Foglight FoundationEssential for comprehensive coverage of your critical business applications is a core set of capabilities that provide the foundation for Foglight Application ManagementAt the heart of Foglight is an adaptable architecture that enables comprehensive application management at significantly decreased time-to-value. Packaged around that architecture is a foundation of capabilities that provide the essentials to support Foglight’s extensive, field proven set of out-of-the-box management technologies. This foundation provides the core capabilities that Foglight draws upon to manage the performance and availability of your applications and services.
Alerting
Foglight’s 360 degree view of the application enables problem alerting from multiple correlated perspectives. It monitors end-user experience simultaneously with the status of critical services (both internal to IT and externally visible to IT customers and the business) and the components in the application environment that support them. This comprehensive monitoring ensures personnel are proactively alerted to problems and provided role based views and workflows to quickly resolve them before the business and end-users are affected. - Service desk personnel know when end-users are affected and what actions have been taken before they call in
- Technicians know when and what components are malfunctioning and which are affecting end-users and/or critical business services
- IT Management understands when Service Level Agreements are being affected, what is affecting them and who is working on the problem
Extensibility
In addition to extensive, field proven out-of-the-box application management capabilities that cover most enterprise requirements, Foglight provides unparalleled extensibility that can be leveraged to adapt it to meet the Application Management needs of most IT organizations.
Foglight is built on Service-Oriented Architecture concepts, enabling it to operate in a loosely-coupled and standards-based fashion. These interfaces are published allowing your IT staff or our professional services organization to adapt the system to your specific application management needs.
Foglight’s extensible technology provides: - A loosely coupled design that enables customers to quickly incorporate new or legacy technologies, new IT processes and new organizational roles and responsibilities into their application management strategy
- The ability to tightly integrate to existing monitoring tools to extend the life of your previous tool investments
- The option to modify or extend out-of-the-box Foglight capabilities to meet your specific needs (e.g. modify default rules and policies for services, applications, etc.)
- An extensible architecture that supports the addition of custom agents to gather data from other systems like scripts of any kind, XML files or streams, JMX MBeans, SQL queries, SNMP and more.
Scalability
Foglight® easily scales to manage applications that cross thousands of components within your enterprise. It can be partitioned into logical units to support geographical, physical or organizational boundaries and to exploit additional processing power through deployment of multiple Foglight Management Servers (FMS). To accomplish this Foglight uses a single FMS designated as the federation server. This server can pull and consolidate data on demand from all other federated servers, making it possible to manage your critical applications from an enterprise wide perspective while continuing to provide local application management capabilities through each of the federated servers. - Scale Foglight to support your application management strategy regardless of environment size
- Manage your applications from an enterprise or business perspective or locally within physical or logical boundaries
Root Cause Diagnostics
Understanding the root-cause of a performance degradation or application availability issue can be difficult and costly. And while IT works to expedite a resolution to the problem, end users and the business must wait until service is returned to normal.
Foglight provides root-cause diagnostics to help IT greatly reduce the mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) for application issues. Giving IT the ability to drill-down to gather deep diagnostic data directly from the production environment, Foglight selectively pinpoints those elements which are causing the problem. Foglight uses low overhead agents to gather this information so it doesn’t adversely affect the production environment.
Foglight provides root-cause diagnostics through: - Dynamic User Transaction Tracing for Java and .NET applications to help isolate problem transactions and pinpoint bottlenecks
- Low-overhead agents that selectively pinpoint problem elements or components
- Integrated diagnostic workflows that helps IT quickly diagnose and resolve incidents and repeated problems
Service Discovery
Being able to proactively understand and assess risk and business impact resulting from IT change and to better monitor and trace performance issues is a constant challenge in IT. Foglight provides Service Discovery to help IT automatically and systematically define the critical linkages between business services, IT services and infrastructure components. By being able to understand these relationships, IT can understand service dependencies, identify gaps in monitoring and foster improved communication with the business.
Foglight provides service discovery through: - Targeted and controlled discovery to create a topology of the target application or service selected and builds component-level information about the items discovered for greater analysis
- Automatic and custom service dependency mapping to build service dependency maps that show all of the components that make up the delivery of a service automatically and tailored to specific requirements
- An operational CMDB to systematically catalog IT components across multiple IT environments and maintains the service relationships
Reporting
Foglight provides flexible and powerful reporting capabilities to keep stakeholders in IT and the business informed. Through a model-based approach, Foglight separates the physical IT infrastructure from the logical representation of the managed environment and allows for infinite views to maximize efficiency and productivity.
Foglight provides service reporting through: - Out-of-the-box reports that reflect typical needs within IT for end user, application, and database reporting
- Drag and drop reports that allow IT to quickly build portlets, data items and individual metrics for rapid visualization and reporting
- A report builder capability that allow any report or dashboard to be customized to the needs of each stakeholder
Model Based Data Management
Foglight® provides the capabilities you need to manage applications and services now and as your IT environment changes. Through a combination of model-based management and a flexible architecture, Foglight takes you beyond traditional monitoring to provide an adaptive management solution. With Foglight, your IT team maintains an up-to-date view of the managed environment, yet remains flexible and adaptive to change—whether the change is a simple upgrade or a totally new service for the business. - Focus on managing your applications, not the tool—monitoring policies, dashboards and reports automatically adapt to changes in the monitored environment as they occur
- The solution grows with your organization—model-based design enables quick adaptation to changes in people, process or technology
- Keep costs down—extensible technology integrates your existing monitoring assets
- Proactively reduce downtime—model-based design correlates metrics by application or service for quick prioritization and resolution of problems
Service Dashboards
As part of Foglight’s core capabilities it provides a 360 degree view of application and service level performance and availability through a management portal. The portal provides an enterprise wide, single point of entry that focuses executives, managers and workers onto corporate-wide application management goals. Customizable role-based views allow standardization of what data is used, how it is viewed and what actions are available for further investigation while offering the flexibility of customization to individual needs. - Provide a consistent view of application management to business and IT
- Promote collaboration among executives, managers and workers towards a common set of application management goals and priorities
- Enables employees to work proactively and make better decisions by giving them relevant, actionable information
Data Correlation
Managing end users, applications and databases in silos can be extremely efficient, but a downside exists. IT teams are left with a fractured view of the environment. They can monitor the health of their individual silos, but cannot effectively predict how a change might impact other infrastructure components or IT services within the environment. They then cannot understand how end users are affected by performance issues, or work efficiently to find the root cause of a problem.
Foglight provides an integrated and correlated end-to-end view of applications and infrastructure components, breaking down silos to create a unified view of the managed environment. This view allows your IT team to prioritize incident and problem resolution based on end-user impact.
Foglight provides a unified view across internal IT silos through: - Correlated data from all tiers and silos – such as users, transactions, custom and back-office applications and databases – allowing IT to analyze the performance of all the tiers in the context to end user experiences
- Management of performance data across heterogeneous environments from the end user to the database for efficient problem management
- Dynamic User Transaction Tracing to help isolate problem transactions and pinpoint bottlenecks
Data Collection
Application Management requires the ability to collect performance, availability and service definition data from a range of technologies in your environment – from the end user and business layer to both the physical and virtual infrastructure layer supporting the application service. Whether you need low overhead collection, collection to feed deep-dive diagnostics, touch-less agents, passive monitoring, or synthetics, Foglight implements the data collection method most appropriate for the data source and purpose.
- Select the collection technologies that make sense for overhead and security goals
- Use zero overhead passive agents connected via router SPAN ports to capture end user performance and session data
- Collect performance and availability data for servers without agents on the managed host
- Enable deep-dive diagnostics, memory leak detection, exception analysis and collection of internal system metrics servers via embedded agents that live on the managed host
- Discover and manage network topologies and environments through touch-less and agent-based agents that use SNMP and WMI
- Import performance, availability and service definition data from any external source through standard, XML-HTTP collection agents
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