, optionally, be saved by Foglight for future examination and possible tuning.   This blog explains how to find that SQL.

Is TOAD required for Foglight for Oracle EBusiness Suite? 

2.0  SERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE

A layered Service Level Management (SLM) architecture recognizes the many management functionality requirements, goals and policies of every customer and presents them in a single management view. It then performs the many and varied management functions through cooperative management entities, working together in a collaborative manner to achieve consistent, high availability, service level management objectives.

With the addition of a single point of view management interface technology issues (I.e. alerts and performance exceptions) as well as Service Level Management policies will be presented to technical operations personnel and business leaders in terms that they can understand and apply to their objectives. They will have an opportunity to take control of the IT linkage to their business by adding Service Level Management capabilities to its offerings.

 A Blog explaining how to add a Foglight dashboard as a SharePoint WebPart.

Foglight for VMWare VMAlarms dashboard flow is a bit different than the Foglight alarms dashboard but once customers understand the flow, navigation is fast and easy. This is specifically important when fine tuning the rules and alarm to fit your preferred settings as a quick flow from alarms to rules to variables is the one that is repeated frequently.

My name is Pontus Rydin and I am a Senior Solutions Architect with Quest Software, specialized in Foglight customization, integration and Java Monitoring.

In this article, I am going to discuss Event Driven rules and how they can be used for notification and integration purposes.

With the release of Foglight 5.2.3 comes a rich set of updated resources to help you take advantage of the new product features.

These resource links are available from SupportLink, but you can get them all from one place here, including the new "how-to" videos.

Hello all. Statsinger here. I'm one of Quest's pre-sales guys and I spend a fair amount of time working with the Foglight 5 JavaEE agent. I thought I’d introduce myself and start a discussion on how this agent processes application request information and some of the considerations involved in tuning its behavior. A subsequent posting will get into some hands-on examples of working with the configuration settings.

The JavaEE agent is a fairly sophisticated beast. It can leverage Java management protocols such as JMX or IBM’s PMI to provide detailed information on the health and status of JavaEE application server instances, and it also provides performance monitoring and diagnostics for incoming requests made against the applications running on those servers. ... Read More »

As background, the traditional role of management systems has typically been perceived as either operational overhead or a necessary burden with an unfortunate technology centric point of view.  This is because the language and presentation of “technology” issues has, up until this point, not been articulated in terms that business leaders are able to understand.

This tip will describe how response time gets calculated, and how it can be configured, using the SQL2005 agent for SQL Server 2005.

Retention Policies specify when and how monitored data is sampled, aggregated and purged from the Foglight Database. Configuring basic data Retention Policies in Foglight 5 is easy. Here's how.

The rich, interactive Foglight UI allows you to monitor your critical business services, applications and technical infrastructure.  It also provides a mechanism to manage that infrastructure, and the administration of your Foglight implementation, without using the Foglight UI.  The Foglight command-line interface lets you automate your business logic by writing scripts, deploy and create agents, install and activate cartridges, create and manage users, manage licenses and many other tasks.

There are a couple of different approaches to creating your architecture.

The traditional approach and most widely used is the bottom up. The bottom up approach followed an isolated domain scheme. You know the one, where the guy in the network group says we need to monitor our network without any concerns for other domains.......

Every quarter at Quest, we go through a series of business reviews with executive management.  Each business unit prepares a summary of the business, key findings, and action plans for the coming quarter.  We take three full days to review each business individually with stakeholders representing a cross-section of the company from R&D to sales to PSO to finance and everything in between.

In environments with multiple agents of a particular type, one can edit the agent properties individually or for all of the agents of that type at the same time.

"I like the new reporting feature within Foglight, and I'm pretty happy with the generated reports.  However, I'd like to replace the Quest Software logo with my own corporate logo.  How do I do that?"

It’s been very exciting here in Quest land in these last few weeks. I’ve officially been with Quest for 1 year and I’m as excited as I was the first day. The breadth and depth of the offerings around Foglight is simply amazing.

Building on the last post, Service Level Management also has a few definitions in the Industry.

Quest Software holds frequent customer briefing events all over the world – where we talk with our customers about their challenges, explain our own thinking and hopefully agree on mutually-beneficial areas to explore.

The most recent took place in beautiful Amsterdam and Hamburg last week. Prospects and customers from all over Europe and the Middle East came together to discuss application/database management and Windows infrastructure management. Their profile was varied – representing finance, manufacturing, telcoms, retail and transport.

So what were the ‘hot topics’ in applications & database management?

In my last post, we started to talk about a performance management roadmap. In this post, I’d like to share some of my thoughts around the nature of the APM problem that we are trying to solve and the economic implications of that. 

We’ve been working around this theory that the goal of APM is to identify the root cause of any issue whether it has happened, is happening, or will happen, and then take protective measures to prevent it from repeating. One approach to solving this problem says that it’s key to have every possible metric generated by an environment collected and kept historically. While this is impossible from a number of dimensions, let’s exercise this philosophy a bit. Disregarding the frequency of collection, what are the implications of capturing every metric that is potentially capable of being captured?

Over the last month or two I have been delivering a presentation highlighting the challenges of monitoring a virtual infrastructure, especially when it comes to the application workloads running within the virtual environment.  This presentation has been very well received, and I can honestly say that with the assistance of a solid marketing team, may be one of the best presentations I've delivered.

A little known, but enormously useful, feature within Foglight is the ability to zoom in and out of the graphs.  The flexibility of Foglight's UI has proven to be a big hit with customers and prospects and I shall cover some more tips on this subject over the next few weeks.

This particular tip provides one with the ability to drill into a particular time period or a particular data point.

Well, it’s been a while since my last post but we’ve been working hard on our Ajax project and I think I can share some of the challenges we will be tackling along the way.  Here is a summary of the challenges with a brief explanation of each.
 

1. When analyzing traffic flowing into an Ajax application you generally see some page request and then you see a series of Ajax calls with the page as the referrer some time later.  So the unit of work that used to be a page is no longer very useful for these app types.
2. When you see an Ajax hit you don’t know what was done by the user to initiate the call so if there is an error, performance problem, or general need to understand the context of the hit you can’t do it.  This was very straight forward when the web was synchronous.
Read More »
Foglight Futures

Over the past few months, we have been working on a performance management roadmap. An industry-level view of how enterprises have viewed performance management, what they are doing with it today, and where it's going in the future. I wanted to share some early thoughts we've had in how we are characterizing the problem and the types of solutions the market is going to need in the future to solve the problems facing us.

What about BSM? I’ve had a few persons asking where the BSM blog is. If you are like me, it’s been quite a challenge keeping up with the definitions in the Industry these last few years. Take the industry’s twists and then talk to several customers that have been blasted by vendor interpretations and you’ll even be more confused.

Last year Quest purchased Magnum Technologies and almost immediately we had integrated the two products. This created a solution that customers could use to gather low-level technical metrics and alarms and then, using internal models, seamlessly roll up those details to higher level services that the application owners could use to measure IT’s positive effects on ...

This week, I wanted to talk about the management of Oracle E-Business (OEB) applications, as it’s something we’re getting asked about a lot at the moment. ...and let's quickly discuss how Foglight has advanced its capabilities in this area.

Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.  In the end user monitoring world this translates to the good old days of basic single web page requests and web server responses going away.  Today you can spend an hour or more working in an Ajax application and all you will see on the wire is one page request followed by hundreds of asynchronous calls, which in the case of a monitor are seemingly issued on behalf of that initial page.  Before Ajax and other asynchronous technologies we had pages and hits where a bunch of hits made up a page that a user would see in their browser.  These hits and pages were sent over http so our products would gather the hit requests and wait for the hit response before reporting the collected metrics back to the monitor.  There was a bit of interpolation magic that we did to differentiate a page from a hit but for the most part our hit processing could group those together pretty well.  With Ajax havin Read More »

Last week, Gartner held their ITxpo Symposium at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.  Quest was the premier sponsor of this event and we were there to [re]launch Foglight.  As the premier sponsor we had prime booth location on the showfloor, as well as a number of sessions.  We had taken our latest release of Foglight (v5.2) and we created 4 demo stations in the booth, covering 4 key aspects of Foglight.

We have spent the week at the Gartner ITExpo and Symposium taking place at Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas.

Hi, I’m Scott Herold and I will be the host of this blog on Foglight.org.  Some of you may know me from my book or my personal blog www.vmguru.com.   Whereas, on vmguru, I get deep into general virtualization technology and the overall market, I’ll focus this blog more on monitoring VMware.

My name is Tyler Jewell and I head product management for Quest’s application management business. For Quest, application management includes systems management solutions for application environments and solutions targeting enterprise database deployments. This blog will focus on markets trends, common challenges, possible solutions...and more...

Hi and welcome to the blog about managing end users and the services delivered to them.

My name is John Spirko and I am the product manger of Foglight’s End User Management component and will be the host of this blog.

My name is Greg Crow and I’ll be your blog host. Since this is my first blog on Foglight.org, I’ll take a little space to introduce myself, and let you know why we're talking SLM in our App Management site.

Welcome to the Tips and Tricks area of Foglight.org.  Members of the Solution Architect teams around the world will be posting product tips and tricks to help you configure, deploy, administer, tailor, and take full advantage of Foglight.  My name is Mark Gowdy and I will be the blog host...