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Troubleshooting eGurkha Enterprise

1. gt What is a measurement The agents monitor the environment by running periodic tests The outputs of the tests are called measurements A measurement determines the state of a network system application service element of the target environment For example a Process test reports the following measurements e Number of processes of a specific type executing on a system e The CPU utilization for these processes e The memory utilization for these processes gt Does the eG Enterprise Suite provide separate agents for databases web servers application servers etc Many network system management platforms e g BMC provide separate agents for databases web servers application servers etc Having to install separate agents for the different servers poses a lot of overhead on the user To simplify its installation and use eG Enterprise Suite comprises of just a manager and an agent package The agent package includes special purpose tests for the different applications Based on the discovery process the eG manager determines which tests need to be deployed on each server gt How many agents can an eG manager support The number of agents that an eG manager can handle depends on various factors like e The number and type of tests that each agent executes e The frequency with which each test runs e Whether the eG database is local or remote e The number of simultaneous monitor admin users connected to the manager e H
2. the ability to configure the monitoring for the servers they operate To address such environments eG Enterprise included the capability to configure users with limited administration rights For instance a separate role can be created to allow monitor users with just the permissions to configure tests that should be executed on their servers to change the thresholds that can be applied for monitoring their servers and or to apply maintenance policies on the servers assigned to them This is why as soon as the Limited option is chosen all the check boxes except the Agent Test Config Agent Threshold Config and Maintenance Policy Config check boxes are grayed out in the Admin section This implies that user roles with Limited component access can only perform one more of the following administrative functions e Configuring tests pertaining to the components assigned to them e Configuring the thresholds related to the components under their monitoring purview e Suppressing the alerts related to the components assigned to them by configuring maintenance policies On the other hand if the Complete option is chosen it implies that the user role has access to all the monitored elements in the infrastructure and can be granted any administrative monitoring privilege as the administrator deems fit gt Can ladd a new user to the environment Yes As soon as an administrator successfully logs in the first page to appear will be the Admin Home
3. wish to change the IP address of the component can do it Yes it is possible 44 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite Click on the Change IP button in Modify Component Details page This way you can modify the IP address gt What is Agentless Monitoring The agent based approach to monitoring requires one internal agent per system that is to be monitored As operating systems and applications have evolved they have incorporated newer instrumentation mechanisms that allow monitoring of these environments from remote locations i e external to the system or application that is to be monitored The main advantage of this remote monitoring approach is that it does not require an agent to be installed on every system that is to be monitored hence the name agentless monitoring for this approach gt What are remote agents Agentless monitoring is implemented in the eG Enterprise Suite using Remote Agents A remote agent is an agent that is capable of monitoring a number of systems and applications remotely in an agentless manner gt How do remote agents monitor a component For monitoring Microsoft Windows systems and applications a remote agent uses Netbios perfmon to communicate with the operating system applications For monitoring Unix systems secure shell SSH is used In addition for specific applications the remote agent uses application specific protocols to communicate with the application e g SQLNet
4. ASSOCIATION section in your case should indicate the zone s associated with your service Clicking on the Zone in question will enable you to reconfigure the zone and add the missing component to the zone gt Can l group services Large organizations may have multiple services grouped under different business units There may hence be a need to represent groups of services as an entity To address this requirement eG Enterprise allows the configuration of service groups in the eG admin interface and represents the real time state of the service groups in the eG monitoring interface To configure a service group follow the menu sequence Infrastructure gt Services gt Groups in the eG administrative interface 53 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite 6 13 Configuring Transactions gt How do add new transactions For each web site that has been configured the eG agent has the ability to monitor individual transactions that happen via the web site By choosing the Transactions menu option under SERVICES configuration menu an administrator can view the transactions that have been currently configured for each web site Clicking on the ADD DELETE TRANSACTION button will enable an administrator to add new transactions for a web site Please go through Chapter 3 of the eG User Manual for specifying the details of transactions to be added gt Can delete existing transactions The Transactions option under Services sub menu o
5. Administering the eG Enterprise Suite How does the eG manager discover the IT infrastructure elements The eG manager uses port scanning and SNMP for discovering the IT infrastructure elements gt Can I know what components of which type have been managed across the infrastructure Yes While monitoring large environments using eG Enterprise administrators may want to instantly figure out the total number of managed components in the environment across categories component types to assess the load on the eG manager and the database Some other times they may require a quick summary of the number of managed components within a particular zone service segment To enable such administrators and top level executives to receive an overview of the managed infrastructure based on chosen criteria the eG administrative interface provides the MANAGED INFRASTRUCTURE page This page which appears when the Infrastructure gt View menu sequence is followed provides administrators with a quick look at the managed infrastructure as a whole based on a chosen service zone segment gt Whatare the other discovery options available in the DISCOVERY page You can auto discover the vSphere ESX servers in the environment by connecting to the vCenter server managing them Using the DISCOVERY page you can configure the vCenter server to be used for performing such a discovery Similarly you can auto discover the IBM pSeries servers hosting AIX LPARs by
6. To ensure that a separate email is sent for every alarm select the Yes option Note The separate email SMS alert flag setting will take effect only if a user is configured to receive email SMS alerts for the NEW alarms For users who are configured to receive the COMPLETE LIST of alarms details of multiple alarms will continue to be clubbed in a single email SMS regardless of the flag setting gt The mail server that have configured for the eG manager requires a user to login before sending mails How do I configure this authentication Select the Yes option against the Does SMTP server require authentication flag in the MAIL SERVER SETTINGS page Then provide a valid USER name and PASSWORD for logging in gt Can l receive email alerts when the state of a component changes to Unknown Yes You can receive Unknown state mail alerts by configuring a setting in the eg services ini To do so follow the steps given below 1 Edit the eg services ini file in the EG INSTALL DIR Imanagerlconfig directory to set the values of the parameters in the UNKNOWN STATUS REPORTING section as shown below UnknownStateMail No UnknownStateSMS No 33 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite UnknownStateInfoMail UnknownStateInfoSMS UnknownStateMailList UnknownStateSMSList DefaultUnknownStatePeriod In order to receive unknown state mails set the UnknownStateMail parameter to Yes The default is No Similarly spe
7. as the case may be activities e View a consolidated list of issues currently encountered by physical servers and virtual machines across the environment and also per virtual component so as to ease the troubleshooting efforts of a dedicated help desk gt What are the contents of a VM dashboard The VM Dashboard of comprises of two panels The left panel boasts of a tree structure comprising of a global node named Zones All the zones farms in the target environment that have been configured with one more virtual hosts eg VMware ESX servers Citrix XenServers etc will be 69 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite the sub nodes of the Zones node If you expand a particular zone node in the tree you will find that the virtual component types that have been added to that zone appear as its sub nodes Independent virtual hosts that are not part of any existing zone will be automatically grouped under the Default zone tree If you expand a virtual component type under a zone then all virtual hosts of that type will appear as its sub nodes Expanding a virtual host tree will reveal the VMs and resource pools that are executing on that tree Similarly if you drill down a resource pool in the tree the VMs available in the pool will be listed as its sub nodes The state of a node in the tree depends upon the current state of its sub nodes The right panel is a context sensitive panel the contents of which will vary acc
8. domain creation if you attempt to Create New user using this page you will be prompted to indicate the User authentication mode that applies to the new user If you are creating a domain user whose requests are to be authenticated by the Active Directory then select the Domain option If you are creating a user who is local to the eG Enterprise system and whose login requests are to be authenticated by the eG database select the Local option Upon choosing the Domain option you will be prompted to perform the following tasks e Select the Domain to which the new user belongs The domain that you created using the Users Configure Domains menu sequence will be listed in the Domain list e Then set the Operation flag to User specify the ID of the new user in the User ID text box and click the Validate button When this is done the eG manager immediately connects to the Active Directory server and verifies whether the user is a valid domain user or not If the user is not a valid user then an error message to that effect appears On the other hand if the user is indeed a valid domain user then the eG manager allows you to proceed with the user creation However you cannot provide a password for the domain user This is because the credentials of the domain user are configured in and maintained by the Active Directory server eG Enterprise therefore will neither reveal nor allow you to modify the password of the domain user thus ensuring
9. e When a segment is added to a new zone then only the segment and the components within the segment are added to the zone e Similarly when a segment is disassociated from a zone that segment and the underlying components alone will be removed from the zone Can configure zone locations Typically zones can be used to represent the status of the IT infrastructure in a specific geographic location eG Enterprise allows you to drill down on a geographic map to visually figure out the exact geographic area where a zone operates and instantly evaluate the performance of the different zones spread across the different locations worldwide To enable such an analysis you first need to indicate the geographic location of the configured zones using the built in map interface of eG Enterprise For instance while configuring an east_coast zone you can use the map to point to the east coast of USA so as to enable quick and accurate identification of zone locations To achieve this click on the Add geographic location link in the right corner of the ZONE SELECTED FOR CONFIGURATION section in the CONFIGURE ZONE page The page that then appears reveals a world map The geographic map display for zones is achieved through an integration of the eG Enterprise management console with the Google maps service You will therefore have to enable this integration in order to configure and visualize zones Please refer to the eG User Manual for steps on how to enabl
10. While creating a new user the account has to be associated with a default tablespace where the user s data is hosted and a temporary tablespace which is used for buffering sorting etc The identities of the default and temporary tablespaces have to be input in this page Please look into Chapter 3 of the eG User Manual gt Should restart the eG manager every time a user changes the configuration of a test or a threshold The manager or the agents do not need to be restarted every time a test configuration or thresholds for the measurements have been changed The eG agent and manager automatically discover changes that have been made by users to the test configuration and or measurement thresholds gt Can ladd aggregate tests for aggregate components If so how Yes For each aggregate component type you manage you can add aggregate tests which automatically execute configured functions average sum sum of average max min etc on chosen measures to report meaningful aggregated metrics of performance To add an aggregate test follow the Infrastructure Aggregates Add Modify Tests menu sequence To configure these tests follow the Agents gt Tests gt Configure gt Specific or Default menu sequence just like in the case of non aggregate tests For more details refer to the eG User Manual 6 15 Configuring Thresholds gt How dol configure thresholds for various measurements Thresholds can be configured via t
11. a herculean task The WM Distribution report is ideal for such farms as it provides administrators with the following a quick look at the VMs registered with a few all virtual hosts in the environment the powered on status of the VMs which VMs were VMotioned XenMotioned to or from chosen virtual hosts in the environment during the configured timeline Virtual Centers Report This report tracks the performance history of vCenter installations in the target environment so that administrators are able to perform the following effectively Determine how healthy the vCenter server as a whole has been over a broad period of time Take a closer look at the overall performance of the critical components of vCenter i e clusters and individual physical servers managed by vCenter over time Detect peculiar problem patterns and analyze the root cause of recurring performance issues 81 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite Cluster Details Report The report provides you with historical insights into how well a chosen cluster all clusters on a vCenter are utilizing the available resources This way resource intensive clusters can be accurately identified Also by allowing administrators the flexibility to include the performance information related to the physical servers in the cluster and the virtual machines executing on these physical servers eG Enterprise enables administrators to zoom into th
12. a name for the schedule against the Schedule Name text box To indicate how often the report would have to be mailed to a specific recipient select a frequency from the Mail list box The options provided therein include Daily Weekly and Monthly If the report need not be mailed then select None from this list box If the report is to be mailed to a specific recipient i e if the Mail list box does not contain None then mention the Mail ID of the recipient Then indicate the Schedule type You can indicate when report scheduling is to occur by picking an option from the Schedule type list To generate schedule reports at the end of every day pick the Day end option from this list To generate schedule reports at a configured time every day pick the Any time option from this list and then indicate the exact time of generation using the Schedule at time controls that then appear Finally click on the SAVE button to register the schedule 76 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite gt Can l mail reports directly to specific recipients If so how Yes The eG Reporter component facilitates mailing of the displayed reports directly to specific recipients To achieve this first click on the MAIL button in the reports page Using the page that appears next specify the mail IDs of the primary recipients the mail IDs of the recipients to whom the reports need to be copied etc Also an appropriate Subject can be provided fo
13. alarm gt How dol acknowledge an alarm Select the check box corresponding to the alarm in the CURRENT ALARMS window and click the Acknowledge button Provide a brief description of the acknowledgement and submit it by clicking the Submit button therein gt How does alarm acknowledgement help By acknowledging an alarm a user can indicate to other users that the issue raised by an alarm is being attended to In fact if need be the user can even propose a course of action using this interface In such a case a user with Admin or Supermonitor privileges roles can edit the acknowledgement by providing their own comments suggestions on the proposed action The acknowledgement thus works in three ways gt Ensures that multiple members of the administrative staff do not unnecessarily invest their time and effort in working on a single issue gt Serves as a healthy forum for discussing and identifying permanent cures for persistent performance ills gt Indicates to other users the status of an alarm gt Can l delete alarms If your profile authorizes you to delete alarms then Yes you can gt How do delete alarms Select the check box corresponding to the alarm to be deleted in the CURRENT ALARMS window and click the Delete button Provide a reason for the deletion and click the Submit button 64 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite gt Can view the history of alarm acknowledgements and de
14. and the maximum number of connections in the connection pool gt Can I configure specific cleanup frequencies for detailed diagnosis data reported by individual tests Yes For this navigate to the DETAILED DIAGNOSIS DATA PURGE PERIODS page by clicking on the Advanced Settings button in the DATABASE SETTINGS page gt How do view the details of the eG database Use the menu sequence Configure gt Data Management gt Database Properties for this purpose gt Howcanl configure the mail settings for the eG manager The mail settings can be configured via the options provided by the Mail sub menu of the Alerts menu gt By default the eG Enterprise system transmits email alerts using the SMTP protocol Can change this default setting Yes you can In the MAIL SMS SETTINGS page that appears when the Alerts gt Mail gt Server menu sequence is followed will contain a Mail Protocol list SMTP is the default selection in this list You can if you so need change this default setting by picking the SMTP TSL or SMTP SSL options from this list If the mail server through which you wish to send the mail messages is SSL enabled then select SMTP SSL from the Mail protocol list box If your mail server offers enhanced security and provides certificate based authentication select the SMTP TLS option from the Mail protocol list box gt Can l configure a custom subject for mails Yes The administrator can customize the subject of
15. are assigned to a user How can I modify the eG database settings The Database Settings option in the Data Management sub menu of the Configure menu will enable the administrator to modify the database settings of the eG manager What are the database settings that can be modified The database of the eG manager stores the instantaneous measurements reported by the agents hourly daily and monthly trends that summarize the measurements made in the past a history of past alarms events including their descriptions their start and stop times audit logs the measure data used for generating reports the detailed diagnosis measures if applicable and 31 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite configuration data and details of configuration changes if the eG license enables Configuration Management The DATABASE PURGE PERIODS and the DATABASE CONNECTION POOL SETTINGS are the settings that can be configured via the eG user interface You can also schedule day end activities such as trend computation scheduled mail generation and cleanup by specifying the time in the Day end activities start at this time field To optimize accesses to the database the eG manager uses connection pooling By using a pre established set of connections and multiplexing requests over these connections the eG manager ensures that individual connections are not established and closed for each request The DATABASE CONNECTION POOL SETTINGS govern the initial
16. control actions 45 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite The eG web adapter for in depth web server monitoring on Unix and Microsoft environments i e web transaction monitoring for web servers is not available with agentless monitoring gt What are Aggregate Components How do add them eG Enterprise typically monitors every component of a type separately However sometimes administrators might want to receive an aggregated view of the performance of two more components of a type For instance Citrix administrators might want to know the total number of users who are currently logged into all the Citrix servers in a farm so that sudden spikes in the load on the farm as a whole can be accurately detected Similarly Windows administrators might want to figure out the average CPU usage across all the Windows servers in an environment so that they can better plan the capacity of their Windows load balancing clusters To provide such a consolidated view eG Enterprise embeds a license controlled Metric Aggregation capability This feature when enabled allows administrators to group one or more components of a particular type and monitor the group as a single logical component broadly termed as an aggregate component The eG Enterprise system then automatically aggregates the metrics reported by the components in the group by applying pre configured aggregate functions on them and reports these metrics as if they were extracted
17. data integrity Moreover subsequently when you log into the eG management console as a domain user you will have to make sure that you prefix the user name with the domain name in the format domainName Username or domainName V Username Every time a domain user logs into the eG Enterprise system the login will be authenticated by the Active Directory server that manages the users in that domain 28 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite gt Whatis the purpose of the Operation flag in the ADD USER page Using the Operation flag you can indicate whether the profile being created is for a domain user or a domain group gt How dol create a domain group in the eG Enterprise system To create a domain user group then do the following gt Set the Operation flag to Group gt Next select the Domain to which the group belongs The domains that you created using the Users gt Configure Domains menu sequence will be listed in the Domain list gt Soon after a Domain is chosen the Group Name list will be automatically populated with all the user groups that are pre configured in the selected Domain Pick the Group Name that is to be registered with the eG Enterprise system All users who are part of this AD group will now be allowed access to the eG Enterprise system The rights and privileges eg role expiry date email SMS alert settings alarm acknowledgement deletion rights etc define
18. e First click on the Calendar control E next to the Shifts field Doing so invokes the SHIFTS window wherein you can specify a From time and To time for your shift Ensure that the shift timings correspond to the Time zone chosen for the user e To provide an additional time slot click on the circled button at the end of the first row Another row then comes up wherein you can provide one more time period In this way you can associate a maximum of 5 shift periods with the chosen Days e To remove a shift period from the SHIFTS window simply click on the circled button against the corresponding specification Finally to add these time periods to the Shifts field click on the Add button in the SHIFTS window You will thus return to the ADD USER page where you can find the time period s that you specified appear against the Shifts field e To add another Day Shift specification just click on the circled button at the end of the first row Another row will then appear where you can specify a few more Days and Shifts This way a number of Day Shift specifications can be associated with a user e To delete a particular Day Shift specification from simply click on the circled button gt Is there a limit to the number of Day Shift specifications that can be associated with a user Yes but this number is configurable It can be any number between or equal to 1 and 10 To configure this number go to the MAIL
19. environment Clicking on a component component type in this list reveals the layer model tests and the last set of measurements that the eG agent reported for that component To analyze events across a broader time window in the past select a different timeline from the Components with most events in the last list box here The details available in the Event Analysis section serve as an effective indicator of the efficiency of the administrative staff in resolving performance issues To view the complete history of alarms in the environment click on the Click here for more events gt gt link gt The Components At A Glance section comprises of a bar graph depicting the number of components of each type that are being monitored and their respective states Clicking on a bar will take you to a page that lists the individual components of the corresponding type and their current state gt What happens when I click on a zone in the ZONES LIST page of the eG monitoring console The Zone Dashboard appears that provides a quick overview of the performance of that zone For more details on the dashboard refer to the eG User Manual gt Can view the location of zones configured Typically zones are associated with different geographies While monitoring large infrastructures therefore eG Enterprise allows you to drill down to view the exact geographic area where a zone operates and instantly evaluate the performance of the different zone
20. however to perform better problem diagnosis you might want to review specific acknowledgment descriptions associated with an alarm and not all of them For instance while two users john and elvis may have acknowledged an alarm raised on an Oracle database server you might only want to view user john s acknowledgement description To facilitate such selective viewing of acknowledgement information eG Enterprise provides a dedicated ACKNOWLEDGEMENT HISTORY page this page provides a wide variety of filter options with the help of which you can quickly and easily run a search across all alarm acknowledgements and swiftly locate the acknowledgment information of interest to you To access the ACKNOWLEDGEMENT HISTORY page follow the Alarms gt History of Acknowledgements menu sequence in the eG monitoring console Alarm Deletion History The EVENT HISTORY page has also been embedded with the intelligence to indicate whether a past alarm was deleted or not If a past alarm had been acknowledged then this page will automatically display the acknowledgement history below that alarm If that alarm had been deleted at some point of time in the past then the history will display an additional entry providing the details of the deletion These details include the user who deleted the alarm the reason for the deletion and the date and time of deletion Sometimes you might want to view the details of all alarms that were deleted by a particular
21. infrastructures typically comprise of applications and network devices operating in conjunction to offer a service Often a problem with one component can ripple and affect all the other components Consequently operators are confronted with a flood of alarms reporting a variety of different failures Sifting through the alarms and determining where the root cause of the problem may lie is a time consuming laborious process Moreover a significant amount of expertise is essential to effectively troubleshoot problems Correlation technology embedded in monitoring solutions can significantly reduce the burden on operators by pointing them directly to the root cause of problems eG products include specialized heuristics incorporated into the manager software to enable problem diagnosis at a single mouse click gt Can monitor networks that are protected by firewalls using eG products Yes The eG Enterprise Suite uses a truly web based architecture all communications between the agents and the managers happen through HTTP The port used for all eG communications is configurable at the time of setting up the eG manager Moreover since the eG architecture uses an agent driven model with the agents polling the manager the eG manager can be hosted outside a firewall with the agents being used within the firewall domain gt Can monitor IT infrastructures using eG products from my web browser Yes The eG manager is a complete web applicatio
22. issue e Serves as a healthy forum for discussing and identifying permanent cures for persistent performance ills e Indicates to other users the status of an alarm To enable the alarm acknowledgement capability for the new user select the Yes option from the Allow alarm acknowledgement section in the ADD USER page The ADD USER page now allows me the flexibility to create a Local user or a Domain user What is this all about The eG administrative interface provides administrators with a wide variety of options to manage user information Be it user creation modification deletion or simply viewing user information any type of user related activity can be performed quickly and easily using the eG administrative console Some target environments however use the Active Directory server as the central repository for user information and for authenticating domain logins In such situations if both the eG manager and the Active Directory consoles were to be used together for managing and validating the same set of users it is bound to result in chaos Therefore to provide administrators with a single central interface for efficiently managing users eG Enterprise integrates seamlessly with the Active Directory server The first step towards implementing this integration is the creation of a domain Use the Users gt Configure Domains menu sequence to configure the domain which is managed by the Active Directory AD server Subsequent to
23. maximum j TCP connections to which port are taking too long k Which host is currently not available over the network You can however change this default setting to reveal more or less i e you can add to the measure list displayed here or remove a few measures from the displayed list To achieve this do the following Login to the eG administrative interface as admin e Go to the MONITOR SETTINGS page using the menu sequence Configure gt Monitor Settings Click on the Measures At A Glance button in the MONITOR SETTINGS page e The resulting MEASURES AT A GLANCE CONFIGURATION page will display the default measure configurations for the Measures At A Glance section To know how to manipulate the controls in the page to add more measures or remove a few of the pre configured measures refer to the eG User Manual The min max values of the configured measures will then be displayed in the Measures At A Glance section of the Monitor Home page The first column of the Measures At A Glance section indicates the current state of the measure whether Normal Critical Major Minor Unknown The Measure column is where the configured measures will be displayed Similarly each of the configured tests will appear in the Test column Besides a Server column exists which displays the name of the component and the descriptor which has currently registered the maximum minimum value as the case may be for every chosen measure Final
24. multiple web servers to support a single web site The eG Enterprise Suite supports both of these scenarios gt How do l configure a new site for monitoring To configure a web site an administrator has to choose the Topology option from the Services sub menu of the Infrastructure menu in the eG administrative interface Using the Add New Service option in the page that appears new web sites can be added for monitoring by eG In the screen that appears next the name of the new service has to be specified Additionally users need to indicate whether the service is a web site or not by selecting the Yes option from the list box in the page For in depth details about configuring the dependencies of a website via the user interface please refer to Chapter 3 of the eG User Manual Whatare the restrictions for a site name While specifying the name of a website care should be taken to see that 1 it does not contain any special characters that are not permissible for a site name 52 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite 2 a does not occur 3 does not have letters in upper case gt Can the eG Enterprise Suite monitor services other than web sites Yes The eG Enterprise Suite can monitor services other than web sites To configure a service an administrator has to choose the Topology option from the Services sub menu of the Infrastructure menu in the eG administrative interface Using the Add New Service option in the page t
25. or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or higher CentOS 5 2 or higher ii JDK 1 6 0 10 or above iii Oracle database server version 10G or higher Microsoft SQL Server version 2008 2012 for the eG database The database can be installed on the same system as the eG manager or it can be installed on a separate system For implementations with 100 monitors or more the database should ideally be hosted on a separate system Both the eG manager and the eG database can be hosted on virtual machines or physical machines iv A valid eG license 2 On Windows the requirements are i JDK 1 6 0 10 and above ii Windows 2003 server OR Windows 2008 server OR Windows XP workstation OR Windows 7 OR Windows 8 OR Windows 2012 iii Only systems with a static IP address i e no DHCP address should be used for installing the eG manager iv Internet Explorer 9 or higher or Mozilla Firefox Version 16 or higher or Chrome v Oracle database server version 10G or higher Microsoft SQL Server version 2008 2012 for the eG database The database can be installed on the same system as the eG manager or it can be installed on a separate system For 16 Installing and Configuring the eG Enterprise Suite implementations with 100 monitors or more the database should ideally be hosted on a separate system Both the eG manager and the eG database can be hosted on virtual machines or physical machines V A valid eG license W
26. page From the Users menu select the Add option which will enable the administrator to add a new admin or monitor user gt Can I change passwords for the default users Yes The default users of the eG Enterprise Suite are Admin and Supermonitor The Admin user can change his password using the Change Password option present in the Users menu An administrator can change the password of a Supermonitor using the Modify User option present in the same menu gt Whatis alarm escalation Can I escalate alarms The eG Enterprise system can be configured to automatically escalate persistent problems to the next managerial level so that the higher authority can initiate immediate action When a user who receives an email SMS alert of an issue is unable to resolve the reported issue for a pre configured period of time then the eG Enterprise system immediately forwards the email SMS alert to a comma separated list of mail IDs mobile numbers specified against the Level 1 field in the Escalation Mail ID section You can if you so desire define additional support levels by clicking on the sign that appears at the end of the Level 1 text box This way issues that remain unresolved even at Level 1 will be escalated to Level 2 and so on You can create upto a maximum of 5 escalation levels To delete a newly added level click on the sign at the end of the corresponding Level text box 25 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite Note Al
27. panel of the page For more details refer to the eG User Manual gt How dol configure the measures that need to appear in the Measures At A Glance section of the eG monitoring dashboard By default the Monitor Dashboard provides a Measures At A Glance panel which allows users to view the min max values of critical measurements updated in real time Users can thus receive instant status updates on sensitive performance parameters and can also accurately determine at a single glance the pain points of an infrastructure This useful display is governed by the Compute top metrics flag that appears when the Enable Disable Metrics sub node of the Measures At A Glance node in the Monitor Settings tree is clicked Setting this flag to Yes will enable the Measures At A Glance panel in the eG monitoring console To configure the measures that are to be listed in the Measures At A Glance panel click on the Add a New Measure sub node under the Measures At A Glance node in Monitor Settings tree 6 1 Detailed Diagnosis Configuration gt Whatis detailed diagnosis To make diagnosis more efficient and accurate the eG Enterprise Suite embeds an optional detailed diagnostic capability With this capability the eG agents can be configured to run detailed more elaborate tests as and when specific problems are detected For example when the CPU usage of a host reaches the threshold the agent can be configured to provide more details e g the
28. performance of an infrastructure component the operation reports provide detailed insights into specific measurements and how they compare with their threshold bounds While a number of pre canned reports are available for each component being monitored administrators also have the flexibility to build customized reports e Comparison reports While operation reports allow analysis of different metrics of a specific component comparison reports can be used for cross correlation i e to compare different metrics across different components For example the response time of the network server database application etc can be compared and plotted in the same report e Snapshot reports These reports are ideal for post mortem analysis If an administrator is aware that a problem occurred in the past during a certain period of time he she can use the Snapshot reports to quickly identify which measurements for a specific component were not in conformance with their thresholds e Consolidated reports Use these reports to assess the performance of chosen server farms servers services over time Periodic analysis of overall performance enables administrators to accurately predict behavioral trends and sizing requirements and thus perform effective capacity planning e Thin client reports These reports facilitate root cause analysis and identification in Citrix Terminal VDI server farms Thinclient administrators can use these reports to asses
29. refer to Chapter 3 of the eG User Manual gt Should restart the eG manager when new components are added to the target environment The eG manager is able to detect new components in the environment and is capable of adding new tests for these components without having to shut the manager down and restart it Changes to thresholds any parameter changes to the tests the enabling disabling of all tests etc are handled by the eG Enterprise Suite without requiring the eG manager to be started up and shut down gt Can ladd an Oracle server just like the other types of components An Oracle server listening on a port may comprise of multiple instances The eG manager can monitor the different database server instances individually The database server instances associated with an Oracle server have to be configured manually via the Add Modify Servers option of the Infrastructure menu If the instances corresponding to the Oracle server are not configured then a WARNING icon appears at the top left corner of the MANAGE UNMANAGE ADD NEW COMPONENTS and TOPOLOGY CONFIGURATION pages By moving the mouse over this icon the user can see the warning message that displays the components for which the instances have not been configured Please look into the eG User Manual for how to specify the information about the Oracle server under consideration gt Ihave already specified the details of the component in the ADD MODIFY COMPONENTS page Now if
30. the alarm mails by specifying an appropriate subject Towards this end the administrator will first have to indicate whether he she needs to provide a simple brief subject or a more descriptive subject To provide a short and crisp subject select the Concise option against Mail subject format In which case the administrator has to specify the mail subject in the Mail subject text box To provide an elaborate subject which should include the names and or types of components to which the alarms pertain select the Descriptive option In this case administrators will be allowed to build the entire mail subject by first specifying how the subject should begin in the Start of mail subject text box Then he she should select the Contents of mail subject from the list box The administrator can choose to include either the problem component names or the component types or both in the mail subject The maximum number of problem components to feature in the mail subject should also be indicated in the Maximum components in mail subject text box 32 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite gt What is the significance of the Alternative Mail sender ID specification in the MAIL SMS SETTINGS page By default eG Enterprise sends email alerts from the eG Administrator mail ID configured in this page In MSP environments typically different support groups are created to address performance issues relating to different customers These suppo
31. transmitted between the manager and agents HTTPS support is particularly useful for remote monitoring across multiple locations wherein the manager may be in a central location and the agents at remote locations use the public Internet to communicate with the manager 3 4 Database gt What databases does the eG Enterprise Suite require for storing its data The eG Enterprise Suite requires Oracle database server version 10G or higher Microsoft SQL Server version 2005 2008 2012 for storing its data 11 Licensing Policy of the eG Enterprise Suite Licensing Policy of the eG Enterprise Suite This chapter clarifies the doubts on the licensing policy of the eG Enterprise Suite of monitoring products gt How is the licensing policy of eG Enterprise Suite different from that of the other monitoring tools Many monitoring systems have such complex licensing policies that just tracking the different licenses necessary to get a monitoring system operational itself is a burdensome task Whereas eG s licensing policy e Simplifies the administration and use of eG products by providing license management from a single central location e Requires minimal configuration and license management when adding new applications for monitoring e Reduces the overheads involved in maintaining separate monitoring packages for individual applications gt What does eG s single agent licensing mean Many a time system admi
32. ALERT CONFIGURATION page that appears when you follow the Alerts gt Mail gt Alerts menu sequence In the SHIFT PERIOD CONFIGURATION section of this page select the Maximum number of Day Shift combinations Howto configure shift periods for SMS alerts Similar to email alerts SMS alerts can also be configured to be sent out only during specified time periods on specific days of the week The first step towards this is to enable the SMS alerts only during shift periods flag by selecting the Yes option in the add user page Using the Days and Shifts fields that appear subsequently you can configure one more Day Shift combinations in the same manner as discussed for email alerts 30 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite gt do not want the option to enable email SMS escalation alerts for shift periods to appear in the ADD USER page What do I do to ensure this To ensure that the shift related flags do not appear in the ADD USER page perform the following e Use the menu sequence Alerts gt Mail Settings gt Alerts to open the MAIL ALERT PREFERENCES page e In the Shift Period Configuration section of the page set the Allow shift period configuration flag to No By default this flag is set to Yes e Finally register the changes by clicking the Update button in that page want a user to receive email alerts of only those issues that pertain to the Network layer Can email alerts be so filtered By default a u
33. For more details regarding the eG architecture and the details of the metrics collected by the eG agents refer to the following documents A Virtual Private Monitoring Solution for Multi Domain IT Infrastructures The eG User Manual The eG Installation Guide VON ON WV The eG Measurements Manual Please contact us at support eginnovations com for further clarifications 94
34. LOGY DISCOVERY SETTINGS section will automatically appear therein using which you can define the settings for automatically discovering the component topology using the eG agent The Enable topology discovery flag is set to Yes by default indicating that the eG agents are bundled with the ability to perform automatic topology discovery Once automatic topology discovery is enabled the eG agent will run the netstat command on the target host every 45 minutes by default to determine which applications are operating on the host and which port they listen to This default frequency can be overridden using the Delay between successive dependency discovery attempts Mins parameter in the TOPOLOGY DISCOVERY SETTINGS section By default this parameter is set to 45 by default indicating that the default discovery frequency is 45 minutes To override this default frequency specify a different duration in minutes against the Delay between successive dependency discovery attempts Mins parameter 49 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite Whenever the eG agent on a host runs netstat it retrieves a list of ports that are operating on that host While some of these TCP ports may be standard listening ports i e TCP ports at which the applications executing on that host listen for requests from remote hosts applications a few other TCP ports may be local ports created dynamically on the host for a temporary purpose To clearly differentiate betwe
35. Name text box To search for all VMs with names that begin with a particular string just enter the string in the Virtual Machine Name text box To know whether the VMs with the specified name are in a powered on state or not choose Powered on from the State list To view the complete list of VMs with the specified name regardless of state choose the Any option from the State list The default Timeline for the VM search is 24 hours You can however change this Timeline To view the VMs that fulfill the specified conditions click the Submit button 89 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite gt Whatare the details displayed in the VM Search The name of the VM The server on which the VM is currently executing The server type The time at which the VM information was reported by the eG agent gt Whatis the graph icon and diagnosis icon meant for in the VM Search page By default clicking on the Graph icon corresponding to a VM reveals a graph of the powered on state and physical CPU usage of that VM for the Timeline specified This graph brings to light CPU usage excesses by the VM and also intermittent changes in the state of the VM Similarly clicking on the Diagnosis icon corresponding to a VM by default lists all the VMs that are executing on the Server displayed the IP address of each VM and the operating system 90 Configuration Management Configuration Management
36. The direction signifies cause effect relationships if any between the components being connected together gt CaneGauto discover topology If so how Whether an infrastructure is virtual or physical inter dependencies exist between applications For example a web server uses a middleware application server and an application server relies on a database server eG Enterprises uses this inter dependency information for root cause diagnosis so administrators can determine where exactly the problem lies and where the effects are eG Enterprise includes the capability to auto discover inter application dependencies This auto discovery reduces the time and effort involved in setting up the performance monitoring solution and also reduces the human errors that can be involved in manual specification of inter application dependencies In the eG Enterprise system segment service topology definitions embed the inter application dependencies Discovery of this topology information is initiated by the agents By default the ability of the eG agent to automatically discover topology is enabled However this default setting will take effect only if the eG agent has the ablity to automatically discover components This is because topology discovery cannot be performed without component discovery Therefore as soon as the Enable agent discovery flag in the AGENT DISCOVERY SETTINGS page Agents gt Settings gt Discovery is set to Yes a TOPO
37. The eG Quick Reference Guide eG Enterprise v5 6 Restricted Rights Legend The information contained in this document is confidential and subject to change without notice No part of this document may be reproduced or disclosed to others without the prior permission of eG Innovations Inc eG Innovations Inc makes no warranty of any kind with regard to the software and documentation including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose Trademarks Microsoft Windows Windows NT Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in United States and or other countries The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners Copyright 2013 eG Innovations Inc All rights reserved The copyright in this document belongs to eG Innovations Inc Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user Purpose of the Manual This manual provides answers to some of the most frequent queries that users have regarding the eG Enterprise Suite of products Table of Contents INTRODUCTION TO MONITORING ssscssssssssssssscsssssssssessssessesssssssssssessesseseassssessssessessssasesseseassesesssssscssssasessessasessessssssscsssassssessasesseseseses 1 ABOUT THE EG ENTERPRISE SUITE cccscssssssssssssssssscssssssssssscssssessccssscsssssssc
38. Whatis the mechanism that is used for manager agent communication The agent uses the push technology to put the information that it has collected into the manager This way we are able to avoid opening of ports on the agent side which many administrators and security experts are very concerned about gt Whatis the bandwidth required for agent manager communication The factors controlling the required bandwidth are as follows 1 The number of agents reporting to the manager 10 System Architecture 2 The frequency at which the tests are running 3 The amount of information reported by the tests In a typical environment the manager agent communication requires about 0 05 KB s gt How does the eG agent communicate with the manager IT infrastructures typically include multiple demilitarized zones From a security perspective most IT infrastructure operators view SNMP and other proprietary protocols suspiciously whereas they believe that HTTP HPPTS traffic is not a serious security threat Consequently the eG Enterprise Suite uses HTTP HTTPS for all communications between the manager and the agents gt Can the eG agent and manager be configured to use SSL HTTPS Yes The eG agent and manager can be SSL enabled if so required The advantage of enabling HTTPS support in the eG Enterprise Suite is that by default the eG manager agent communication is encrypted thereby preventing a third party from snooping and decoding the data
39. a new component using the NEW COMPONENT DETAILS page of the eG admin interface an Internal agent assignment field appears By default the AUTO option against the field will be selected This indicates that by default eG maps every configured IP nick name with a separate internal agent To manually define the IP internal agent association select the MANUAL option Upon choosing MANUAL an additional Internal agent list box will appear From this list box select the internal agent that needs to be associated with the IP of the component being created This way the same internal agent can be associated with multiple IPs on the same host gt When does the INTERNAL AGENT ASSIGNMENT field appear in the NEW COMPONENT DETAILS page The INTERNAL AGENT ASSIGNMENT field will appear only if the following conditions are fulfilled gt The eG license enables the AGENT PER SYSTEM flag gt The AGENTLESS flag in the NEW COMPONENT DETAILS page is set to NO In other words users will not have the option of mapping an IP to an internal agent if agentless monitoring is enabled 6 9 Configuring Zones Whatis a zone Large infrastructures spanning geographies can pose quite a monitoring challenge owing to the number of components involved and their wide distribution Administrators of such infrastructures might therefore prefer to monitor the infrastructure by viewing it as smaller more manageable business units In eG parlance these small business units
40. agent will be able to promptly detect the additions removals in the environment everytime it rediscovers and will be able to update the eG manager with this knowledge Note that since agents are not installed on network devices network devices are not discovered by the agent discovery process gt Can the solution auto discover inter application dependencies as well If so how Whether an infrastructure is virtual or physical inter dependencies exist between applications For example a web server uses a middleware application server and an application server relies on a database server eG Enterprises uses this inter dependency information for root cause diagnosis so administrators can determine where exactly the problem lies and where the effects are In earlier versions of eG Enterprise inter application dependencies had to be manually configured Not only is this time consuming it is also prone to human errors In many cases administrators may not even know all the dependencies that exist in the infrastructure An incorrectly built segment topology impairs the eG correlation engine s ability to auto correlate performance thereby resulting in inaccurate root cause diagnosis V 5 6 of eG Enterprise includes the capability to auto discover inter application dependencies This auto discovery reduces the time and effort involved in setting up the performance monitoring solution and also reduces the human errors that can be involved in manua
41. agents cannot auto discover the topology gt Differentiate between the USES and CONNECTS relationship The CONNECTS dependency indicates flow of data e g a physical connection between a web server and a network router and the USES dependency refers to a logical dependency e g a web server and a web application server a web application server and a database server etc The key difference between the two forms of dependencies is that when one component USES another problems with the latter component can actually reflect in problems with the former component With the CONNECTS dependency there are no such cause effect relationships between the two components gt Where dol get to see the topology preview While the administrator is defining the dependencies within a target environment using the CONFIGURE TOPOLOGY page the SEGMENT PREVIEW section at the end of the page displays every step of the topology specification as it proceeds The feedback provided by the topology preview can be used by the administrator to refine the topology specification gt Does the topology indicate network connectivity The topology indicates how application components rely on other components for their functioning The interconnections can represent either physical connections e g a web server connected to a network router or logical dependencies e g a web server using a web application server gt want to manually construct the segment
42. alled on a system in order to discover the components applications within it as the eG Enterprise suite follows selective port discovery 5 7 Starting the Agent gt When l start the eG agent what processes should see On Unix environments look for the following processes e EgMainAgent the core agent process e A script named eGAgentMon that periodically monitors the agent and restarts it if the agent ever fails On Windows environments look for the following processes e eGurkhaAgent core agent process e eGAgentMon agent recovery process 20 Installing and Configuring the eG Enterprise Suite gt start an agent without starting a manager Will this work No The agent waits for a maximum of one day for the manager to come up 21 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite Administering the eG Enterprise Suite This chapter mainly focuses on many of the common questions that an administrator of the eG Enterprise system may have Please refer to the User Manuals for detailed information gt How dol connect to the eG manager Users can connect to the eG manager using the URL http lt eGManagerlP gt lt eGManagerPort gt use https lt eGManagerlP gt lt eGManagerPort gt if SSL enabled gt How do login to the Enterprise system The user will get to see the login window as soon as a connection is established with the eG manager from where he she can access the eG Enterprise system The eG Enterpri
43. ansaction s performance eG Enterprise offers the IIS Transaction Analysis report gt Why do we need a comparison report The Components comparison report allows administrators to compare statistics pertaining to selected components For example consider an environment comprising of a Web server supported by an Oracle server Ldap server and a Dns server Say that the web server in hosts a web site that depends upon the Oracle server for storage and recovery of critical data While the web server uses the DNS server for host name resolution the Oracle server uses the LDAP server Assume that the user accessing the web site on the web server begins to experience a marked deterioration in the responsiveness of the site An increase in the response time of a web site could be caused by either all of the following reasons e A network delay between the web server and the user e A problem in the response time of one all of the other servers Oracle DNS LDAP that the web server relies on e A comparison report provides an easy way of comparing the response times of each application gt What is the significance of trend reports and detailed test tables A Trend report will not include the data for the current day since trend data is only computed at the end of the day If the Trend option is chosen the time period of the report should be greater than 1 day The usage of Detailed test tables for generating reports especially those th
44. are already working on The domain experts and service managers are responsible for the early detection diagnosis and fixing of problems with the networks servers applications and services they control While the domain experts are interested in the detailed performance metrics relating to the IT infrastructure the executive managers are interested in high level service level reports that detail if the IT infrastructure is meeting the service expectation of their users To support these varying requirements of the IT operations staff the eG Enterprise Suite supports different user roles The user roles define the rights and responsibilities that any user of the eG Enterprise system has Each user in the eG Enterprise system is assigned to a user role Explain the default user roles of the eG Enterprise system e Admin Users who are assigned administrative rights become the super users of the system Such users can choose what hardware and application servers are to be monitored by the 23 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite system where the agents should be executed to monitor the hosted environment what tests these agents should run how often these tests should be executed and can view the status of the entire monitored infrastructure The administrative user also has the rights to add delete and modify user roles and individual user profiles The default admin user is assigned the Admin role only e Monitor Monitor users have
45. are termed ZONES A zone can typically comprise of individual components segments services and or other zones that require monitoring For example in the case of an infrastructure that is spread across the UK USA and Singapore a zone named USA can be created consisting of all the components segments and services that are operating in the US branch alone The USA zone can be further comprised of an East coast zone and a West coast zone to represent infrastructure and services being supported on the two coasts of the US While a service segment contains a group of inter related components with inter dependencies between them a zone contains a group of components services segments or zones that may may not have inter dependencies How dolaccess the zone configuration page 47 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite Use the menu sequence Infrastructure gt Zones to access the zone configuration page What is the implication of enabling disabling automatic association If automatic association is enabled When a segment is added to a new zone then the following if available will automatically be added to the zone e All the components within that segment e All the services using that segment e All the other segments that are part of the associated services Similarly when a segment is disassociated from a zone then the afore said will also be automatically removed from the zone If automatic association is disabled
46. arm escalation will work only if you configure the following e The duration beyond which the eG Enterprise system needs to escalate a problem to the next level e The alarm priorities to be escalated Both these parameters can be configured using the ALARM ESCALATION section in the MAIL ALERT CONFIGURATION page that appears when the Alerts gt Mail Settings gt Alerts menu sequence is followed gt Can delete users from the eG Enterprise system Yes The Delete Users option present in the Users menu will enable the administrator to remove an existing user from the eG Enterprise system gt Can enable the remote control capability for specific users Yes Using the ADD USER screen that appears upon clicking the Add User option in the Users menu you can enable this capability for a specific user This remote control capability allows monitor supermonitor users to remotely manage and control servers from a web browser itself From the browser a monitor supermonitor can execute commands on a monitored component run some diagnosis and initiate corrective actions to fix any problems gt When and why do I need to specify a Mail ID Mobile No while creating a new user The eG manager is capable of alerting users as and when problems occur The alarms are classified into critical major and minor When a mail id mobile no is associated with a user then the eG Enterprise system will forward the alarms to the specified mail id s
47. ary manager only To simply monitor the environment without making any configuration changes the administrator can login to the secondary manager as well Monitor users can login to any of the managers in a redundant Active Active cluster In an Active Passive cluster though monitor users can login to 61 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite the primary manager only as long as it is available If primary is down they will be able to login to the secondary manager 6 19 Audit Logging gt Whatis an Audit Log An audit log can be best described as a simple log of changes typically used for tracking temporal information gt Why should the eG manager create and maintain audit logs The eG manager can now be configured to create and maintain audit logs in the eG database so that all key configuration changes to the eG Enterprise system which have been effected via the eG user interface are tracked The eG audit logs reveal critical change details such as what has changed who did the change and when the change occurred so that administrators are able to quickly and accurately identify unauthorized accesses modifications to the eG Enterprise system gt Howto enable audit logging By default audit logging is disabled To enable the capability follow the steps given below e Login to the eG administrative interface e Open the SETTINGS page using the menu sequence Configure gt Settings e Expand the Manager Settings t
48. at span weeks increases the stress on the eG database thus resulting in undue delays in report generation In order to ensure that the database is not choked by such voluminous data requests you can 79 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite configure eG Enterprise to automatically force the use of the Trend option if the Timeline of a report exceeds a pre configured duration To specify this time boundary do the following 1 2 3 Edit the eg_services ini file in the lt EG_INSTALL_DIR gt manager config directory In the MISC section of the file you will find a DetailedTime parameter Specify the duration in days beyond which Detailed reports cannot be generated against the DetailedTime parameter and save the eg_services ini file For instance to make sure that Detailed reports are disallowed for a Timeline of over 2 weeks set the DetailedTime parameter to 14 and save the file Say subsequently you attempt to generate a Detailed report for a Fixed Timeline of 3 weeks which is greater than the 14 day limit set in our example The instant you select the 3 weeks option from the Fixed list box the Detailed option gets automatically disabled and the Trend option gets enabled Similarly if you specify an Any Timeline that runs over 14 days then upon clicking the SUBMIT button to generate the report a message box appears informing you that only the Trend option is permitted To proceed with the Trend repo
49. ated to the database gt Ihave configured a maintenance policy for a component in the eG admin interface Is it possible to know about it in the eG monitoring console Yes it is possible to know whether the component host test is under maintenance in the eG monitoring console A spanner icon appears alongside a monitored host component test in the eG monitoring console during such time a maintenance policy is active on that host component test gt Where in the eG monitoring console can find information related to maintenance periods If you click on the DETAILS button in the Measurements panel of the layer model page of a component the resulting TEST DETAILS page displays the details of the maintenance policy associated with that component host test gt Will the maintenance policy information be available always in the TEST DETAILS page No This information will be available only for the duration for which the maintenance policy is effective In other words if a maintenance policy has been configured to suppress the alerts of a component between 1 PM and 3 PM every Friday then the TEST DETAILS page of that component will display the maintenance information only during 1 PM and 3 PM on Fridays 39 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite gt What details related to the maintenance policy will be available in the TEST DETAILS page Maintenance Match Criteria If the maintenance policy applies to the monitored host as a who
50. ated zone What do I do Any segment that is associated with a zone or service will carry an ASSOCIATION section in its configuration page which not only lists the zones and services that are mapped to the segment but also links to the corresponding zone and service configuration pages Accordingly the ASSOCIATION section in your case should indicate the zone s associated with your segment Clicking on the Zone in question will enable you to reconfigure the zone and add the missing component to the zone gt Can a component be added to more than one segment By default the components in a segment will not be candidates for inclusion in another segment However you can share components across segments by selecting the Use components from other segments check box in the topology configuration page 6 12 Configuring Services gt Can the eG Enterprise Suite monitor specific web sites Rather than monitoring individual elements the eG Enterprise Suite monitors the services that end users see Users do not access web servers Rather they access web sites that are hosted on one or more web servers A web site offers one or more services to its users The various services that users can avail via a web site are referred to as transactions Web sites and web servers have a many to many relationship among them In an ISP hosting scenario many web sites may be hosted on the same web server Alternatively very large eBusiness sites may use
51. automatically determine the lower and upper bounds for each measurement Since the values of many measurements vary from time to time the historical thresholds are computed in a time varying manner e g the normal rate of connections to an Intranet web server may be high during office hours and low during non office hours As in the case of absolute thresholding the state of a measurement is determined by comparing instantaneous values with historical thresholds Currently the eG Enterprise Suite supports only one policy for relative thresholding sqc standing for statistical quality control Future versions may support additional policies c None If the threshold policy for a measurement is none an eG agent will stop tracking the state of this measurement i e The agent will continue to collect values for this measurement but will not generate any alarms relating to this measurement Even in the case of absolute and relative thresholding the eG Enterprise Suite allows either the minimum or maximum threshold values to be none gt What are multiple thresholds and how do define them The eG Enterprise system offers three levels of thresholds that correspond to the three alarm priorities Critical Major and Minor The user has to specify three maximum and or three minimum threshold values in the format Critical Major Minor While the maximum thresholds are to be provided in the descending order minimum thresholds have to be spec
52. be greater than or equal to the Timeline chosen for the current values The number of past measurements to be plotted can be specified in the No of Times text box In the example above if 2 is specified against the No of Times text box then the measure graph will plot 2 sets of past measurements This includes 88 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite The values for 12 00 PM to 1 00 PM on the February 21 2005 The values for 12 00 PM to 1 00 PM on the February 20 2005 gt Is the Sharing feature available only for Quick Insight No Live graph views Custom dashboards My Dashboards and reports saved as favorites using eG Reporter can also be shared with other users in the same manner discussed for quick insight views gt Ina huge Citrix Terminal virtual desktop environment if want to locate a particular user and the servers accessed by him which option in the eG monitor console should choose The Users Search option in the Options menu of the eG monitor console provides you with the information you are looking for Large Citrix Terminal server farms and virtualized environments are typically characterized by a wide range of servers each of which could be servicing a large number of concurrent users When a particular user reports an issue with a server the thin client administrator has to locate that user and the server that is being accessed by him her so that effective prognosis can be perf
53. cation performance and to enable them to accurately isolate the root cause of any application level slowdown eG Enterprise offers the Application Dashboard gt Can the contents of a dashboard be modified Yes Admin and Supermonitor users are alone authorized to modify the contents of a dashboard by clicking on the St button at the top of the dashboard A Dashboard Settings window will then appear using which such users can alter the default dashboard settings 72 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite gt Whatare the applications for which Application Dashboards are provided Currently only the following applications support Application Dashboards Java application MS SQL server 7 Citrix XenApp server gt What about other applications for which an Application Dashboard is not offered out of the box Though the contents of the system network application dashboards are customizable the right to customization rests with the Admin and Supermonitor users alone and not all users to the eG monitoring console This means that if any monitor user logs into the console he she will only be allowed to use the pre defined dashboards These dashboards as we know will focus on only those metrics that an Admin or Supermonitor has configured a normal monitor user can neither customize the layout nor alter the contents of such dashboards Also note that by default dashboards are available only for those applications tha
54. cify Yes against UnknownStateSMS parameter to be able to receive SMS alerts when the state of a component changes to Unknown The eG Enterprise system can also be configured to send out unknown state alerts even if the state of a test descriptor changes to Unknown by setting the UnknownStatelnfoMail parameter to Yes To receive SMS alerts to that effect set UnknownStatelnfoSMS to Yes You can even specify the users who should receive the email SMS alerts by providing a comma separated list of mail ids and mobile numbers as the case may be against the UnknownStateMailList and UnknownStateSMSList parameters respectively The eG Enterprise system will email SMS the configured users only when a component remains in the Unknown state for the duration specified in the DefaultUnknownStatePeriod parameter This duration can also be set specific to a test by inserting the test name as a parameter in the UNKNOWN_STATUS_REPORTING section and providing a value against it as shown below OraTableSpacesTest 60 The DefaultUnknownStatePeriod will automatically apply to all those tests which do not have a specific unknown state period or which have been misspelt in the UNKNOWN_STATUS_REPORTING section 2 Finally save the eg services ini file gt Can l configure the eG Enterprise system to notify me when a problem gets fixed Yes The eG Enterprise system can also be configured to send email alerts SMS when a problem gets fixed This can be done by set
55. connecting to the HMC server in the environment To facilitate this discovery use the DISCOVERY page to configure the HMC server of interest Likewise you can use the DISCOVERY page to configure an RHEV manager using which the RHEV hypervisors in the environment are to be auto discovered In the same manner you can configure the AWS EC2 Cloud with the AWS EC2 Regions to be monitored 6 6 Managing Unmanaging Components gt How dol manage unmanage the discovered applications servers Select the Servers option from the Manage Unmanage sub menu of the Infrastructure menu helps the administrator to manage or unmanage the discovered components Refer to Chapter 3 of the eG User Manual for the steps involved in this process gt Canlmanage unmanage all applications executing on a particular host at one shot Yes You can manage unmanage all applications executing on a particular host using the SYSTEMS MANAGE UNMANAGE page that appears when the System option is chosen from the Manage sub menu of the Infrastructure menu gt Can delete a server application that is being managed by the eG manager Yes A server application being managed by the eG manager can be deleted The administrator has to choose the component to be deleted from the MANAGED COMPONENTS list box in the COMPONENTS MANAGE UNMANAGE module and then click the Delete button at the bottom of the list box 43 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite gt Can delete an unmanag
56. d for the chosen group will govern all users who belong to that group This saves administrators the trouble of defining separate profiles for each domain user in a group gt Note that the group is not associated with any password This implies that while a group itself cannot login to the eG management console a user who belongs to the group can login using the credentials defined for him her in the AD server At the time of login the group user should provide his her name in the format lt DomainName gt lt UserName gt Everytime a group user logs into the eG management console the solution automatically connects to the AD server to validate the login Note gt If a domain user group is registered with the eG Enterprise system and a profile is later created in eG for a particular domain user in that group then when that user logs into the eG management console the user level settings will override the group level settings If a domain user belongs to more than one AD group that is created in the eG Enterprise system then when that user logs in the solution provides him her with a list of domain groups to choose from Selecting a group from the list enables the user to automatically inherit the access rights and monitoring scope defined for that group gt work only during the nights and therefore prefer to receive email alerts only during that time Can eG Enterprise be configured to facilitate this Yes By configur
57. dently they may not provide a common view of the entire enterprise Hence it could be very cumbersome to have the IT staff of the enterprise login to different eG management consoles to get a complete view of the status of the target infrastructure A SuperManager is a manager of managers that provides a consolidated view of the status of the IT infrastructure that is being handled by different eG managers gt What are the different types of Supermanagers that can be configured using the eG administrative interface The eG Enterprise Suite offers two options for configuring a super manager The eG SuperManager is a 100 web based component of the eG Enterprise Suite that provides a consolidated view across disparate eG managers On the other hand an administrator can also use the Computer Associates Network and System Management NSM product as a super manager i e the CA Supermanager 6 3 Configuring Reports gt Whatis the eG Reporter The eG Enterprise system embeds an optional eG Reporter component that allows monitor users to generate a wide variety of reports Using the eG Reporter users can view reports that provide insights into the performance of the critical components of their infrastructure The eG Reporter 36 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite enables analysis of collected metrics for trending capacity planning problem diagnosis or service level audits gt The eG manager already embeds a robust graphing ca
58. e users can monitor various aspects of their IT infrastructure 6 About the eG Enterprise Suite Figure 2 2 depicts the various stages involved in deploying eG Enterprise Suite in a target environment INSTALLATION CONFIGURATION ADMINISTRATION MONITORING Figure 2 2 Stages involved in deploying eG Enterprise Suite The following chapters will explain the details on the stages of deployment of eG Enterprise Suite and its use System Architecture System Architecture A thorough understanding of the system architecture of the eG Enterprise Suite is essential for the user to deploy and use it effectively This chapter elucidates the details of the eG Enterprise system architecture 3 1 Manager gt Does the eG database need to run on the same system as the manager It is not mandatory to host the eG database on the same system as the manager In the event the eG database is hosted on a server other than the one hosting the eG manager the firewall rules should also allow the manager database communications gt Should the eG manager be deployed inside or outside a firewall The eG manager can reside either within or outside the firewall While the Apache Tomcat communications are internal to the eG manager accesses from users and agents to the manager involve remote communication to and from the manager s web server port 7077 is the default port If there are any firewalls used in the target environment it is e
59. e agent The date and time at which the agent last updated the manager with configuration changes Y Y ON ON V A RESET button gt Can I enable output logging for a particular agent from the eG administrative interface How do view the logs Yes you can For this set the OUTPUT flag that corresponds to an agent in the AGENTS STATUS page to ON To view the log click on the LOG icon that corresponds to that agent gt Whatis the significance of the RESET button in the INFORMATION page Once an agent is upgraded information regarding the upgraded package will be registered with the manager The INFORMATION page provides that information only Now the next time the agent requests for an upgrade the manager checks whether any newer upgrades are available If any such upgrade is found it sends the same to the agent If for some reason the information pertaining to the last upgrade has to be cleared from the agent s upgrade history then click on the RESET button This ensures that the details of the last upgrade are lost and helps the agent download the last upgrade once again from the manager gt What is an Upgrade Do I need to manually upgrade every eG agent No Upgrades or patches to the eG agents add new features and enhancements to the eG product suite Manual installation of the agent upgrades involves a lot of time labor and cost especially in environments comprising of hundreds of agents spanning multiple locations I
60. e for default users Yes The profile of an existing eG user can be modified using the Modify option in the Users menu gt Can l configure a user profile with the right to delete alarms Yes To achieve this just set the Allow Delete flag in the ADD USER page to Yes gt After enabling the Remote control capability for a user noticed that a Remote command execution filed appears in the ADD USER page What is this all about Using the Remote command execution filed you can indicate whether the new user is authorized to execute any command remotely or is only allowed to choose from a pre configured list of commands For more details refer to the eG User Manual gt What is alarm acknowledgement How do I enable this capability for a user Optionally specific users can be configured to acknowledge an alarm displayed in the eG monitor interface By acknowledging an alarm a user can indicate to other users that the issue raised by 27 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite an alarm is being attended to In fact if need be the user can even propose a course of action using this interface In such a case a user with Admin or Supermonitor privileges roles can edit the acknowledgement by providing their own comments suggestions on the proposed action The acknowledgement thus works in three ways e Ensures that multiple members of the administrative staff do not unnecessarily invest their time and effort in resolving a single
61. e have access to all the components being monitored e ServerAdmin The users who have been assigned the ServerAdmin role have all the administrative rights of an Admin user except the right to user management Similarly like a Supermonitor user a ServerAdmin user can monitor the complete environment and even change his her profile e MonitorNoConfig The users who have been assigned the MonitorNoConfig role will have access to the eG monitoring and reporting interfaces only and not the eG Configuration Management interface e SupermonitorNoConfig Users with SupermonitorNoConfig privileges will have unrestricted access to the monitoring and reporting consoles only such users will not be able to access the configuration management console even if the eG license enables this capability gt created a user role and provided Limited COMPONENT ACCESS to that role Once this was done noticed that the Admin section of the page grayed out all options within except 3 options Why did this happen and what does it mean In any monitored environment typically administrators alone have the right to make configuration changes using the eG administrative interface Monitor users on the other hand have no access to the administration console In large enterprises multiple distinct administration teams may use the same eG Enterprise manager for their monitoring These teams would require 24 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite
62. e of installing MS SQL 2005 2008 2012 Express However the respective executables need to be downloaded from the web and made available on the eG manager host The download URLs and the steps for installation are detailed in the eG Installation Guide However note that MS SQL Server 2005 2008 2012 Express can only serve as a temporary substitute for the MS SQL server as it provides only limited storage and scalability capabilities Owing to such constraints it is strongly recommended that you restrict the usage of MS SQL Server 2005 Express to short term monitoring of a relatively small number of components to be precise a maximum of 25 components We also recommend that you acquire a licensed version of the MS SQL server as soon as possible install the server and migrate the eG database to it 5 3 Configuring the Manager What is the significance of the host name or the IP address that is being specified while configuring the eG manager While configuring the eG manager if the user provides an IP address the same should be used for connecting to the manager If he she specifies the host name then only this host name should be used for connecting to the manager Improper usage may result in login errors even when a valid user tries to login Can the eG manager be double byte enabled If so when The eG Enterprise system provides users with the option to view and key in data in a language of their choice Different users connecting t
63. e physical server virtual machine that could be the root cause of any resource contention at the cluster level Cluster Resource Pools Report As resource intensive VM resource pools configured on one more vSphere ESX servers in a cluster can drain the physical resources of the corresponding virtual hosts and consequently affect the aggregated resource base of the cluster it is imperative that you monitor the current and historical performance of the cluster resource pools so that resource contentions can be captured early and resolved quickly The Cluster Resource Pools report enables you to perform just that Besides helping you identify resource hungry resource pools in a cluster this report also enables you to isolate the VM in the pool that is responsible for the abnormal behavior of the pool if any and the physical servers on which these VMs operate Cluster Physical Servers Report While the Cluster Details report enables you to identify resource intensive clusters configured on a vCenter server using the Cluster Physical Servers report you can figure out which VM on which physical server in the cluster is responsible for the resource drain and why In short you can have the following questions answered with the help of this report o Which physical servers are part of a cluster and how have they been using the resources available to the cluster Is any physical server using up excessive resources o Are any VMs on
64. e the integration 6 10 Configuring Groups gt What is a Component Group Large enterprises often have load balanced groups of servers providing web middleware and database functionality The servers in the group often perform the same functions and have the same set of dependencies on other infrastructure components For a service with tens of servers in a group the service topology representation can quickly get very cumbersome To handle such environments eG Enterprise allows administrators to define server groups that represent a 48 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite collection of similar servers By including a server group in a service topology representation administrators can indicate that all the servers in the group have the same set of dependencies on other parts of the infrastructure Topology representation using server groups are compact and concise to represent and simple to understand 6 11 Configuring the Topology gt Whatis the topology and why is it needed The eG manager s patented correlation technology is dependent on the specification of topology information that indicates how components are interconnected and which components rely on others for their functioning The interconnections can represent either physical connections e g a web server connected to a network router or logical dependencies e g a web server using a web application server Each interconnection is associated with a direction
65. ecutes This frequency governs how quickly the eG manager is able to discover servers that may have been newly added to the target environment gt How do I know which components were recently discovered by the eG manager Typically in large infrastructures discovery re discovery may result in automatically discovering numerous components of varied types Though the discovered components can be viewed in the MANAGE UNMANAGE page upon the selection of a component type administrators of such environments would prefer an interface that can provide them with a quick look at what components have been discovered across component types so that they can swiftly decide which components need to be monitored and which do not require monitoring To allow administrators easy and instant access to the details of newly discovered components eG Enterprise provides the option to configure a discovery pop up Soon after discovery this pop up once enabled will display a type wise list of recently discovered components thus saving administrators the trouble of navigating to the MANAGE UNMANAGE page to achieve this gt How dol enable the discovery pop up By default this pop up is disabled To enable the pop up open the expand the Manager Settings tree in the SETTINGS page Configure gt Settings menu sequence select the Discovered Components node in the tree and set the Show pop up flag in the DISCOVERED COMPONENTS POP UP section to Yes 42
66. ed For eg On Unix platforms commands for rebooting the system script file execution viewing files viewing the processes running currently etc can be issued On Windows environments commands for starting and stopping services processes viewing files batch file execution etc can be issued gt Does eG Enterprise provide a repository of ready to use commands for remote execution If so how can access this command list Yes By default eG Enterprise provides a set of pre defined remote commands for use during remote problem correction or diagnosis This list will be available to you as options of the Command list box in the REMOTE CONTROL page of the eG monitor interface gt Can l change this default command list Yes If need be administrators can override this default list using the Manage Commands page that appears upon following the Agents gt Settings gt Remote Control menu sequence gt Can l use the eG manager in addition to my existing SNMP manager To monitor applications the eG manager can be integrated with existing SNMP managers such as OpenView s Network Node Manager NNM such that alarms generated by the eG Enterprise Suite can be prioritized and reported via NNM s alarm console The combination of the eG Enterprise Suite and NNM can offer customers a powerful monitoring solution for networks systems and applications gt Can a customer update his her own profile The administrator can modify a use
67. ed component Yes An unmanaged component can be deleted in the same way as a managed one The administrator has to choose the component to be deleted from the UNMANAGED COMPONENTS list box in the COMPONENTS MANAGE UNMANAGE module and then click the Delete button at the bottom of the list box gt What does an asterix beside a component name in the Manage Unmanage page imply When the eG manager discovers a component it will mark the component as being unmanaged and prefix it with an asterix to indicate that this component has been newly discovered The administrator then has to explicitly choose to manage the component 6 7 Adding Components gt How dol add a new component explicitly to the eG Enterprise system In cases in which the eG manager s discovery process is not able to discover a specific component or set of components like network node load balancers etc the Add Modify Servers option of the Infrastructure menu permits the user to explicitly add the component for monitoring by the eG agent Upon choosing the Add Modify Servers option the administrator sees a display of all the types of components currently being managed For each type of component by choosing the Add New Component option the administrator can choose to add a new component for monitoring by the eG agent For the details regarding the parameters that have to be specified by an administrator when adding a new component for monitoring by eG agent
68. en listening ports and local ports the eG agent does the following gt By default the eG agent compares the ouput of four consecutive executions of the netstat command on a host If a port number is repeated in all the four netstat outputs by default then that port number is counted as a server listening port This default behavior is governed by the Dependencies must be present and the Number of dependency discovery attempts parameters in the TOPOLOGY DISCOVERY SETTINGS section Both these parameters are set to 4 by default The 4 against the Number of dependency discovery attempts parameter indicates the maximum number of consecutive netstat outputs to be considered for identifying the server listening ports The 4 against the Dependencies must exist parameter indicates the minimum number of netstat outputs in which a port number should appear for it to be considered as a server listening port You can change this if you need For instance if you set the Dependencies must exist parameter to 3 and let the Number of dependency discovery attempts parameter to remain at 4 then the eG agent will count the port numbers that appear in at least 3 out of 4 consecutive netstat outputs as active listening ports gt Once the listening ports are identified the agent then closely observes traffic to and from a server listening port identifies the remote applications that frequently connect via this port and thus automatically discovers the inter
69. ent Tests and measurements are mapped to each layer and the state of a layer is determined based on the status of the measurements mapped to it The layer model representation is used for automatic correlation of metrics when a similar priority problem happens at two layers the problem at the higher layer of the layer model is attributed to being caused by the lower layers The layer model representation has several advantages By using a common model for representing heterogeneous infrastructure components eG Enterprise makes it easy for an administrator to monitor different components with diverse functionality the monitoring model in the eG Enterprise representation was similar The layer model representation makes it easy to demarcate problems e g is a problem with an application being caused in the operating system layer or in the network layer or in the application layer The main limitation of the layer model representation is that if an administrator is interested in an at a glance view of the key metrics for a component this is not available Further when looking for a specific measurement administrators need to know which layer the measurement maps to Otherwise they would have to click through each of the layers to find the measurement of interest 70 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite To address these shortcomings eG Enterprise now includes specialized dashboards for network system and app
70. environments look for the following processes a eGmon manager recovery process b eGurkhaTomcat core manager process 5 5 Prerequisites for the Agent gt What are the hardware pre requisites for the eG agents a Atleast 256 MB RAM b At least 1 GB of disk space free Whatare the software pre requisites for the eG agents 1 On Solaris the requirements are i Solaris 7 or higher use uname a to check the OS version 2 OnLinux the requirements are i Red Hat Linux 3 or higher use uname a to check the OS version or openSUSE v11 or above 3 On CentOS the requirements are i CentOS v5 2 or above 4 On AIX the requirements are i AIX 4 3 3 or higher 5 On HP UX the requirements are 19 Installing and Configuring the eG Enterprise Suite i HP UX 10 or higher 6 On Free BSD the requirements are i Free BSD 5 4 7 On Tru64 the requirements are i Tru64 5 1 8 On Windows the requirements are i Windows 2000 server with Service Pack 4 OR Windows 2003 server OR Windows 2008 server OR Windows 2000 Professional workstation OR Windows XP workstation OR Windows Vista OR Windows 7 OR Windows 8 OR Windows 2012 5 6 Installing the Agent gt Can multiple agents execute on the same host No Only a single eG agent should execute on a host gt Does the agent need to be installed in a system to discover the components in it No An agent is not required to be inst
71. eport will all the measures chosen for comparison always be plotted in a single graph No It is not mandatory for all the measures being compared to be plotted in a single graph By choosing the Graph Type as Multiple instead of the default Single you can ensure that each of the selected measures are plotted in individual graphs gt I had a problem between 3 5pm yesterday Can I do a post mortem analysis find out what was the problem and how the measures were Yes The Snapshot Reports offered by the eG Reporter enable you to perform a post mortem analysis on a monitored environment What are the different types of Consolidated reports provided by eG Reporter What does each report type do The following Consolidated reports are offered by eG Reporter Server Report To simplify individual server monitoring eG Enterprise offers the Server Report where the critical performance results of a particular server are aggregated over time and made available e Zone Report In large zones that consist of tens of thousands of servers it is very difficult for administrators to focus on the performance of individual servers a zone wide overview of performance is hence desired Therefore to enable administrators to evaluate the performance of specific component types that constitute the zone the suite provides Zone Reports This report by default reveals the average performance of the component type as a whole e g all Oracle da
72. esholding capability eG Enterprise offers the FIXED THRESHOLD CONFIGURATION page To access this page select the Global Thresholds option from the Threshold sub menu of the Agents menu Is there a separate interface for viewing threshold configurations Yes Follow the menu sequence Agents gt Thresholds gt View to view the threshold configurations of chosen components component types 6 16 Configuring Alarm Policies gt What are the alarm policies currently supported by eG How are they different from each other The eG Enterprise Suite includes four preset alarm policies namely standard immediate shortterm and longterm These alarm policies are used by the system to determine when to generate alarms For instance there might be an instantaneous spike in the CPU utilization of a system While an instantaneous spike may not be a problem a set of periodic spikes or a persistent increase in the measurement may indicate a problem To differentiate between these different scenarios eG uses two parameters Window size and Number of crossings While Window size reflects the number of measurements in the past that are used to determine the current state of a measure the number of crossings indicates the minimum number of measurements in the window which if abnormal change the state to bad For eg if Window size is 3 and Number of crossings is 2 then it means that eG will generate an alarm if 2 readings out of every 3 readings of a mea
73. evere space crunch the VMs associated with that datastore may fail to operate and this would render the VMs inaccessible to users gt What are the different types of Thin Client reports that are on offer gt The eG Reporter provides the following Thin Client reports VON ON WV The Zone report The User report The Session report The Application report For elaborate details on how to generate these reports refer to the eG User Manual Is the information displayed in a Thin client report configurable 83 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite Yes Using specific sections of the eg_report ini file in the lt EG_INSTALL_DIR gt manager config directory you can configure the data to be displayed in a thin client report Please refer to the eG User Manual for more information gt Does the eG Reporter provide any Prediction Reports Yes it does Prediction Reports analyze the history of metrics and provide a prediction for the future A Prediction Report applies built in prediction mechanisms and sophisticated forecasting techniques on historical data for a metric to automatically compute how that metric is likely to change in the future The result is a graph where historical data and future predictions are both plotted together With the help of Prediction Reports administrators can Clearly understand how load was and how it will change in the future Accurately determine when in the future the cu
74. f the values of a chosen measure for a specified timeline For example a Sum graph of TCP connections to a Terminal server serves as an accurate indicator of how busy the Terminal server was during a given period Note The capability of the eG manager to compute the Sum and Average of metrics is governed by the Compute average sum of metrics while trending flag in the MANAGER SETTINGS page Configure gt Manager Settings in the eG administrative interface By default this flag is set to Yes indicating that eG Enterprise computes and stores the average and sum values of every performance metric in the database by default If for some reason you want to disable this capability just set this flag to No and Update the changes gt I need to know which Citrix server related metrics are currently under performing but really don t wish to take the cumbersome layer test measure route Do you have an alternative eG agents are capable of extracting a wealth of performance information pertaining to the managed components Larger the environment larger will be the number of measures collected The biggest challenge for the administrators of such large environments therefore is to isolate and attend to the anomalies surrounding certain critical performance metrics For instance administrators of large mission critical Citrix environments might want to focus on some sensitive performance areas such as user sessions to the Citrix farm reso
75. f 50 will result in a Minor priority alarm Note To omit a particular alarm priority priorities from a multiple threshold specification replace the value that corresponds to that priority with a hyphen For example to omit the Major priority alarm for the Disk utilization measure the threshold specification should be 90 50 gt How do I define thresholds for a measure Typically depending upon the nature of the performance metrics reported by the eG agent administrators may set either Absolute or Relative thresholds for the metrics For instance while Absolute thresholds can be set for time invariant measures such as disk space usage dynamic parameters such as connections to a web site are better governed by relative automatic thresholds A key advantage of automatic thresholds is that the administrators do not have to spend endless hours configuring thresholds for each and every metric While auto thresholding is ideal for infrastructures with periodic workloads this can result in false alerts when used in infrastructures where the workload is not as periodic To overcome this limitation eG Enterprise allows administrators to set a combination of fixed and automatic thresholds for each metric For example take the case of the number of connections to a target server in an IT infrastructure Since this measure increases during the working hours and decreases during the non working hours of the infrastructure the maximum
76. f the Infrastructure menu will enable the administrator to view the transactions that have been configured From here click the ADD DELETE TRANSACTION button beside the transaction to be deleted Finally click the DELETE button to remove the transaction permanently gt Based on what criteria do define transactions There are two criteria that an administrator can use to define transactions that must be monitored a Administrators can configure transactions to reflect the key operations performed by users of the web site like login registration browsing of the product catalog searching the catalog adding to shopping cart deleting items from the cart payment etc By monitoring individual transactions web site operators can determine patterns of user accesses to individual transactions Moreover errors and response time issues with individual transactions can be monitored b Transactions can also be configured so as to differentiate between requests to the front end web server and requests to the backend For example considering a web site that uses the iPlanet application server all requests to the back end application server can be represented by the pattern cgi bin gx cgi where indicates zero or more characters Using this approach a web site operator can track requests sent to the back end independent of requests targeted at the front end web server and detect problems associated with the back end easily 6 14 Configuri
77. failure for the monitoring solution gt What is a Manager Cluster Differentiate between the Active Active and Active Passive clusters A cluster can have a single primary manager and one secondary manager An Active Active cluster is one where both the primary and secondary managers can both have agents reporting measures to them during normal operation Alternatively administrators can opt for an Active Passive setup wherein the primary manager alone will manage all the agents deployed during normal operation The secondary manager in such a setup will remain passive i e will be up and running but will not manage any agents unless the primary manager fails gt Is the redundant manager capability license controlled Yes The Manager Redundancy is a license controlled feature of the eG Enterprise Suite and is governed by the Cluster Type condition in the eG license If the Cluster Type condition contains the value Not Supported it indicates that the current installation of the eG Enterprise Suite supports a single manager only If Cluster Type is set to Active Active or Active Passive then it indicates that manager redundancy has been enabled for that eG installation gt By default all agents report to the Primary Manager in a cluster Can this default setting be overridden If so how Typically the manager to which an agent reports will be set during the time of agent installation itself To facilitate manager redundancy this
78. for Oracle databases HTTP for WebLogic and WebSphere application servers JDBC for Sybase etc When deploying a remote agent it is essential to ensure that the remote agent can communicate using multiple of these agentless mechanisms with the target environment appropriate firewall rules must be configured for this purpose gt When can an eG user choose between the agent based and agentless monitoring approaches Unlike many existing solutions the eG Enterprise Suite does not require that IT administrators choose between one of these contrasting approaches at the time of installing deploying the eG Enterprise Suite Instead when adding any new application system for monitoring administrators have a choice of whether to use agent based or agentless monitoring for the application or system under consideration For instance an administrator can choose to monitor the most critical servers in an agent based manner and to monitor the less critical servers in the staging development environment in an agentless manner gt Under what circumstances will the option to enable agentless monitoring for a specific component be available The eG license should indicate agentless monitoring support Atleast one remote agent has to be configured in the environment gt What are the capabilities which are not available for servers or applications monitored by remote agents Detailed diagnosis Automatic corrective script execution Remote
79. from the managed aggregate component Separate thresholds need to be set for the aggregated metrics to track deviations in the consolidated performance The state of the aggregate component is governed by these exclusive thresholds and not by the state of the components within the group Moreover since only remote agents can perform metric aggregation one more premium monitor licenses would be required for implementing this capability Using this Metric Aggregation capability administrators can perform the following Effectively assess the collective performance of a group of components of a particular type Easily study load and usage trends of server farms or groups as a whole Accurately detect resource inadequacies or unusual load conditions in the component group or farm Compare and correlate the performance of the member components with that of the aggregate component so that the reasons for performance issues with the aggregate component can be precisely determined The very first time the administrator manages adds a component of a type the eG Enterprise system dynamically creates a corresponding aggregate component type For instance if an IIS web server component is added to the eG Enterprise system for the first time a component type named IIS Web Aggregate is automatically created alongside To add a component of the dynamic aggregate component type use the Infrastructure Aggregates Add Modify menu seq
80. gle problem occurs in their environment Identifying the exact source of a problem requires a great deal of expertise and experience Moreover problem identification also takes time Correlation capabilities included in a monitoring solution can dramatically reduce the time and effort necessary for problem diagnosis To perform correlation effectively the monitoring solution should be able to correlate between the network system and application layers gt Weare currently using homegrown scripts for monitoring our infrastructure Will this not suffice A whole lot of expertise is necessary in putting together a comprehensive end to end monitoring solution The main drawbacks of homegrown scripts are e Homegrown scripts are typically constructed in an ad hoc manner to address problems that have arisen in the past Because they are put together in an ad hoc manner these scripts may not be complete comprehensive and efficient e The cost of producing documentation maintenance and periodic upgradations of homegrown scripts is often very expensive About the eG Enterprise Suite About the eG Enterprise Suite This chapter gives a basic idea about the eG Enterprise Suite and its capabilities gt How will eG s products benefit me eG s products can enable customers to e Proactively monitor and manage their infrastructure thereby offering the best performance for users e Instantly diagnose and fix problems thereby minimizing d
81. gt Why should component device configuration be monitored and managed Today s IT implementations are increasingly more complex A single server can contain thousands of configuration elements including system files kernel parameters registry keys application settings and firmware switches Each of these elements may need to meet specific IT business requirements Since a typical organization may have hundreds or even thousands of servers the number of configurations to be tracked and managed can reach millions parameters Change within an IT environment is a constant and can range from the planned such as application and operating system upgrades patch installations and approved configuration updates to the unplanned including accidental system alterations and malicious security breaches It is often these unplanned changes that have the greatest impact on the organization Leading analyst firms estimate that on average more than 60 percent of all critical system and application outages are caused by inappropriate changes The costs associated with unplanned and uncontrolled change can impact an organization on many levels Unplanned and uncontrolled change can lead to a longer time to value for new products and services and can cause inconsistent and unpredictable service Uncontrolled change can also increase security and compliance risks opening an infrastructure to malicious attacks and limiting an organization s ability to apply c
82. hapter provides an overview of monitoring IT infrastructures gt What is monitoring and how can it help me Do I need a monitoring solution A monitoring solution is critical for on going monitoring of an IT infrastructure A few of the ways in which on going monitoring can help include e Early detection of problems e Knowledge of the normal usage of your IT infrastructure so that anomalies are detected when they happen e g a sudden surge in usage a hack attack etc e Analysis of the load handling capacity of the different IT infrastructure components and to plan for capacity upgradation if required gt What are the IT infrastructure components that will need to be monitored The performance of a service depends upon various components the performance of the network the server hardware the server s operating system the individual application platforms e g middleware in use and the applications involved gt Ihave a network monitoring solution Isn t this enough Network monitoring solutions are optimized to monitor and manage key network elements such as routers hubs and switches to monitor network connectivity of the different servers and to track usage of the different network segments But an IT infrastructure is a combination of network system and application elements All of these layers are critical for efficient functioning of your infrastructure and a problem in one of these layers will have a cascading effec
83. hat appears new services can be added for monitoring by the eG Enterprise system The name of the new service has to be specified in the page that appears next Additionally an administrator will have to indicate that the service being configured is not a web site by selecting No from the list box therein For in depth details about configuring the dependencies of a service via the user interface please refer to Chapter 3 of the eG User Manual gt Can l associate a service with a zone If so how Yes a service can be associated with a zone This can be performed in 2 ways While configuring a zone you can add specific services to the zone While configuring a service you can associate the service with a zone gt While configuring service1 associated it with my zone What are the implications of this association If during service configuration you associate the service with a zone then such a service can be constructed using only the components segments that are already a part of the zone gt During service configuration realized that a segment that want to associate with the service is not available in the associated zone What do I do Any service that is associated with a zone or service will carry an ASSOCIATION section in its configuration page which not only lists the zones and segments that are mapped to the segment but also links to the corresponding zone and segment configuration pages Accordingly the
84. hatare the database requirements for the eG manager The database requirements for the eG manager are a Must be able to provide the database administrator name and password to create a new user account for the eG user b Must be able to provide the default and temporary tablespace in which the eG user account is to be created c At least 100 MB of space available for the eG user The exact size requirement depends on the target environment 5 2 Installing the Manager gt Dol need a dedicated server for the eG manager and agents We recommend a dedicated server for the eG manager The external agent executes on the same system as the manager The system on which the eG manager and external agent executes is the eG server gt Can l have multiple eG managers For scalability an IT infrastructure can choose to deploy multiple eG managers Alternatively to ensure high availability a single primary manager and multiple secondary managers can also be configured in the environment However an agent must work under the control of only one manager gt Can an existing user account be used to install the eG manager and agents Yes The installation process checks that the user account specified exists If the user account exists the installation uses the existing user account itself gt Can luse the same server for both the eG manager and the database Yes provided both the database server and the eG manager reside on the same h
85. he Default Specific option in the Thresholds sub menu of the Alerts configuration menu This will take the user to page that displays the tests that map to the selected component type The Default Thresholds option beside a test enables the administrator to configure the default threshold values for the measurements pertaining to that test for the selected server type The Specific Thresholds option on the other hand allows the user to configure the thresholds for individual servers The Refine button in the Specific Thresholds page allows users to define descriptor specific thresholds for individual server For greater details refer Chapter 3 of the eG User Manual 55 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite gt Whatare the thresholding policies that the eG Enterprise Suite supports The eG Enterprise Suite supports three threshold policies a Absolute thresholding The eG Enterprise Suite permits operators to specify time invariant lower and upper bounds for each measurement The values specified by the user depending upon their infrastructure in the Minimum and Maximum columns form the bounds The state of a measurement is abnormal if the instantaneous values of the measurement cross the lower and upper thresholds for a sustained period of time determined based on the window size and the number of threshold crossings b Relative thresholding eG agents track past history for each measurement and using statistical quality control techniques
86. ified in the ascending order For example take the case of the Pct_disk_util measure of a host This measure reports the percentage of disk space that has been utilized The user can set a single Maximum threshold of say 98 and expect to be alerted when the disk utilization crosses 98 Alternatively the user can also set multiple maximum thresholds thereby instructing the eG Enterprise system to send different types of alerts at various levels of disk usage in other words the user can instruct the eG Enterprise system to trigger a Minor alert if the disk utilization crosses 50 a Major alert if the disk utilization crosses 75 and a Critical alert if it falls beyond 90 This provides ample opportunity to the user to identify and attack problems early in its life cycle In the case of the Pct_disk_util measure in our example the Maximum thresholds can be defined as 90 75 50 Since an absolute minimum threshold is not required for the Pct_disk_util measure it can remain as none According to this specification if the Maximum threshold of 90 is violated then a Critical priority alarm will be generated This is indicative of a critical issue with the host Similarly if the value of this measure crosses the Maximum threshold of 75 then a Major priority alarm will be generated 56 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite This is indicative of the existence of a major issue with the host Likewise a value beyond the Maximum threshold o
87. in the future capacity requirements of their critical servers systems The Correlation Report enables this correlation analysis With the help of this report administrators can pick two closely related measures and plot their historical values in a single graph with one measure being the X axis and the other being the Y axis For instance you can pit disk space usage against free space on the disk in the same graph To generate this report follow the Capacity Planning gt Correlation menu sequence gt Does the eG Enterprise Suite have basic correction capabilities Yes The eG Enterprise Suite includes a powerful Remote Control capability that allows monitor supermonitor users to remotely manage and control servers from a web browser itself From the browser a supermonitor can execute commands on a monitored server run some diagnosis and initiate corrective actions to fix any problems gt Will Remote Control Actions cause security breaches in the target environment The control actions are enabled with no change in the eG architecture The agents do not listen on any TCP ports Hence security risks in the target environment are minimum Furthermore since control actions can be initiated from a web browser they can be triggered from any where at any time gt What kind of commands can be issued to an agent host remotely All non interactive commands that can be executed from command prompt WIN or prompt UNIX can be issu
88. ing shift periods for email SMS escalation alerts you can ensure that these alerts are received only during specified time periods gt How to configure Email alerts to be sent out during shifts To configure shift periods for email alerts do the following e First enable the Email alerts only during shift periods flag by setting it to Yes in the ADD USER page 29 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite e Upon setting the flag to Yes you will be required to specify the Days on which the user should receive email alerts also in the Shifts field alongside you need to mention the specific time periods on the chosen Days at which the user should receive email alerts e First click on the Calendar control E next to the Days field e From the DAYS list that pops out which lists the days of the week select the days on which email alerts need to be sent to the user e To choose more than one day from the list select a day by clicking on the left mouse button and then with the Ctrl button on your keyboard pressed click on another day to select it Similarly multiple days can be selected To add your selection to the Days field click the Add button in the DAYS list You will thus return to the ADD USER page where the selected days will be listed against the Days field e Next using the Shifts field provide the specific time periods at which email alerts should be sent out to the user on the chosen days For that do the following
89. ioning of your system and applications up and running Has the hotfix patch been applied to all target systems Do any systems require additional hard disk space If so which ones Do any systems require their RAM size to be increased If so which ones Have all Windows systems been updated with their latest service pack Which are the systems that are supported by a particular processor family Which systems in your environment have been assigned static IP addresses and which ones hold dynamic IP addresses How many printers has a system been configured with What is the current status of each printer Have any configuration changes occurred during the last 24 hours If so when exactly and what are its details Was this a planned change or an accidental one Could this configuration change have induced a drop in the performance level of the system application Can any difference be noticed in the configuration of two components of the same type If so could this difference be the cause for the poor performance of one of the components Which are the systems that fulfill a specific configuration requirement For more details about the console please refer to the eG Configuration Management console 93 Conclusions Conclusions This manual clarifies common questions that users may have regarding the eG product For more information on the eG Enterprise Suite of products please visit our web site at www eginnovations com
90. is regarded as a premium agent c External Agent These are agents that execute tests from locations external to the servers and network components of an infrastructure Selecting any of the above agent types will invoke a list of agents of that type accompanied by their status 5 A d vba against each agent indicates that the agent has been deployed A against each agent implies that the agent has not been deployed A full charge on the cell in the Status column indicates that the eG agent is up and running gt Can l restart all agents from the eG administrative interface Yes Clicking on the Restart All Agents button in the AGENTS STATUS page Agents gt Status gt Details menu sequence remotely initiates an agent restart gt Canl restart one particular agent Yes To do so first click on the RESTART button corresponding to the agent in the AGENTS STATUS page gt What does the INFORMATION page reveal This page reveals agent related information which includes The Agent IP Nickname gt An indicator as to whether the auto upgrade capability has been Enabled for that agent or Disabled The ID of the last upgraded package if any if no upgrading has occurred then this will be None gt The date and time at which the agent was last upgraded 59 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite The HostName of the agent The operating system on which the agent is executing The current version of th
91. is the resource usage of a VM impacting the physical resources available with the server 80 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite Virtual Machines Details The Virtual Machines Details report enables administrators to zoom into a particular VM analyze its performance up close and accurately determine the following Has the VM been frequently moved to other hosts Which are the servers to which a VM has been Vmotioned during a given period Why was the VM moved Is it because the VM is resource intensive and is hence eroding the physical resources of the host or is it owing to the fact that the host is not adequately sized to support the VM s operations How well is the VM using the resources allocated to it Are spikes in usage sporadic consistent Have these usage patterns impacted the performance of any of the hosts on which the VM was Vmotioned XenMotioned to during the designated period What could be the reason for this anomaly a resource hungry application executing on the VM or insufficient resource allocation to the VM by the host VM Distribution Report In large virtualized farms it is often difficult for administrators to know the VMs configured on the various virtual hosts and the current status of each VM The use of VMotion XenMotion technologies to migrate resource intensive VMs to hosts that are well sized compounds the problem as tracking the movement of VMs across hosts becomes
92. it tedious to look across multiple interfaces eg the SERVICE LIST page the SERVICE TOPOLOGY page the Layer Model tab page etc to identify problematic services and to isolate the problem source Such administrators would therefore prefer a single central Service Dashboard that not only introduces them to the problematic services but also readily provides them with all the information that they may require such as the components associated with the service the relationship between the components the state of each component and the metrics they report to deep dive into the issue at hand and zero in on its root cause without requiring cumbersome navigation eG Enterprise provides such a dashboard The Service Dashboard boasts of a left panel that contains a tree structure with a global Services node Expanding this node will list all the services that are monitored in the target environment as the sub nodes When you expand a particular service node in the Services tree the components that are associated with that particular service will appear as its sub nodes The current state of every service component will also be indicated When you click on a particular service sub node a context sensitive right panel will appear with contents varying according to the service chosen from the left panel By default the right panel comprises of 3 tab pages a Systems tab page providing an at a glance view of all host level measures for each compone
93. ite gt What is the maximum number of tiers servers measures that can be defined for a custom Quick Insight view A maximum of 15 tiers can be configured In every tier a maximum of 15 servers can be added and every server can be associated with an upper limit of 15 measures gt Can ladd multiple servers to a tier at one shot Yes Once a new tier is added the button alongside the tier name in the DESIGN VIEW Clicking on this button will lead you to a page using which multiple servers can be simultaneously added to the tier Similarly a amp I button appears alongside every server in a tier allowing you to add multiple measures to a server at one shot gt Can l share the Quick Insight views I create with other users Yes you can gt How dol share custom views with other users While configuring the LAYOUT of your view you can pick an option from the Sharing list box to indicate whether not you want to share you view with other users gt What options are available in the Sharing list box Private If you set a view as Private then all other users to the eG Enterprise system will be denied access to that view Only the creator of the view will be able to access the view Public If you set the view as Public then only users with the following rights will have access to that custom view o Users with access to all the managed components in the environment o Users with access to one more components that are incl
94. itors should be reserved for Basic Agents and how many for Agentless Basic Components This way administrators can move the licenses between agent based and agentless components without actually modifying the license Premium Monitors are typically a combination of premium agents agentless premium components and external agents These concepts have been demystified below gt Premium Agents If any applications on the host e g Web email DNS etc have to be monitored the internal remote agent used for this purpose is counted as a premium agent 13 Licensing Policy of the eG Enterprise Suite gt Agentless Premium Components In eG parlance hosts applications that are monitored in an agentless manner are called Agentless Components All applications that are monitored using a remote agent are called Agentless Premium Components gt External Agents The eG license restricts the number of external agents that can be configured in the target environment Since each eG installation requires at least one external agent the customer s license must allow for at least one The total number of Premium Monitors that an eG installation is allowed to use is automatically computed as the difference between the Total Monitors and Basic Monitors For instance if the eG license allows 20 monitors totally and 7 basic monitors then 13 will be automatically set as the maximum number of premium monitors that can be configured in the environmen
95. l specification of inter application dependencies Discovery of inter application dependencies is initiated by the agents Using a variety of approaches e g reading application configurations checking Windows registry entries checking TCP port connectivity etc each eG agent discovers inter dependencies between applications running on the system it is installed on and other applications in the infrastructure The eG manager is responsible for aggregating dependency information reported to it by different eG agents When an administrator constructs a segment he she now has the option to create the segment s topology manually or by using auto discovered information If the administrator chooses to use the auto discovered information he she can choose the starting components of the segment and from there view the auto discovered dependencies For each dependency the administrator has the option to delete or reconfigure the dependency After all the dependencies have been reviewed the administrator can save the segment and its topology As before this information is then used by eG Enterprise s patented correlation engine for automatic root cause diagnosis 41 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite gt How dol enable agent based discovery Follow the Agents gt Settings gt Discovery menu sequence and set the Enable agent discovery flag in the page that appears to Yes gt How dol discover components using the eG manager F
96. le then the host name will be displayed here If the policy applies to an application on the host then the component name IP will be displayed here Similarly if the maintenance policy suppresses the alerts related to a particular host level test then the test name and host name will be displayed in the format TestName HostName On the other hand if the maintenance policy hides the alerts pertaining to a particular component level test then the test name and component name will be displayed here in the format TestName ComponentName 1f multiple maintenance policies prevail during the same period then the match criteria will be displayed as a comma separated list Policy group name The policy group into which the maintenance policy policies has been added multiple groups appear as a comma separated list Policy name The name of the maintenance policy if multiple maintenance policies execute during the measurement time then the policy names will be displayed as a comma separated list Policy time The time specifications associated with the maintenance policy policies displayed against Policy name multiple time specifications are displayed as a comma separated list 6 5 Discovering Components What mechanisms does eG Enterprise use to automatically discover components in the target environment eG Enterprise is capable of automatically discovering the components in the target environment To perform this discovery admini
97. le on one of the servers 78 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite e Is there any unusual slowness observed on specific web servers o ServicesHealth Report Irrespective of whether a service is a web site or not a user may want to view the resource usage e g CPU memory disk utilitization and other key metrics about all the servers that support a specific service The ServicesHealth report addresses this requirement From this report a user only sees all the components that are specific to a chosen service and can review performance metrics across all these components to identify any bottlenecks in the infrastructure o IIS Transaction Analysis Report Whenever users to your mission critical web sites on an IIS web server or web services overlying an IIS web server complaint of slowdowns the first step to troubleshooting these issues is identifying which specific transaction s to the web sites is causing the slowdown For this you will have to periodically monitor the responsiveness of key transactions to your web sites so as to quickly and accurately identify slow transactions Also by keenly observing the variations in the responsiveness of transactions over time you can ascertain how often a transaction experienced slowdowns in a given timeline determine whether that transaction is prone to delays and investigate the root cause of the same To provide you with such in depth historical insights into a tr
98. letions Yes The eG monitoring console provides you with many interfaces with the help of which the complete history of acknowledgements and deletions can be viewed Alarm Acknowledgement History In large environments it is but natural that the same set of components are assigned to multiple users for monitoring In such environments some all the users with monitoring rights to a component might want to post their comments for an alarm related to that component If acknowledgment rights are granted to all these users then each of them can login to the monitor interface and provide an acknowledgement description for the same alarm eG Enterprise maintains a history of the acknowledgement descriptions provided by multiple users with rights to monitor a single component and lists the entire history the next time one of these users attempts to view the acknowledgement details in the CURRENT ALARMS window To view the acknowledgement history move your mouse pointer over the Aicon that appears alongside any acknowledged alarm in the CURRENT ALARMS window This way the administrative staff can share the responsibility for resolving critical issues brainstorm online to identify accurate remedies and even provide each other with quick updates on problem status If a past alarm is associated with one more acknowledgement descriptions then the EVENT HISTORY page too will automatically display the acknowledgement history below that alarm Sometimes
99. lication monitoring In addition to the layer model administrators can access key metrics at the network system and application layers directly from the dashboards For example in the system dashboard administrators can view at a glance the CPU utilization memory utilization disk usage current system configuration top CPU and memory consuming processes and other key system metrics Thus these dashboards gt Serve as a single central console that not only depict the current state of a layer but also instantly indicate the root cause of issues pertaining to that layer thereby enabling administrators to go from problem effect to the problem source in no time gt Combine both raw and graphically represented data and facilitate an in depth analysis of not just live performance but also the historical performance of a particular layer thus shedding light on potential anomalies gt Aid administrators in effectively analyzing the past trends in the performance of a layer so that they can easily forecast future performance gt Enable service level audits on the fly and thus help administrators accurately determine when a layer slipped from the desired performance levels gt Briefly describe the service dashboard Some mission critical environments may support services which are delivered by a large number of components that share intricate inter relationships with one another Administrators of such environments may find
100. ll FortiGate Firewall Terminal servers Citrix MetaFrame 1 8 XP server Citrix XenApp server Windows Terminal server Other Citrix Products Citrix Secure Gateway Citrix Secure Ticketing Authority Citrix Web Interface NFuse Citrix Access Gateway Citrix Netscaler Netscaler ADC Email servers Microsoft Exchange Instant Messenger on the Exchange 2000 server Lotus Domino R5 Sun Java Messaging Qmail server AsyncOS Mail Veritas Backup Exec server MSMQ IBM MQ FioranoMQ Novell Groupwise Tibco EMS SAP R 3 server SAP Internet Transaction server ITS SAP Web Application server MaxDB Others LDAP DNS LDAP and SunONE LDAP server DNS and Windows DNS server FTP MTS Event Logs Tuxedo domain servers Printers Windows Domain Controller NetApp filers and NetCache SiteMinder Policy server Radius server COM server Tcp server ASP NET server Network File System on Solaris server and client Network File System on Linux server and client MS RAS server MS Radius server eDirectory server Sun Ray server HP Blade server XUps Endeca Search Bluecoat AV 2X Client Gateway 2x Publishing Agent 2X Terminal server SUNONE Directory Server Cisco UCS manager Egenera PAN Manager Teratext Arbortext Teratext Content Server DoubleTake Availability Marathon everRun About the eG Enterprise Suite Virtual Infrastructures VMware ESX Servers 3 3 5 ESXi Solaris Containers Microsoft Virtual Server Solaris LDoms Citrix XenServe
101. ll throw this alarm once for all components and not once for every component This is what is called as alarm suppression gt How dolaccess the eG Reporter To access the eG Reporter select the Reports option from the Graphs menu gt Whatare the different types of Executive Reports that can be generated using the eG Reporter The eG Reporter offers the following Executive Reports COMPONENT SEGMENT SERVICE and COMPONENT TYPE gt Whatare the different types of Operation Reports that can be generated using the eG Reporter The eG Reporter offers the following Operation Reports NETWORK SYSTEM APPLICATION SITE EVENT ANALYSIS and UPTIME gt How can l save reports for future reference Once the reports are generated click on the FAVORITES button at the right top corner of the page Upon clicking the report conditions specified in the reports page will be displayed Enter a Name for the report and finally click the SAVE button To recall the report conditions click the FAVORITES tab and then click on the FAVORITE NAME listed therein How dol schedule reports The eG Reporter also provides a useful report scheduling capability that automates the process of mailing specific reports to specific individuals at pre defined intervals To schedule the printing mailing of the reports displayed a page click on the SCHEDULES button in the tool bar at the right top corner of the reports page In the page that appears next provide
102. ly the current value of the measures for the displayed components will be displayed in the Value column Optionally you can even switch off the Measures At A Glance section To do so you will have to set the Compute top metrics parameter in the MEASURES AT A GLANCE CONFIGURATION page of the eG administrative interface to No By default this parameter is set to yes indicating that by default the monitor home page will contain the maximum minimum computations for 67 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite measures i e the Measures At A Glance section When it is set to no the Measures At A Glance tab is hidden from the home page and the Event Analysis tab alone appears gt The Event Analysis tab page when clicked lists the top 5 layers that were most affected by performance issues Corresponding to every layer name in the Event Analysis section you will see the number of alarms that are currently open for that layer the average duration of the open alarms and the maximum duration for which an alarm had remained open To the right of the tab page you will find a list of components that experienced the most number of performance issues during the last one hour by default Against every component listing the corresponding component type and the number of events the component encountered during the default period of one hour is displayed This information brings to light the most problem prone components in the
103. manager agent association can be overridden using the eG administrative interface To change the mapping use the ASSIGN AGENTS page Agents gt Redundant Manager gt Assign Agents menu sequence of the eG administrative interface gt Is the option to manually override the manager agent association available to all types of clusters No The option to assign agents to specific managers will not be available for an Active Passive cluster gt What happens when a manager that was down earlier comes back up When a manager comes back online the agents which had earlier switched to report to the other manager in the cluster will automatically begin reporting measures to the original manager to which they were assigned Also when a manager is offline the other manager receiving data from agents will store the data that it receives from the agents locally When the manager comes back up the other manager will transmit the saved data to the manager that has just come up This ensures that there is minimal data inconsistency between the different eG managers gt What do Ido to remove a primary manager from a cluster To remove a primary manager from a cluster the secondary manager should be converted into a primary manager For further details about configuring manager redundancy refer to the eG User Manual gt Doall managers in a cluster allow admin logins No An administrator can login and make configuration changes using the prim
104. me of the sensitive performance parameters have performed during the last 1 hour by default gt The resource hungry processors supported by the host and the disk partitions on the host that are currently experiencing a space crunch The Network Dashboard allows you to zoom into the performance and problems pertaining to the Network layer and related layers of a target application device Using this dashboard you can gt Determine whether not the application device currently experiences has in the past experienced network related issues gt Accurately identify the network parameters that are currently failing Understand the current network configuration gt Analyze network performance over time study the trends in network connectivity and usage and accurately deduce problem performance patterns gt Identify persistent problems with network health and the network related layers responsible for the same In order to ascertain how well an application is has been performing analysis of the performance of the System and Network layers of that application alone might not suffice A closer look at the health of the Applicaton Layers is also necessary so as to promptly detect instantaneous operational issues with the target application and also proactively identify persistent problems or a consistent performance degradation experienced by the application To provide administrators with such in depth insights into overall appli
105. ments bar graph in the Infrastructure Health section Clicking on a division in this graph will enable you to view the list of segments in a particular state Alongside each segment the IP hostname of the segment components i e components that are part of the segment and their current state will be displayed Finally click on a division in the Components bar graph for a quick update on components that are currently in a particular state 66 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite gt Below the Infrastructure Health section you will find a Measures At A Glance section that provides the min max values of critical measurements updated in real time By default using this section you can quickly find answers to the following critical performance queries a Which host across the environment is consuming the maximum CPU b Which host in the monitored infrastructure has very little free memory to its credit c Which disk partition on which host is utilized the maximum d Which is the Citrix server that supports the maximum number of active sessions e Across all monitored Citrix servers which application is CPU intensive and which Citrix server is it executing on f Which is the web server that services the maximum number of requests over time g Which network interface is using up a lot of bandwidth h On which host are TCP retransmits very high i Where in the target environment is network latency the
106. mobile no s When multiple mail IDs are specified an administrator can specify which mail address es need to be in the To field of the mail alarm and which ones should be in the Cc and Bcc fields If a mobile number s is specified then a compact alarm report ideal for a mobile phone console is generated However note that eG alarms will be forwarded to a mobile phone only if an eG SMS Manager has been installed in the network and the eG manager has been configured to work with the SMS manager gt want the email alert to a specific user to include the detailed diagnostics as well Is this possible Yes You can configure a user profile to additionally receive the detailed diagnosis if any associated with a problem measure in the email alerts For this just set the Include detailed diagnosis in mail alerts flag in the ADD USER page to Yes 26 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite gt Besides problem information and detailed diagnosis what more can an email alert contain Specific user profiles can be configured to receive additional measure details in email alerts Such additions can be any of the following a graph of the problem measure plotted for the last 1 hour OR the data plotted in a 1 hour measure graph gt Can specify the alarm priorities that a user can view in the eG monitor console s Alarm window Yes By selecting specific alarm priorities from the ALARM DISPLAY field in the ADD USER page an administra
107. monitored Explain the Quick Insight view Often administrators may wish to track the values of certain key metrics in a single dashboard so that they can proactively determine when the IT infrastructure may need attention The metrics to be tracked may differ from one administrator to another The eG Quick Insight offers an easy way for administrators to quickly track key metrics at each of the infrastructure tiers With the help of this option users can define infrastructure tiers to be monitored add critical components for monitoring within each tier and associate key metrics requiring closer observation with every component Besides providing a holistic view of the environment at a single glance this option enables users to focus on the more sensitive and critical components in the environment and keep a close watch over their performance gt Whatare the key ingredients of a custom view Tiers A custom view is divided into broad sections known as tiers A tier can be based on geography or it can match the different infrastructure tiers for eg the database tier the web server tier or it can even be a service segment Servers Each tier comprises of one or more servers Typically the critical servers in the monitored infrastructure are added to a tier Metrics These are the key performance statistics that need to be extracted from every component in a tier 86 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Su
108. n and hence both administration and monitoring using the eG products are enabled through a web browser gt am already using a network monitoring system Can the eG Enterprise Suite integrate it into my environment Yes The eG manager can be configured to send SNMP traps to any network monitoring system console gt Does the eG Enterprise Suite use SNMP for measurements Many of eG s pre defined tests make measurements using SNMP Monitoring of routers load balancers many application servers etc is done using SNMP gt What are the stages involved in deploying the eG Enterprise Suite Deploying the eG Enterprise Suite in a business environment is a very simple task The following are the different steps involved in deploying the eG Enterprise Suite 1 Installation of the eG manager and the agents This stage mainly involves deployment of the software on the appropriate servers creating user accounts and setting up the directory structures 2 Configuration of the eG manager and the agents In this stage the environment is set up for the proper operation of eG and the manager and agent processes are started 3 Administration of the eG At this stage the user interacts with the eG manager through the eG manager user interface to determine where agents must be deployed what tests these agents must run how often the tests should run etc 4 Monitoring using the eG Enterprise system At this stage using the user interfac
109. n order to simplify the process of deploying the agents eG Enterprise offers the auto upgrade capability By default this capability is disabled for all agents Once it is enabled then the next time the agents check the manager for the existence of an upgrade the manager will send the upgrade if any to the agents The agent will then install the upgrade automatically gt How dol enable the auto upgrade capability of the eG agent Please refer to the eG User Manual for a detailed procedure on how to enable the auto upgrade capability 6 18 Manager Redundancy gt Whatis a redundant eG manager configuration In the default deployment the eG Enterprise Suite has a single central manager that receives performance metrics from the agents detects anomalies and sends email and SMS alerts to administrators regarding a probable problem condition In this scenario if the eG manager fails critical issues in the target infrastructure e g failure of a network router stopping of a key application process will go unnoticed and therefore unattended To ensure high availability of the eG monitoring solution the eG Enterprise Suite offers a redundant manager option wherein a secondary manager can act as an active or passive standby for the primary manager This 60 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite capability together with the ability to deploy redundant external agents in multiple locations ensures that there is no single point of
110. n to view the list of open alarms that correspond to that state Below the Current Status section is the section that reveals the Infrastructure Health Since the health of an infrastructure depends entirely upon the performance of each of its key ingredients namely the Components Zones Services and Segments this section takes the help of a bar graph to clearly indicate the number of zones services segments and components that are in the Critical Major Minor Normal and or Unknown states The table below explains the color coding scheme adopted by eG for indicating the states of the services segments components Color State Red Critical Orange Major Pink Minor Green Normal Blue Unknown If you click on a division in the Zones bar graph you will be lead to a page that lists the zones which are in that particular state Clicking on a division in the Services bar graph in the Infrastructure Health section will lead you to a page that lists the services which are in that particular state By default against every service in this page the service components i e the components that are associated with the service and their current state will be displayed Clicking on a division in the Service Groups bar graph will lead you to a page that lists the service groups which are in that particular state Next to know how well every segment configured in the environment has fared take a look at the Seg
111. nd agentless approaches 1 Agent based approach 1 Premium Monitor license for every ESX server to be monitored 5 Premium Monitor licenses 1 Premium Monitor license for the default external agent installed on the eG manager Total 6 Premium Monitor licenses 2 Agentless approach No license is required for the remote agent that monitors all 5 ESX servers 1 Premium Monitor license for every ESX server to be monitored by the remote agent 5 Premium Monitor licenses 1 Premium Monitor license for the default external agent installed on the eG manager Total 6 Premium Monitor licenses 14 Licensing Policy of the eG Enterprise Suite gt Does the eG license control the Agentless Monitoring capability Yes Agentless Monitoring is indeed a license controlled feature of the eG Enterprise Suite 15 Installing and Configuring the eG Enterprise Suite Installing and Configuring the eG Enterprise Suite This chapter delves into the details of installing and configuring the eG Enterprise Suite 5 1 Prerequisites for the Manager gt What are the hardware prerequisites for the eG manager a A minimum of 2 GB RAM would be required for installing the eG manager on a 32 bit host for a 64 bit host on the other hand a minimum of 4 GB RAM would be required b A minimum of 1 GB of disk space free gt Whatare the software prerequisites for the eG manager 1 On Unix the requirements are i Solaris 10 or higher
112. nd the processes running on it To use a basic agent the user must manage the host as any of the following Generic server Eventlog server Windows Generic server Linux Solaris AIX HPUX Windows server MS File server or MS Print server gt Agentless Basic Components eG Enterprise supports both agent based and agentless monitoring of target components For implementing agentless monitoring the solution uses Remote agents A remote agent implements agentless monitoring for one or more of the target servers applications i e without requiring an internal agent for the target server application the remote agent can collect critical statistics about the target For more details regarding eG s Agentless Monitoring capability refer to the eG User Manual In eG parlance hosts applications that are monitored in an agentless manner are called Agentless Components Typically a Generic server Windows Generic server Linux Solaris AIX HPUX Windows server MS File server MS Print server AS400 server Netware server Snmp Generic server when managed by remote agents will be counted as Agentless Basic Components The eG license does not restrict the number of Basic agents or Agentless Basic components that can be configured in an eG installation instead it only restricts the total number of Basic Monitors This imparts to customers the flexibility to decide how to use the basic monitors i e they can decide how many of the Basic Mon
113. ng Tests gt How dol configure the tests for different component types For each component type the eG Enterprise Suite has a set of predefined tests These tests can be configured via the Configure sub menu of the Agents Tests menu The Configure menu provides two options namely Specific and Default While many of the eG tests do not require any manual configuration some tests require explicit manual configuration To configure such tests 54 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite for all components of a type pick the Default option To configure a test for a specific component of a type pick the Specific option Regardless of the option chosen from the Configure menu a page displaying the list of tests that are not configured appears Choosing any of the unconfigured tests will lead the user to a screen from where the user can proceed to configure the test gt How dol configure the tests for an Oracle database server As already mentioned eG agents can collect a variety of statistics regarding Oracle database servers While configuring the Oracle tests a link is provided along with the parameters to be configured The user is taken to the ADD NEW USER page by clicking on the link Click here above the list of parameters to be configured The host name port number and the sid of the Oracle server to be configured appear in the corresponding location To add a new user specify the database administrator s login and password
114. nistrators and network operators have found that configuring and tracking the licenses required by a monitoring system itself can be even more time consuming and laborious than managing their networks and servers directly Many application monitoring tools enforce strict licensing on the software agents that are used to monitor servers and applications Separate agent licenses need to be purchased based on various parameters like the deployment platform the types and number of applications monitored the number of CPUs etc Based on the market feedback eG has introduced a powerful single agent licensing policy for its agents As per this policy a single eG agent can monitor all the applications executing on a server Moreover agent licenses are not tied to operating systems or node locked thereby allowing operators to pick and choose where they want to deploy the agents and to even dynamically change the location of the agents Its simple and cost effective agent licensing model makes eG an attractive solution for IT infrastructure monitoring gt How dol get a license for the eG products Once you get the demo software you should send an email to license eginnovations com with the following information to obtain a valid license IP address of the host on which you will run the manager how many agents they want to use and the address of their organization as well as a contact name 12 Licensing Policy of the eG Enterprise Suite gt H
115. nt engaged in the delivery of the chosen service a Components tab page providing an at a glance view of all the application level metrics for each service component and the Topology tab page displaying the service topology An additional Transactions tab page will appear for web site services alone The Transactions tab page will display all the transactions that have been configured for a chosen web site the current state of each transaction and the metrics collected in real time for every transaction 71 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite gt What dashboards accompany each application device that is monitored and what is their purpose While all components monitored come with a System and Network dashboard Application dashboards are available for a few key applications only The System Dashboard of an application allows you to focus on the performance of the operating system on which that particular application runs i e the Operating System layer of an application Using the System Dashboard administrators can determine the following gt The current status of the application host gt The problems that the host is currently facing and the type and number of problems it encountered during the last 24 hours gt The current system configuration if the eG license enables the Configuration Management capability gt The current state of the critical parameters related to system performance How so
116. o the same manager can view data in different languages However some languages such as Chinese Japanese and Korean support a double byte character set To view data in the eG user interface in Chinese Korean or Japanese the eG manager should be explicitly configured to display and process double byte characters In such a case enable double byte support for the eG manager by specifying y On the other hand for handling the character sets of other languages example French German Spanish Portugese etc the eG manager need not be double byte enabled At such times enter n to disable double byte support for the eG manager 18 Installing and Configuring the eG Enterprise Suite To double byte enable an eG manager installation simply type y in case of a Unix manager or click the Yes button in case of a Windows manager when manager setup prompts you for your confirmation to enable the usage of a double byte character set For the other steps to be followed to ensure complete double byte support refer to Chapter 4 of the eG Installation Guide 5 4 Starting the Manager gt When l start the eG manager what processes can expect to see On Unix environments look for the following processes a Anumber of web server processes with a path of opt egurkha manager apache bin httpd b One tomcat process search for a pattern java Xbootclasspath in the ps output c The eG manager s recovery process eGmon On Windows
117. ompliance strategies or the principles of good corporate governance Auditors who discover evidence of uncontrolled change are likely to cite the organization for deficiencies or in the most severe case a material weakness Finally uncontrolled change can increase administrative costs as systems fail to provide the level of service expected and IT teams are forced to duplicate efforts and repeat processes in an effort to ensure systems remain functional gt What are the challenges in monitoring and managing the current configuration and the changes to it Traditional methods of managing and monitoring configuration settings are impeded by IT staffs that simply do not have time or resources to look at each element of a complex infrastructure individually This can initially result in systems being deployed into the infrastructure that are not fully configured to a defined standard Even when deployed properly over time the lack of visibility into the environment will result in configuration drift configuration settings that without staff knowledge have changed over time until they are far from what they are supposed to be Configuration drift negatively impacts an enterprise s operational performance and availability security and eventually state of compliance to internal and external standards 91 Configuration Management gt How doe eG Enterprise help in managing configuration What administrators require is a single integra
118. omponent then they will override the default configurations Similarly if no user site application host specific reports have been configured then the default configurations will apply automatically 38 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite 6 4 Maintenance Policies gt What are Maintenance Policies and why do we need them During times when an IT infrastructure is under maintenance it is but natural that few all of the monitored components are rendered unavailable This in turn could cause the monitoring tool to generate a plethora of alarms indicating a non existent problem situation In order to prevent such an occurrence eG allows administrators to e Define maintenance policies using the Configure Maintenance gt Define Policies menu based on the periodicity of the maintenance procedures performed on the environment e Group the defined policies using the Configure gt Maintenance Define Groups menu e Associate the groups with components hosts in the target environment using the Configure gt Maintenance gt Associate Groups menu e These features enable administrators to switch off eG alarms for specific components during maintenance periods gt Whatdolassociate maintenance policies with You can associate maintenance policies with hosts applications or specific tests When do maintenance policy configuration changes take effect Changes made to maintenance policies are instantly propag
119. ording to the node chosen from the left panel By default this panel provides 3 tab pages a VMs tab page that provides current status updates related to virtual machines a Hosts tab page that displays virtual host specific metrics gathered in real time and a Current Events tab page that lists the problems currently experienced by virtual hosts and guests By default all the tab pages provide information pertaining to managed VMware vSphere ESX servers in the environment Accordingly the VMware vSphere ESX option is chosen from the drop down list in the top right corner of the right panel You can view details for a different virtual component type by selecting a different option from this drop down list gt Are dashboards available only for Zones and Virtual Infrastructures What about other servers applications The eG monitoring console now provides dashboards for each of the critical layers of an application device that you can zoom into the current and historical performance of that entity using a single interface Dashboards are also available for segments and services When you have the layer model why do we need application specific dashboards By default the primary means of analyzing the performance of an infrastructure component a network device a server or an application is by using a layer model representation The layer model is hierarchically structured and each layer mapped to specific functionality of the compon
120. ormed and the root cause of the issue identified Administrators of these vast environments often have to toil for hours to identify the problem servers The Users Search option provided by the eG Enterprise suite is tailored for such large environments This option lists the servers accessed by a specified user and the last access time for each server so that administrators can quickly and accurately identify the server that was being accessed by the user when he she reported a problem Moreover to support the administrator s diagnostic efforts this page provides links to tools such as graphs and detailed measures thus facilitating swift problem isolation and resolution gt How does VM Search help the users Large virtualized environments typically comprise of hundreds of host operating systems supporting heterogenous virtualization technologies VMware Xen LDOMs etc with tens of virtual machines configured on each host When the users in such environments report that they are unable to access a particular VM administrators often take hours to figure out which server the VM is operating on and what its current state is To enable administrators to quickly determine the location of a VM and its powered on state eG Enterprise offers the VM Search capability gt How to access the VM Search page Select VM Search from the Options menu Once the VM SEARCH page appears specify the name of the VM to search for in the Virtual Machine
121. ost gt Can the manager and agent be installed using different user accounts On different hosts the manager and agent can be installed in different user accounts However on the same host the manager and agents must be installed using the same user account The installation directory should also be the same 17 Installing and Configuring the eG Enterprise Suite gt gt gt am installing the eG manager The manager install prompts for a database username password Do I need to create this user account in the database No The install process will create the user account if it does not exist The manager install process prompts for data and temporary tablespaces when using an Oracle database as the backend Do I need to manually create these tablespaces No You can use existing data and temporary tablespaces To find tablespaces go to the sql prompt and type the command select from v tablespace This will report the existing tablespaces to you Choose the data and temporary tablespaces from this am installing an eG manager on a Windows box My environment does not comprise of an Oracle or an MS SQL server Is there an alternative database that can use If you choose not to use an Oracle or an MS SQL server backend for a Windows 2003 Windows 2008 Windows 7 Windows 8 Windows 2012 eG manager then you can install and use the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 2008 2012 Express The eG manager setup itself takes car
122. ow dol know if have a valid eG license Issue the command opt egurkha bin viewCert opt egurkha bin license on Unix environments On Windows environments issue the command lt target dir gt egurkha bin viewCert lt target dir gt egurkha bin license The output will provide information about the validity of the eG license The same information is also available from the eG user interface gt Is it necessary to install a license on each server where an agent is to be installed No The license is centrally managed by the eG manager The manager is hooked to one IP address Whereas the agents have a restriction in the number and are not hooked to any IP addresses The agents can be moved around However the number of running agents cannot exceed the number for which the license has been obtained gt Differentiate between Basic and Premium Monitors The eG license controls the total number of Monitors that can be used by an eG installation The Total Monitors listing in the eG license indicates the total number of basic and premium monitors that the current installation of eG Enterprise is allowed to use the total number of such monitors that are currently utilized and the overall usage percentage Basic Monitors are typically a combination of basic agents and agentless basic components These concepts have been demystified below gt Basic Agent A basic agent can be used to monitor only the operating system of a host a
123. ow frequently the database is purged e The hardware on which the manager executes the CPU and memory configuration of the system No special hardware is required for the eG manager gt Does an agent listen on a port eG agents do not listen to any ports and therefore reduce security risk Communications are always initiated from agents to manager Statistical information alerts are sent to the manager which will respond with a timestamp of the last configuration change New policies will be downloaded as required System Architecture gt Do the agents run periodically An agent may comprise of multiple testers one for each type of test that the eG Enterprise Suite supports A tester executes tests one after the other That is if there are two Http tests that need to be run the HttpTester will first run a test for a server A and after this it will run another test for server B A tester will attempt to run tests periodically The tester will strive to keep the same average frequency as specified agents run pseudo periodically that is they will attempt to run with the same average frequency but the exact time at which a test is run will be varied E g a test that has to be run once every 5 mins may be run after 4 mins once and after 6 mins the next time By doing so the eG agent attempts to catch performance phenomena that may happen with the same periodicity gt Can the eG Enterprise Suite use only external agents Yes Ho
124. own times and preserving their online revenues e Lower IT support costs by making monitoring simple and more effective e For service providers hosting providers Internet Data Centers and Managed Service Providers eG products can open up new revenue streams The eG Enterprise Suite s virtual manager architecture allows service providers to offer revenue producing monitoring and optimization services to their customers gt How does the eG Enterprise Suite differ from other monitoring solutions available in the market The primary differentiators of eG products relative to competing solutions are Single click problem diagnosis capability based on a patent pending correlation technology that correlates across network system and application layers to identify the root cause of problems Unlike many other solutions this capability is available out of the box and does not require elaborate set up and customization gt Real time monitoring of web servers web sites and even individual web transactions without using explicit expensive logging of requests Automatic thresholding of collected metrics so as to simplify configuration and set up Pay per use subscriber management model Personalized real time views for individual users Y Y ON WV Simple One and Only agent licensing that makes eG a cost effective solution About the eG Enterprise Suite gt What are the servers that the eG Enterprise Suite can manage eG product
125. ows to 3 and the No of Columns to 3 will ensure that you do not have to scroll down or scroll right to view the graphs The eG interface will automatically resize the graphs so that all the 9 measure graphs can be viewed at a single glance On the other hand if the number of measures configured is greater than the maximum number of measure graphs that can fit into the defined layout then the additional measure graphs can be viewed only by scrolling The nature of this scrolling can be set by selecting the Vertical or the Horizontal option Selecting the Vertical option will ensure that additional graphs are appended to the bottom of the graph display page Therefore you will have to scroll down to view the graphs To scroll right to view the graphs select the Horizontal option gt Explain the significance of the Interval and No of Times fields in the live graph configuration page If the Lookback option is chosen then proceed to select an Interval for the past values For example if the Timeline for the current measures is set to 1 hour then the current measure graph will be plotted for the last one hour say for 12 00 PM to 1 00 PM of February 22 2005 If the Interval is set to 1 day then the eG Enterprise Suite will plot the values reported between the same hour i e 12 00 PM and 1 00 PM but for the previous day i e February 21 2005 To view meaningful data it is recommended that the Interval set for the past values
126. pability Why do need a separate component called the eG Reporter While the eG manager allows specific measurements to be plotted and analyzed in isolation eG Reporter allows multiple measurements to be correlated and analyzed simultaneously gt How dol configure the reports Reports can be configured using the Configure gt Reports submenu gt What are the options offered by the Reports menu The options offered by the Reports menu are Default The eG manager includes a number of pre canned report templates These templates define the set of metrics that are plotted together on the same timeline for cross correlation and analysis These default report templates can be refined using the Default option Specific In many cases an administrator may want to specify a different set of metrics for each component being managed For example the reports for the Oracle server running on the production server could be different from that running on the staging server Such reports that are specific to a particular component application site are known as Specific Reports Such reports can be configured using the Specific option User eG Enterprise also provides administrators the ability to define reports for individual users These user reports can be configured using the User option Consolidated In order to enable you to focus on the critical hyper sensitive attributes of server zone performance eG Enterprise allows you the fle
127. parison Reports Comparison reports enable users to compare correlate and analyze across a wide variety of performance metrics generated by the monitored environment so as to facilitate quick and accurate root cause identification gt What are the different types of Comparison reports offered by eG Reporter eG offers two types of Comparison reports namely COMPONENTS TESTS and TOP N reports The COMPONENTS comparison report allows administrators to compare statistics pertaining to selected components For example a COMPONENTS report can be used to compare the responsiveness of an Oracle server DNS server a Web server and a WebLogic server The TESTS report can be used if any of the metrics collected by a test have to be plotted in the same report to facilitate easy analysis and troubleshooting For example a TESTS report can be used to compare the CPU utilization of all the hosts in a target environment Using the TOP N reports offered by eG Enterprise administrators can rank components for every metric collected by the eG Enterprise system The report also reveals the best worst players in a particular performance area thereby bringing to light components that are problem prone and which hence require continuous attention For example you can view the top 10 consumers of CPU across the infrastructure using TOP N reports 77 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite gt While generating a Components Comparison r
128. perators have different views of the web sites The eG Enterprise Suite product will enable the users to have different views gt Why doesn t the eG manager report only for the period when there was a problem Why does it report all the measures throughout The eG Enterprise Suite does relative thresholding based on usage trends and not just problem detection Hence it requires continuous measures even when the components are functioning properly This information is also required when people want to look at the usage trends and overall performance for the past 75 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite gt Whatis one click problem diagnosis When a monitor user logs into the eG user interface an alarm window showing all the current alarms in the system will appear automatically Clicking on an alarm will pin point the measure that is causing the problem in the environment This is one click problem diagnosis gt What is alarm suppression We will illustrate this phenomenon with the example given below Consider two Oracle databases in the same system One database is used by one site and the other database is used by another site When the disk is running low on space the DiskTest pertaining to the host layer will generate an alarm for each database The eG Enterprise Suite is intelligent enough to figure out that the problem is common for all the components residing on this server Thus the eG Enterprise Suite wi
129. r VMware vCenter Microsoft Hyper V AIX LPARs on IBM pSeries servers IBM HMC server Citrix Provisioning Server Oracle VirtualBox RHEV Server RHEV manager Connection Brokers Virtual Desktop Manager Leostream connection broker Xen Desktop Broker VMware View Oracle VDI Broker SAN Storage Devices Hitachi AMS Hitachi USP HP EVA StorageWorks Array IBM DS RAID Storage EMC CLARiiON Dell EqualLogic NetApp USD Other Operating Generic SNMP Generic Netware AS400 server OpenVMS server Systems Siebel Enterprise Siebel Web Server Siebel Application Server Siebel Gateway Cloud Providers Amazon EC2 vCloud Director gt What is a generic server What measures corresponding to a generic server does the eG Enterprise Suite report Basic monitoring of a host at the network and operating system levels can be performed by managing the host as a Generic server in the eG architecture For a generic server an eG agent monitors the server s CPU memory disk and network statistics In addition if desired specific application processes executing on the server can be monitored gt What platforms do the eG products support The following tables show the platforms on which the eG agent can run on Platform Version Red Hat Linux 2000 2003 2008 XP Vista 7 10 and above Free BSD 5 4 Tru64 5 1 About the eG Enterprise Suite gt How can the eG Enterprise Suite s correlation capabilities benefit me IT
130. r s profile via the administrative interface of the eG manager To reduce the burden on the central administrator the eG Enterprise Suite also provides limited 85 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite functionality for monitor users to modify their profiles On the eG Enterprise Suite s monitor interface a monitor user can choose the Profile option of the menu running across the top of the eG Enterprise Suite s customer interface to modify his her profile From this page the user can modify his her password and alarm preferences gt Can l change the skin of the Admin Monitor or Reporter consoles Yes you can gt What are the skin colors available Blue Grey Green and Purple are available gt What is the default skin color for Admin Monitor and Reporter The default Skin for the Admin console is Blue Monitor console is Gray and for the Reporter console is Purple gt Cana customer choose the language in which the eG monitoring console should display data when he she logs in Yes A customer can set a language preference using the USER PROFILE page that appears upon clicking the Profile option in the menu running across the top of the eG Enterprise suite s customer interface gt What kind of additional privileges that customers enjoy by using the eG Enterprise Suite The eG Enterprise Suite provides limited functionality for monitor users to modify their profiles and to add new transactions to be
131. r the mail Finally click the SEND MAIL to send the reports to the specified recipients gt Can schedule of automatic printing of email reports By default the eG Reporter does not allow users to schedule the automatic printing of reports If you want to schedule report printing then set the EnableSchedulePrint parameter in the MISC_ARGS section of the eg services ini file in the lt EG_INSTALL_DIR gt manager config directory to true default is false Once this is done then a Print list will additionally appear in the SAVE SCHEDULES page Indicate the frequency with which the report is to be printed by selecting an option from the Print list box Here again selecting None would ensure that the report is not printed By default how many descriptors can be displayed in the Operations Report page Is this value configurable By default a single graph in an Operations report can display a maximum of 10 descriptors This value however is configurable For that set the Maxlnfos parameter in the INFOS section of the eg report ini in the EG INSTALL DIR gt manager config directory to the required value gt What happens when I click on a report with many descriptors If a report comprising of more than 5 descriptors is clicked on then an enlarged report will appear providing you with options to restrict your view to specific descriptors only To know how to use these options refer to the eG User Manual gt What are Com
132. ree in the page and click the Auditing node tree e In the AUDITLOG section that appears in the right panel set the Enable auditlog flag to Yes e Click the Update button to save the changes gt How to generate AUDIT LOG REPORTS To view the details logged and analyze their implications eG Enterprise provides an exclusive Audits menu in its administrative interface using which you can generate a variety of AUDIT LOG REPORTS 62 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite This chapter provides solutions to the queries that may arise while monitoring IT infrastructures using the eG Enterprise Suite of products gt Does the eG Enterprise Suite need time synchronization between the manager and agents No eG does not require explicit time synchronization between systems in the target environment The eG agents and manager periodically synchronize their notions of time The agents report all the measurements based on the manager s time settings How can access the eG reports eG supports a web based user interface Hence users can access the eG reports from a browser What does the UNKNOWN state mean The unknown state depicts a condition when the eG Enterprise Suite is not able to make a valid measurement This may be because the agent is not running Alternatively if the component to be measured is not running e g a WebLogic application server is not r
133. relationships that exist between applications in an IT infrastructure The interdependencies that are so discovered are then sent to the eG manager On the other hand all those port numbers that do not conform to the specification governed by the Dependencies must be present and the Number of dependency discovery attempts parameters are counted as local ports All traffic to local ports are hence disregarded for the purpose of topology auto discovery By default the whole cycle of operations beginning with isolating the listening ports to discovering inter dependencies to reporting the discovery to the eG manager takes 180 minutes as indicated by the default value 4 against the Dependencies must be present setting to complete After which the eG agent will wait for another 360 minutes i e 6 hours by default to rediscover the topology In other words all the aforesaid activities will be performed again by the eG agent 6 hours after the first cycle is complete Like other default settings you can also override the frequency with which topology is rediscovered by the eG agent For this use the Topology rediscovery period Mins parameter which is set to 360 by default 50 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite gt Can all eG agents perform topology discovery eG Agents deployed on the following operating systems can alone perform topology discovery gt Linux gt Windows 2000 2003 2008 Vista XP 7 gt AIX Solaris and HPUX
134. restricted access to the eG Enterprise Suite Each monitor user is associated with an email address to which alarms will be forwarded The user s profile also includes information regarding the customer s alarm preferences whether alarms have to be forwarded in text or HTML mode whether a complete list of alarms has to be generated each time a new alarm is added or whether the new alarm alone should be sent via email etc Each monitor user is associated with a subscription period The eG Enterprise Suite allows the monitor users to access the system until this period only e A Supermonitor user has an unrestricted view of the monitored infrastructure He she can receive alarms pertaining to the whole infrastructure that has been configured by the administrative user The default supermonitor user is assigned the Supermonitor role only e AlarmViewer This role is ideal for help desk personnel The users vested with AlarmViewer permissions can login to the monitor interface and perform the following functions o View the details of alarms associated with the specific components and services assigned to them o Provide feedback on fixes for the alarms o View feedback history o Change their profile Like Monitor users users with this role can only monitor the components assigned to them e SuperAlarmViewer Users with the SuperAlarmViewer role have all the privileges of the AlarmViewer role In addition users with the SuperAlarmViewer rol
135. riod of time Since Internet traffic is very bursty using the measurement graphs over a long time window greater than a week to view trends in the measurements can be very difficult To make it easier to analyze trends eG monitors and stores trend data on an hourly daily and monthly basis The eG user interface allows the trend data to be plotted on a web browser gt What are the different types of trend graphs that can be generated using the eG monitoring console By default a trend graph takes the minimum and the maximum value of measurements over a period of time into consideration Accordingly the Graph list displays Min Max by default Alternatively you can even generate a trend graph where the average values of a chosen measure are plotted over a period of time To achieve this simply select the Average option from the Graph list in the TREND GRAPH page For instance you can plot a trend graph that depicts how many TCP T3 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite connections on an average were established with a critical Terminal server every day during a couple of weeks besides indicating the normal load on the Terminal server such a graph also enables you to understand whether the Terminal server has been adequately tuned to handle higher loads and thereby helps you make effective sizing recommendations for the future Likewise you can also choose Sum as the Graph type to view a trend graph that plots the sum o
136. rom the Infrastructure menu of the eG administrative interface select Discover The START DISCOVERY page will then appear This page displays two panels a left panel comprising of a DISCOVERY tree structure which consists of nodes and sub nodes that enable you to quickly navigate the discovery related options and a context sensitive right panel that changes according to the node chosen from the tree Since the Start Discovery node is by default chosen from the tree the START DISCOVERY page is available in the right panel depicting the various inputs that need to be specified before discovery can be started Refer to Chapter 3 of the eG User Manual for the details to be specified in this page Finally click on the Start Discovery button at the bottom of this page to start the discovery process gt How dol change the default port preferences mapped to a component Click on the Ports sub node under the Settings node in the tree structure in the START DISCOVERY page Using the CHANGE PREFERENCE page that displays in the right panel you can edit the port settings of applications gt Dolhave to run the discovery process every time The administrator need not run the discovery process every time Specify the Re discovery period in the START DISCOVERY page that appears when the Start Discovery sub node of the Actions node in the DISCOVERY tree structure is clicked The Rediscovery period determines the frequency with which the discovery process ex
137. rrent resource capacity of the targets may get exhausted or may be inadequate this information will enable you to re evaluate your capacity plans and make sizing changes so as to provide for such contingencies gt Isolate the exact times in the future when the overall performance of a target will dip and also figure out how poorly the targets may perform during such times potential threats to good health are thus revealed and efforts to avert them can be initiated early To generate the Prediction Report select the Prediction option from the Capacity Planning menu in eG Reporter gt Does the eG manager have prediction capabilities There is a very minor difference between reaction and prediction If the specific measure is undergoing a gradual change for example the CPU utilization growing to near 100 then the eG Enterprise Suite can easily detect this change and also display the trend values indicating that it has predicting capabilities Alarms based on trends are not generated by the eG Enterprise Suite However there are some unpredictable events that occur due to external factors like disk failure network failure etc gt What do the Cumulation and Correlation Reports help me achieve How do I generate them The Cumulation Report plots the cumulative values of a chosen measure across descriptors components for a specified timeline For instance you can generate a Cumulation Report that plots the cumulative values of disk
138. rs next All the tests mapped to the chosen component type for which DD is currently enabled will appear in the DD ENABLED TESTS list All the tests mapped to the chosen component type for which DD is currently disabled will appear in the DD DISABLED TESTS list To enable DD for a test pick the test from the DD DISABLED TESTS list and click the gt gt button this will move the selection to the DD ENABLED TESTS list Doing so will ensure that DD is enabled for the chosen test across all components of the selected type To enable DD for a specific component of a type follow the Agents Tests Configure Specific menu sequence Pick the Component type and the Component for which tests are to be configured Pick the test to be configured from the UNCONFIGURED TESTS list and click the Configure button to configure it The configuration parameters of the test will then appear If DD is enabled for this test across all components of the chosen type then an additional DETAILED DIAGNOSIS flag will appear Set this flag to Yes to enable DD for this test for the chosen component 6 2 Supermanager Configuration gt Whatis a Supermanager Large enterprises often have thousands of devices servers and applications that have to be managed and a single eG management console may not have the capacity to handle the entire enterprise To support such enterprises multiple eG managers may be needed However if each of these managers operates indepen
139. rs still prefer to view their infrastructure from a hardware perspective i e as systems they support The eG monitoring console therefore provides a system view which represents the overall health of systems in the target infrastructure with a mapping of the applications that are executing on these systems gt How do I determine the health of virtual hosts If your environment comprises of virtualized components such as VMware ESX hosts or Solaris virtual servers then selecting the Servers option from the Virtual sub menu of the Components menu will allow you to view the current state of the that have been managed by the eG Enterprise system gt How dol access the VM Dashboard The VM dashboard can be accessed by following the menu sequence Components gt Virtual gt Dashboard in the eG monitoring console gt What are the benefits of the VM Dashboard Using this dashboard administrators can e Detect from a mere glance excessive resource usage by any VM resource pool or a physical server from across the environment regardless of the virtualization technology in use quickly diagnose the root cause of the resource drain with the help of efficient drill down features e Accurately identify resource intensive VMs resource pools physical servers e Instantly spot a powered off VM anywhere in the environment e Know which VM is currently operating on which physical server and thus keep tabs on VMotion XenMotion
140. rt generation click on the OK button in the message box To terminate Trend report generation click the CANCEL button gt What type of virtualization reports does eG Enterprise offer Physical Servers Report The Physical Servers report provides deep insights into the performance of a chosen physical server or a server farm during a specified timeline and enables administrators to figure out the following o Is the server adequately sized in terms of resources o Which physical server in the farm has been consistently consuming resources excessively o Which physical server in the farm hosts the maximum number of VMs o Which physical server is the busiest in the farm in terms of disk activity and network traffic handled over time o Which physical server in the farm has been the most problem prone in the given time slot What were the top problems encountered by that physical server Virtual Machines Overview The Virtual Machines Overview report provides administrator with a closer look at the status and resource usage patterns of the VMs on a particular server or a server farm Using this report administrators can figure out the following o How many VMs across the environment are in a powered off state Which ones are they o What percentage of time has a VM been in a powered off state o Are VMs adequately sized in terms of resources o Is any VM utilizing the allocated resources extensively o How mildly badly
141. rt groups might prefer to receive problem intimation from customer specific mail IDs instead of the global admin mail ID so that they can instantly identify the customer environment that is experiencing problems currently Moreover this way every support group will be enabled to send status updates on reported issues directly to the concerned customer instead of overloading the admin mailbox To facilitate this the MAIL SMS SETTINGS page allows the administrator to configure multiple Alternative Mail sender IDs normally one each for every customer in case of an MSP environment While configuring multiple sender IDs in the space provided ensure that you press the Enter key on your keyboard after every mail ID This way every ID will occupy one row of the text area Later while creating a new user the administrator can select one of these configured sender IDs from the Mail sender list in the ADD USER page and assign it to the new user This ensures that all email alerts received by the user are generated by the chosen ID only gt If multiple alarms are generated simultaneously then by default how does the eG manager send email alerts to the configured recipients Can this default setting be overridden If multiple alarms are generated simultaneously then the eG Enterprise system by default sends a single email alert comprising of all the alarm information Accordingly the SEND SEPARATE MAIL FOR EACH ALERT flag is set to No by default
142. s it is How does the eG Configuration Management capability function eG Enterprise determines the current configuration of a component device and the changes to the configuration in about the same way it determines the level of performance achieved by that component device in other words by executing tests on the target components Like Performance tests the eG agents execute Configuration tests on the targets to extract the configuration details of the target These tests can be executed in an agent based or in an agentless manner Where are the Configuration metrics displayed You can view the current configuration of a component device and swiftly detect changes to it using the 100 web based Configuration Management console that eG Enterprise provides Using this console the following questions can be answered quickly and accurately Which are the platforms on which a particular application is currently running gt What are the applications currently executing on a particular system Which versions of an operating system are currently available in the target environment Do any of these operating systems require an upgradation 92 Configuration Management v VON ON ON ON ON WV What is the current configuration of an application Are all mandatory software like antivirus software available and running on all managed systems Which system does not have such software Are all services critical to the funct
143. s are capable of monitoring various network system and application elements in an integrated manner The table below summarizes the monitoring capabilities of the eG Enterprise Suite Component Type Component Brand Apache Microsoft IIS IBM HTTP Server Oracle HTTP Server Sun Java Web Server Web application WebLogic ColdFusion Sun Java Application server Microsoft transaction servers server WebSphere SilverStream Jrun Orion Tomcat Oracle 9i OC4J Oracle Forms Servers Borland Enterprise Servers BES JBoss Domino application server GlassFish Enterprise Server Database servers Oracle Oracle RAC Microsoft SQL server DB2 UDB DB2 DPF Sybase MySQL SQL clusters Backup SQL Intersystems Cache PostGre SQL Oracle RAC DB2 DPF Network devices Cisco routers Cisco Catalyst switches Baystack hub Cisco VPN Network nodes Local director Juniper SA and DX Device 3COM CoreBuilder switch Big IP F5 Load Balancer Brocade SAN switches Alcatel switches Generic Fibre Channel switches Cisco SAN switches Cisco CSS Cisco ASA F5 Big IP Local Traffic Manager LTM Coyote Point Equalizer Microsoft Applications Active Directory BizTalk server Windows Internet Name Service WINS Terminal server DHCP server MS Print server MS Proxy Server MS File server ISA Proxy server Microsoft Dynamics AX Windows clusters MS SharePoint FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 Firewalls Check Point Firewall 1 Cisco Pix Netscreen Firewa
144. s spread across the different locations worldwide To access the map interface that provides this visual treat select the Map option from the Zones menu in the eG monitoring console The page that then appears indicates the zone locations and their current state The geographic display of the maps within the eG Enterprise console is achieved through the integration of the eG management console with Google maps gt What is the zone tree view To the left of the zone map you will find a TREE VIEW section displaying a zone tree While the map enables you to determine the location and the current state of the zones using the tree view you can quickly determine the following e The names of the zones for which locations have been explicitly defined in the eG administrative interface e The state of each of these zones 68 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite e The names of sub zones added to a zone provided the location of the sub zone has been configured gt What do do to view the status of all managed applications in a target environment Just select the Servers option from the Components menu in the eG monitoring console gt What do Ido to view the status of all managed systems in a target environment Just select the Systems option from the Components menu in the eG monitoring console gt Whyisa System View necessary While eG Enterprise focuses primarily on monitoring applications many administrato
145. s the resource utilization of specific applications in the farm analyze user behavior across the farm detect the open sessions in the farm etc e Event Log Compliance Report In order to comply with emerging standards such as HIPPA Sarbanes Oxley etc IT infrastructure operators require a wide range of reports that reveal the service level acheived by a target environment intermittent breaks in service delivery if any the reasons for the breaks how quickly was the service restored etc To cater to these compliance requirements the eG Reporter offers Event Log Compliance reports e Virtualization Report To enable users to oversee the performance of their virtualized infrastructure over time and to analyze the resource usage patterns of VMs and physical servers deployed on various virtualization platforms eG Reporter now includes Virtualization reports e Capacity Planning To enable users to effectively plan the capacity of their environment eG Enterprise allows administrators to configure the trend manager to compute percentile values and then generate detailed Capacity Planning reports using the computed percentiles How does the eG manager prioritize the different types of Operation reports The eG manager assigns the highest priority to the user specific configuration Therefore such a configuration will override default or host application site specific configurations If specific report configurations exist for a chosen c
146. s the option to plot historic data alongside the current data in the graph so that an effective comparison of the past and the present performance can be performed and appropriate performance decisions can be easily taken Mention the default number of rows and columns that a live graph view supports What do they imply and what are the factors that need to consider before modifying the default values in the live graph configuration page The LIVE GRAPH DISPLAY page will display a measure graph for every measure chosen in the live graph configuration page These graphs will be displayed in a tabular format characterized by rows and columns Every graph will occupy a particular cell in the table By default the graph display will contain 2 rows and 2 columns Accordingly by default the value 2 will be selected from the No of Rows and the No of Columns list boxes This default layout can accommodate a maximum of 4 2 rows x 2 columns measure graphs and all the 4 graphs can be viewed at a single glance You can modify the layout by selecting a different number from the No of Rows and the No of Columns list boxes While modifying the layout i e the number of rows and columns remember that to view all the graphs at a single glance without using the scrollbar the layout for the graph display should at least provide for a cell each for each of the configured measures For example if 9 measures have been configured then setting the No of R
147. s will take you to the LIST OF UNCONFIGURED TESTS that provides the complete list of tests requiring manual configuration for the chosen component type Adjacent to the AGENT SUMMARY section is the LICENSE USAGE SUMMARY The eG license governs a wide variety of factors such as the number and type of agents that the installation can support the number of applications that can be monitored etc The information provided by the LICENSE USAGE SUMMARY helps the administrator assess whether the eG licenses are being effectively utilized Clicking on the Click here to get the license details gt link will take you to the LICENSE INFORMATION page that provides the license details as well as its usage details Finally a COMPONENTS AT A GLANCE section is available which indicates the component types that are currently monitored by eG Enterprise and the number of managed components per type Clicking on the bar corresponding to a component type leads you to the ADD MODIFY page where more components of that type can be added for monitoring gt Who are the default users to the eG Enterprise system admin and supermonitor gt Whatis a user role In large enterprises the IT staff have clearly demarcated roles and responsibilities The help desk staff are responsible for handling user complaints and their main concern when a user calls about a problem is to determine whether the user call pertains to a problem that the other operations staff
148. se system is predefined with a default administrator account with a login admin and password admin Specify the same in the space provided and click the Authenticate button gt What if forget my password while logging in Simply click on the Forgot Password button in the login page In the page that appears next provide the Username for which you have forgotten the password and click the Get Password button The password will then be emailed to the mail ID that corresponds to the specified Username gt What is the first page that appears in the eG user interface when you login as admin The eG Admin Home page appears gt What do the various sections of the Admin Home page represent This page enables the administrator to understand at a glance the status of the eG monitoring system The page reveals the following information gt The first section of the page provides the AGENT SUMMARY This section displays the total number of agents that have been configured for the environment The number of agents of each type Basic and Premium that have been configured and the number of agents that are currently running not running are also indicated Clicking on a bar corresponding to Premium or Basic agents will lead you to STATUS page that lists all the agents of the corresponding type and their current status gt Below the AGENT SUMMARY is the USER SUMMARY This section indicates the number of Expired user accounts
149. ser receives email SMS alerts for all issues pertaining to all components assigned to him her In some circumstances the user may not want to receive all of these alarms For instance in a large multi tier infrastructure a user may be monitoring all the applications and network devices involved in supporting a business service However the user may have primary responsibility only for some of the components supporting the business service e g a network administrator s primary responsibility is to monitor the network devices In such cases while the user may want to view the status of all the components of the business service he she may want to receive email or SMS alerts pertaining to specific components of the infrastructure alone e g network devices To enable such selective alerting eG Enterprise provides administrators with the option to configure the eG manager to not send out email SMS alerts related to specific layers components component types tests for specific users By default the ability to filter mail SMS alerts is disabled To enable it do the following gt Use the menu sequence Alerts gt Mail Settings gt Alerts to open the MAIL ALERT PREFERENCES page gt In the FILTER MAIL ALERTS section of the page set the Allow mail SMS filter configuration flag to Yes Once this is done a Configure mail SMS filters button will additionally appear in the page using which components segments services zones service groups
150. space usage for each of the disk partitions of a component Likewise you can configure a Cumulation Report to indicate the cumulative space usage of all servers that share the storage resources in a SAN environment Such reports not only reveal the total space usage of the individual servers disk partitions as the case may be but also reveal the overall space usage across the servers disk paritions This way you will not only be able to pinpoint the resource hungry elements in your infrastructure but will also be able to assess how well poorly the resource in its entirety was utilized during the given timeline Based on these inputs you can accurately forecast the future usage of your critical systems servers and plan their capacity accordingly To generate this report follow the Capacity Planning gt Cumulation menu sequence In order to effectively plan the capacity of their IT environments administrators have to closely observe how resource consumption responsiveness overall performance of a component varies vis a vis its load For instance administrators might want to check how disk space usage is affected by high disk activity or correlate the response time of a Web server with the connections to that server The results of this correlation analysis will enable administrators to judge how 84 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite usage response time will be affected by the anticipated load and accordingly ascerta
151. ssential to ensure that the firewalls are configured to allow all communications to and from the web server component of the eG manager 3 2 Agents gt Whatis an agent What are the types of agents that the eG Enterprise Suite supports Agents are software components deployed at various points in the IT infrastructure Agents use different approaches for testing the target environment The tests can be executed from locations external to the servers and network components that are responsible for the operation of the infrastructure Agents that make such tests are called external agents These agents take an external view of the target environment and indicate if the different services supported by the environment are functioning properly or not Often external agents alone may not be sufficient to completely gauge the health of an IT infrastructure and to diagnose problems when they occur For example it may not be possible to measure the CPU utilization levels of a web server from an external location To accommodate such situations the eG Enterprise Suite uses internal agents An internal agent runs on a server System Architecture that supports the IT infrastructure and monitors various aspects pertaining to the server e g CPU memory and disk utilization the processes executing on it and the applications gt How many external agents does an eG manager support An eG manager has the capability to support multiple external agents
152. ssssassssesssssssesssescssssssassesessssssscsssesssssessassssessesesscssseasscsessasesess 3 SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE cccsssssssssssssssssssssssessscssscsssssssssessssessessesessssssessssssssssssessssessessssasssseseassesessssssscssseassssessassesessssessesessasseseseassssesseseses 8 3 1 I pm 8 320 Agents eene 8 3 3 Manager Agent Communication 10 34 Databaser EN 11 LICENSING POLICY OF THE EG ENTERPRISE SUITE eee eese tette tentatus tn tasas tn tna tn stata stata sinas tasses ones essen enses ses en sensns sn suuta 12 INSTALLING AND CONFIGURING THE EG ENTERPRISE SUITE eese esee esee entente stets status tn sta tasa sustain tns ia sns en ses en sensns tn snuta 16 5 1 Prerequisites forthe Manager ss o cR RO EAR S E BR A EA abe 16 5 2 Installingthe Matiag ri s sciat e e C I EIU NR GERI E GG RONE dacs E R EGEE ERO R ds 17 5 3 Configuring the MANGER 18 5 4 Starting the Manager LI Prer guisites for the Agents oon anna HH EEE OAA O EEA A REA TA TERETE AA AA iS 19 0 607 Installing the Acent iiaiai eiio a a EREE ETER SERE ESO ERER OR OTE ATE OE ETEN UNEEN 20 Ix Slarting the ua ns i EE E E EIE ES ET NEET EE EROA EEA E E A aS 20 ADMINISTERING THE EG ENTERPRISE SUITE scccsssssssssssssssesssssssssssssessscsssessssssseseseassssesssssssessssasscssssasssseseessssesss
153. ssssessseasseseseassesess 22 6 1 Detailed Diagnosis Configuration csse bici e bsec ie ree RENTRER SERRE E E RESES ER SE THERE ESSERE ERES detavsesseassontaatavsvsiesseoeaanasys 35 6 2 Supermanager Configlration ee e x ROI PE AER AERE CURAR E EXE e Re Cavs duh cage eee eed eoe RE e ee Rene 36 6 3 Configuring Reports G4 1 MAINIENANCEPONCIES ER 39 6 5 DISCOVEFING COMPOTEI IS 5o MER RARO MEN ARES aun EES EAT AEREAS dea MARIDO LP DH Oe EUH Pee Dee MARO GTP Der ESPERE ONE EERUSE 40 6 6 Managing Unmanaging Components UAE I DEO UD pM E 44 6 8 Internal Agent Assignment iiie reri A AE EITE NE RETIN EFE GENER aso Y SERE ER TERR 46 6 9 Configuring Zones 6 10 W D ITATI MT GITE 48 6 11 Gon figuring the Topology dpt 49 6 12 Configuring Services 6 13 Configuring Transactions inii nO EHE ITE ERE EE EE ERE FERE GRAS TOE EARLE ERES 54 6 14 Gn OTT TY TENS DR 54 6 15 Configuring Thresholds 55 6 16 Configuring Alarm Policies 58 6 17 Viewing the Agent Status 59 6 18 Manager Redundancy 60 6 19 Audit LOGGING pP 62 INFRASTRUCTURE MONITORING USING THE EG ENTERPRISE SUITE eese eese entente sentent natn etn enata sns tn sta sn status sn suut 63 CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT 91 MOOIESEILO p EX 94 Introduction to Monitoring Introduction to Monitoring This c
154. strators can use either the central eG manager or the eG agents installed on the target hosts Both these discovery methodologies are briefly discussed below Discovery using the eG manager If the eG manager is used to discover the targets for monitoring then such a discovery will typically be based on the port number s on which the components are listening In case of network devices or components that do not listen on any port the eG manager uses SNMP for discovery When discovery is triggered the eG manager uses a unique port scanning technique SNMP as the case may be to discover all the components network devices that are in configured IP ranges regardless of whether agents are installed on them or not Typically an agent is installed on a host only if the performance of one more applications executing on that host interests the administrator Since the eG manager discovers components unmindful of whether agents are monitoring them or not this discovery process might end up discovering a wide variety of applications that the administrator might not even be interested in monitoring Secondly manager discovery is based on the assumption that the eG manager has access to all the components in the target environment In the real world however this might not be the case The manager could be behind a firewall and might hence be denied access to many all components in the target environment in this case therefore with manager based discover
155. sure are abnormal How do configure a new alarm policy Administrators can configure new alarm policies by choosing the Alarm Policy option from the Agents configuration menu The existing set of alarm policies will be displayed New policies can be added using the Add New Policy option Can modify the settings of an existing alarm policy Yes To modify an existing alarm policy choose the Alarm Policy option from the Agents configuration menu The existing set of alarm policies will be displayed Click the Modify button beside the alarm policy to be modified 58 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite gt Can delete an existing alarm policy Yes Choose the Alarm Policy option from the Agents configuration menu to view the existing set of alarm policies Click the Delete button beside the alarm policy to be deleted 6 17 Viewing the Agent Status gt How can I know whether an agent is running The Agents gt Status menu provides the status of a selected agent type Agents are of 3 types namely Basic Premium and External a Basic Agent A basic agent can be used to monitor only the operating system of a host and the processes running on it To use a basic agent the user must manage the host as a Generic SNMP Generic AS400 Netware or an Event Log server b Premium Agent If any applications on the host e g Web email DNS etc have to be monitored the agent is counted as a premium agent An external agent
156. sures are to be viewed Detailed measures that match the specified conditions will then be displayed in the page gt want to compare the disk space usage across all the disk partitions on my host How do I do this If a test supports more than one descriptor as in the case of the DiskActivityTest DiskSpaceTest etc then the eG monitor interface allows you to instantly compare performance across descriptors by clicking on the button that will accompany a descriptor based test in the layer model page gt How is site topology different from segment topology The segment topology indicates how components are interconnected and which components rely on others for their functioning The interconnections can represent either physical connections e g a web server connected to a network router or logical dependencies e g a web server using a web application server Each interconnection is associated with a direction The direction signifies cause effect relationships if any between the components being connected together The segment topology deals only with web servers and not with web sites Web sites and web servers have a many to many relationship among them In an ISP hosting scenario many web sites may be hosted on the same web server Alternatively very large eBusiness sites may use multiple web servers to support a single web site eG supports both of these scenarios The site topology brings out this relationship gt Can o
157. t If required the customer can even have 19 basic monitors reserving 1 premium monitor for the 1 external agent that is a must for every eG installation Moreover the eG license does not explicitly restrict the number of Premium Agents or Agentless Premium components that can be configured in a target environment instead it restricts the total number of Premium Monitors This imparts to customers the flexibility to decide how to use these Premium Monitors i e they can decide how many of the Premium Monitors should be reserved for Premium Agents and how many for Agentless Premium components However since the Premium Monitors restriction includes the ceiling on external agents as well customers cannot exhaust their Premium Monitors license on premium agents and agentless premium components alone in other words if the eG license allows a total of 10 Premium Monitors and 3 External Agents it implies that only 7 Premium Monitors can be consumed by premium agents and or agentless premium components 3 Premium Monitors will be reserved for external agents This way administrators can move the licenses between agent based and agentless components without actually modifying the license gt need to monitor 5 VMware ESX servers in my environment Each ESX server hosts 4 VMs If only want to monitor the host operating systems and the status and resource usage of each of the guests what would be the license requirement for both agent based a
158. t are supported out of the box by the eG Enterprise Suite For in house legacy applications that may have been integrated into the eG Enterprise Suite using the Integration Console plugin ready to use dashboards are not available Therefore to enable every user with monitoring rights to personalize his her dashboard experience the eG monitoring console allows the creation of Custom Dashboards These dashboards can be designed for both existing applications and legacy applications This capability empowers users to control what data is to be displayed in the dashboards and how to present it whether to use dial charts or digital displays or comparison graphs or tables This way users can see what they want to see in the dashboards You can build custom dashboards for a particular application or build a generic dashboard that displays the status of and metrics collected from a multitude of applications gt Whatare the different types of graphs that I can view via eG user interface eG Enterprise includes a variety of graphing capabilities for manual diagnosis eG currently supports three kinds of graphs A measure graph is used by a user to plot the instantaneous value of any of the measurements made by eG with time of day The measure graph can be accessed via the MEASURE option under GRAPHS in the menu across the top of the monitor pages A summary graph gives an overall picture of the percentage of good bad and unknown measurements over a pe
159. t with a potential to bring your complete infrastructure down So it is critical that you monitor all these key elements of your infrastructure Since network monitoring solutions do not have the capability to interface with and monitor systems and individual applications end to end application monitoring requires specialized monitoring solutions By having a network monitoring solution you can only look at the health of your backbone network but the systems and applications on top of it could be failing without your knowledge gt Dolneed multiple monitoring solutions eG products offer integrated network system and application monitoring Hence if required eG products can be used as the only monitoring solution in an IT infrastructure Introduction to Monitoring gt Whatare the characteristics should look for in a monitoring solution An ideal monitoring solution should be able to Perform integrated monitoring i e network system and application monitoring of your IT infrastructure Provide actionable information not raw data and thereby minimize the amount of human intervention necessary to operate it Automatically differentiate between the cause and effect of problems when they happen Proactively detect and alert operators of problems before these problems affect the user experience gt Is correlation important for a monitoring solution System administrators are often confronted with a flood of alarms when a sin
160. tabases and also the average performance of the individual components of the chosen type Besides indicating the health of the component type this report enables administrators to instantly identify the component s that serves as the root cause of the problems if any with the type Services Report In many environments there may be other administrators who are only interested in the performance of specific business services These administrators need reports that are specific to the business services that they are responsible for and the components involved in supporting these services Services Reports included in the eG Reporter address this need There are two sets of reports in the eG Service report category o WebTransactions Report The WebTransactions report is specific to web sites This report provides a summary of the performance of key web transaction metrics reported by eG agents for each web site A web site may include multiple web servers with load balancing being used to distribute the requests across the web servers For a specific time period say 2 weeks a user can use the WebTransactions report to view web transaction metrics across each of the web servers used for a web site Using this report a user can determine e Is the transaction load being balanced across all the web servers supporting the web site e Are any unusual error patterns seen on specific web servers e g because some content is not availab
161. ted solution that can collect consolidate and present in a central interface the basic configuration and configuration change information related to all the components in the environment eG Enterprise is such a solution The optional Configuration Management module offered by this solution employs agent based and agentless mechanisms to extract critical configuration and change details from each of the managed components in the environment stores the data so collected in a central repository and allows administrators to periodically query on the data via a 10096 web based easy to use Configuration Management console so that the following tasks can be performed with elan From time to time take stock of the applications operating systems devices software hardware and services that are available in the environment gt Quickly access the basic configuration information pertaining to any system application in the environment gt Accurately identify systems on which critical services have stopped or on which mandatory software is missing Detect unplanned unauthorized configuration changes with minimal effort Assess how a configuration change could have influenced overall performance health of the system application gt Run periodic checks to verify whether the entire infrastructure adheres to defined standards or not and thus isolate deviations gt Is the eG Configuration Management capability license controlled Ye
162. the feedback form This knowledge base that can be queried by monitor users of the eG Enterprise Suite when a problem and determine how a similar problem had been fixed in the past The history of problems can be obtained by clicking on the HISTORY button available beside the last measurements made 74 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite gt How dol interpret a measurement For details on how to interpret a measure kindly utilize the online help feature of the eG user interface The eG Measurements Manual also provides details regarding the interpretation of the measurements gt The CPU utilization measure of my SystemDetails test is in Critical state with a value of nearly 98 would like to know which process es is consuming this much Cpu time Can the eG Enterprise Suite help me in this regard Yes To know the process es consuming more CPU time you will just have to click the DIAGNOSIS button resembling a magnifying glass available against the CPU utilization measure in the COMPONENT MEASURES page This will result in a page that displays the top 10 processes consuming more CPU time gt Is there an alternative means of viewing the detailed diagnosis of a measure Yes The DETAILED MEASURES page can also be accessed using the menu sequence Options gt Detailed Diagnosis In the page that appears next you can select the Service Component Layer Test Measurement and the period for which detailed mea
163. the problem physical server cosumingg the allocated resources excessively Cluster Virtual Machines Report A resource intensive VM running on a host operating system can create a severe dent in not only the resources of the host but also the consolidated resources of the cluster to which the host belongs Ot is imperative that you monitor the current and historical performance of the VMs in a cluster so that resource contentions can be captured early and resolved quickly The Cluster Virtual Machines report provides you with historical insights into the performance of VMs with a cluster thereby turning the spotlight on potential resource contentions Datacenters Report The Datacenters report provides an overview of the performance of a chosen datacenter over time besides allowing users the flexibility to focus on the overall performance of the clusters physical servers VMs and datastores contained in a datacenter From the report administrators can understand the composition of the selected datacenter and also analyze the overall availability and resource effectiveness of the elements physical servers VMs clusters datastores included in the datacenter VMotion Report Using the graphical tabulated results provided by this report administrators can perform the following 82 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite o Easily observe and effectively analyze the migration activity over time and understand the
164. threshold for this measure can be determined only using sqc i e the relative thresholding policy Accordingly a relative thresholding policy was applied to this measure Now say that there was no user activity in the target infrastructure for over 15 days owing to the Christmas holidays When the users returned connections to the target server naturally peaked However since eG Enterprise auto computed the maximum threshold for this measure based on the performance data of the last 15 days when there was nearly zilch user activity it treated the sudden increase in activity as a violation and generated a plethora of inconsequential alarms To avoid such false alerts you can configure an Absolute Maximum and a Relative Maximum threshold for the number of connections measure A fixed threshold applied along with an automatic threshold specifies a realistic bound that has to be crossed before an alert is to be triggered eG Enterprise then compares the actual value with the higher of the two thresholds and will generate an alert only when the higher threshold is violated For instance you can set an Absolute Maximum threshold of 100 for the number of connections measure and a Relative Maximum threshold of sqc In such a situation when after a brief period of inactivity operations resume in a target infrastructure eG Enterprise first compares the near zero relative threshold with the absolute threshold of 100 and fixes the higher val
165. ting the Send mails SMS when alarms are cleared flag in the MAIL ALERT PREFERENCES page to Yes gt How do make sure that the detailed diagnosis information is also sent along with the email alerts To ensure that the detailed diagnosis information accompanies the alarm details set the Include detailed diagnosis DD in mail alerts flag in the MAIL ALERT PREFERENCES page to Yes What type of manager settings can be defined in the MANAGER SETTINGS tree of the SETTINGS page in the eG administrative interface The MANAGER SETTINGS tree enables you to define the default settings for a few critical operations of the eG manager and also allows you to indicate the manager functions for which logging is to be enabled To access this page select the Settings option from the Configure menu in the eG 34 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite administrative interface and expand the Manager Settings node in the tree structure in the left panel of the page For more details refer to the eG User Manual gt What type of monitor settings can be defined in the MONITOR SETTINGS tree in the SETTINGS page of the eG administrative interface To enable you to configure the default settings for the monitor and reporter interfaces eG Enterprise offers the Monitor Settings tree To access this page select the Settings option from the Configure menu in the eG administrative interface and expand the Manager Settings node in the tree structure in the left
166. top 10 process that are consuming more CPU resources Optionally this capability can also be configured to periodically generate detailed measures regardless of the occurrence of problems gt Can l configure the frequency with which detailed measures are generated If so how do I do it Yes Using the Agents Settings Detailed Diagnosis sequence you can define the frequency with which detailed measures are to be generated In the Diagnosis period during normal operation text box of the DIAGNOSIS SETTINGS page specify the frequency with which the eG agents need to provide a detailed diagnosis of a measure regardless of its state i e good or bad In the Diagnosis period during abnormal operation text box specify the frequency with which the eG agents should report detailed diagnosis measures if they detect a problem gt What happens if set both the normal and abnormal frequencies to 0 By setting both the normal and abnormal frequencies to 0 you can disable the detailed diagnosis capability for all the tests executed by the eG Enterprise system 35 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite gt Can l enable the Detailed Diagnosis capability of a test for specific components component types Yes To enable the detailed diagnosis capability for a test across all components of a type follow the menu sequence Agents gt Tests gt Detailed Diagnosis gt Enable Disable Select a Component type from the page that appea
167. topology How do I know the application relationships to construct a topology There are various ways in which application dependencies may be maintained Some applications may store their info in application specific log files Others may use the system registry to store this info Some others may maintain this info in application specific registries If you have enabled the eG agent s ability to auto discover the topology then the agent using its built in intelligence accurately captures how two applications interact with each other this saves you the time involved in manually understanding the inter relationships between the applications in an environment hare and in translating this understanding into the topology gt Can l associate a segment with a zone If so how Yes a segment can be associated with a zone This can be performed in 2 ways While configuring a zone you can add specific segments to the zone 51 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite While configuring a segment you can associate the segment with a zone gt While configuring seg a associated it with my zone What are the implications of this association If during segment configuration you associate the segment with a zone then such a segment can be constructed using only the components that are already a part of the zone gt During segment configuration realized that a component that needs to go into the segment is not available in the associ
168. tor can configure the alarm priorities that a user can view while monitoring the infrastructure gt What is the significance of the Time zone setting in the ADD USER page By default all alerts generated by the eG Enterprise system are based on the eG manager s time settings However in an infrastructure that spans multiple geographies users who are responsible for the proper functioning of servers in a particular geography or time zone may want to receive email alerts pertaining to those servers in their local time zone To ensure this you now have the option of configuring a time zone for a new user The Time Zone list in displays a wide variety of time zones to choose from By default the manager s time zone is displayed here indicating that by default email alerts are generated based on the manager s time settings However in case of target environments that are spread across multiple time zones you may want to associate a different Time Zone with every user so that email alerts sent to a user report problems based on that user s time settings and not the manager s In such a case select the required Time Zone from the list Once such a user is created all subsequent email alerts that the user receives will report problems based on that user s Time Zone settings only gt Can l start and stop the manager via the user interface No The user cannot start or stop the manager via the eG user interface gt Can l change profil
169. types of migration that were performed during the stated time o Detect failed migrations identify the user s responsible for the same and diagnose the reasons for the failure o Track the movement of specific VMs and accurately identify their current destination o Instantly identify under performing hosts and or resource intensive guests in the target environment on the basis of the migration activity Datastore Report One of the key challenges faced by administrators of virtualized environments is making sure that the datastores do not run out of space at any point in time This is because if a datastore experiences a severe space crunch the VMs associated with that datastore may fail to operate and this would render the VMs inaccessible to users To provide these administrators with historical insights into datastore usage so that they can capture potential space contentions remove them and ensure that business is transacted as usual in the virtualized environment at all times eG Reporter offers the Datastores Report Using this report the following can be ascertained o Are any datastores running out of space If so which ones are they o Which VMs will be impacted by a space crunch in the datastore Uptime Report One of the key challenges faced by administrators of virtualized environments is making sure that the datastores do not run out of space at any point in time This is because if a datastore experiences a s
170. uded in the view being shared Share If you choose the Share option from the Sharing list then you can pick and choose the users who need to be granted access to that view gt Can l hide views shared by other users If so how Yes you can hide the unnecessary shared views To execute this do the following e Select the views you want to hide by providing checkmark in the corresponding checkboxes in the QUICK INSIGHT VIEWS page e Then click on Hide Selected Views Doing so ensures that the chosen views are hidden 87 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite gt Whatis the purpose of a Live Graph Display Administrators of large mission critical environments are expected to be on high vigil 24 x 7 as even seemingly minor aberrations in performance could prove to be fatal for the infrastructure Particularly critical components of such infrastructures demand continuous attention Therefore it is essential for the monitoring solution in use to report even the smallest of variations in performance of such components in real time Towards this end the eG monitoring suite provides the LIVE GRAPH DISPLAY option which displays real time graphs of key performance metrics relating to critical components in the infrastructure allowing the administrator to keep a constant watch on the measure behavior observe variations in the measures as they occur and detect anomalies on the fly Besides the eG Enterprise Suite provide
171. ue of 100 as the threshold for the number of connections measure It then compares the current level of activity on the target server with the threshold of 100 thereby generating alarms only when the number of connections are in excess of 100 Similarly if an Absolute Minimum and a Relative Minimum threshold is set for any measure then eG Enterprise will generate alarms only when the current value falls below the lower of the two threshold settings 57 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite gt Is it possible to assign a set of thresholds to multiple components at one shot Yes By defining threshold rules and creating threshold groups you can actually assign a set of pre defined thresholds to multiple components simultaneously Please refer to the eG User Manual for further information What are Global Thresholds While monitoring large environments some tests executed by the eG agent report statistics on hundreds of descriptors For example the UserProfile test reports the profile size of each and every Citrix or Terminal server user of a server Likewise the WinSvcStatus test reports on the availability of each and every service of a Windows system For such tests storage of the threshold values for each hour for each descriptor can result in significant disk space usage in the eG database In order to enable administrators to optimize database usage for tests that do not use the automatic threshold computation i e relative thr
172. uence 6 8 Internal Agent Assignment gt Whatis the purpose of the agent per system capability of the eG Enterprise Suite By default if a host has multiple IP addresses the eG Enterprise system requires one agent license for each IP address that is managed internally Likewise if multiple nicknames are used for the same IP address a separate internal agent license is used for each unique nickname that has 46 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite been specified In many large environments a single host has many IP addresses each with different nicknames The agent per system capability is intended to optimize the internal agent license usage in such large infrastructures For example suppose a host A has two IP addresses 192 168 10 7 and 10 10 10 1 and that the first IP address 192 168 10 7 has already been managed in the eG Enterprise system When adding the second IP address 10 10 10 1 the administrator has the option of overriding eG s default internal agent licensing policy in this example the administrator can indicate that the internal agent for the IP address 10 10 10 1 is actually the one that is already associated with the IP address 192 168 10 7 By doing so the administrator can ensure that a single agent license is sufficient to manage all the IP addresses and applications executing on a host gt How do I assign the same internal agent to all the IP addresses and applications executing on a host While adding
173. unning then also the eG Enterprise Suite may not be able to make valid measurements because the eG Enterprise Suite may depend on this application to provide the measurements How often does thresholding and trending take place Thresholding runs once an hour Trending is done around midnight each day How will know if the eG manager detects a problem and how soon The time required for the eG manager to detect a problem depends on threshold policy and the frequency of tests As soon as it detects a problem in the environment the eG manager sends alerts through email within the next 5 minutes How will know if the eG agent is not running No measures would be reported if the eG agent is not running This will result in the measures appearing in Blue unknown state on the user interface 63 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite gt How can view the entire list of alarms that were generated Select History from the options available under Alarms in the menu running across the top of monitor pages to view the entire list of alarms pertaining to the entire infrastructure over a period of time gt What do do to view only the current set of alarms Choose Current from the options available under Alarms in the menu running across the top of monitor pages to view the current set of alarms gt Can I acknowledge an alarm If your profile authorizes you to acknowledge alarms then Yes you can acknowledge an
174. urce usage by applications published on the farm the rate of growth of the user profiles etc The metrics related to these areas are mapped to different layers and different tests of the Citrix monitoring model Instead of taking the longer layer test measure route administrators might prefer a single interface that provides a consolidated list of metrics collected from across the Citrix environment so that they can easily pick and choose the metrics of interest to them The MEASURES page that appears upon clicking the Measures menu option provides this much needed measure focus gt Can maintain an information base for the different problems encountered in the environment The users can keep track of the problems arising in their environment and the solutions to these problems by making an entry in the feed back form that can be obtained on clicking the FEEDBACK option available beside the last measurements made This page enables a user to record the details of how specific problems were identified and how the problems were fixed This information is maintained in the eG database and represents a location specific knowledge base that can be queried by monitor users of the eG Enterprise Suite gt Ihave a problem in my environment Can I know if similar problems were fixed before As mentioned above the eG database also keeps a repository of the problems encountered in the past and how they were fixed based on the input given by the users via
175. user Similarly you might want to view only the details of those alarms that were deleted during the last 24 hours Since the EVENT HISTORY page allows you to search based on general alarm information alone and not on deleted alarms this page cannot be used for performing the search operations mentioned above To zoom into the details of specific deleted alarms therefore eG Enterprise offers a dedicated DELETION HISTORY page This page provides a variety of filter options using which you can quickly access the alarm deletion details that you may require To access this page follow the menu sequence Alarms gt History of Deletion 65 Infrastructure Monitoring using the eG Enterprise Suite gt What does the Monitor Home page display This page quickly updates the monitor user with the health of the entire monitored environment The page reveals the following information gt The first section is the Current Status section that reveals at a glance the status of the measurements reported to the eG manager Besides displaying the total number of monitored components and the number of performance metrics collected by the eG agents from these components this section also reveals the percentage of total measurements that are in the critical major minor normal and unknown states Using this information an accurate assessment of the overall infrastructure performance can be made You can click on any measurement state displayed in this sectio
176. user accounts which are Nearing Expiry i e the accounts that will expire within 7 days and Others The Others bar includes the number of users who will never expire i e users for whom the No Expiry option has been set and the number of users 22 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite who are not expected to expire within the next 7 days Note that if any of the above mentioned counters contain the value 0 then the corresponding bar will not be displayed For instance if there are no expired user accounts then the Expired bar will not appear Clicking on any of the bars in this section takes you to that will reveal the users who belong to the category clicked on the zones services segments and components associated with each of the users and the date of subscription expiry For each component i e network device or application being monitored eG includes a specialized model that dictates what tests must be run by the eG agent to monitor the component Many of eG s tests are pre configured i e do not require manual configuration A few tests require explicit configuration The third section in the Admin Home page provides the UNCONFIGURED COMPONENT SUMMARY Besides providing the total number of unconfigured tests this section graphically depicts the number and type of components for which tests remain to be configured For more information on the unconfigured tests click on the bar that corresponds to a component type Thi
177. wever the diagnostic capability of the eG Enterprise Suite is critically dependent on internal agents Without internal agents being deployed an eG manager can detect infrastructure problems but may not be able to offer detailed diagnosis An alternative to internal agents is the use of remote agents A remote agent executes on a central server and collects OS application metrics without needing an agent on each system 3 3 Manager Agent Communication gt When there is network problem how does the eG agent and manager recover from it In the event of a network problem the communication between the eG agent and the manager will be lost As a result the eG agent will be unable to report measurements to the manager Under such circumstances the eG agent stores the measurement information in local files Once the network problem is fixed the agent retrieves the information and passes it on to the manager This ensures that measurements made by the agents are not lost even if there are intermittent manager agent communication problems gt Is the eG agent intelligent enough to know that the manager is down What happens if the agent is not able to talk to the manager Yes the eG agent can identify that the manager is down In this situation as mentioned earlier the agent retains all the measurement information in a local directory Once the manager recovers the agent retrieves all the information and sends it across to the manager gt
178. xibility to choose the measures that are to be displayed in a Zone Server or Service Consolidated Report In addition the default Time period Timeline and Weekend settings for Consolidated and Thin Client reports can also be set These settings can be defined using the Consolidated option Capacity planning To enable users to effectively plan the capacity of their environment eG Enterprise allows administrators to configure the trend manager to compute percentile values and then generate detailed Capacity Planning reports using the computed percentiles These capacity planning reports and the percentile values to be computed can be configured using the Capacity Planning sub menu of the Reports menu For more details on report configuration refer to the eG User Manual gt What are the different types of reports that can be generated using the eG Reporter The reports generated by the eG Reporter can be broadly classified as follows e Executive reports These reports offer a service level summary for each component of the IT infrastructure This summary depicts the percentage of time that a component has been problem free The main intent of these reports is to help senior management of an organization identify which components or domains i e component types are most problem prone in the IT infrastructure 37 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite e Operation reports While executive reports provide a high level overview of the
179. y a number of components could go undiscovered gt Discovery using the eG agents As stated earlier typically an agent is installed on a host only when an administrator is interested in monitoring one more applications executing on that host In large IT environments with thousands of components it is often difficult for administrators to manually track where agents are installed and manage only the 40 Administering the eG Enterprise Suite corresponding hosts and applications In such environments therefore administrators might prefer to run a discovery procedure that automatically discovers only those components that they are interested in monitoring i e an auto discovery procedure that can discover only those applications which are executing on the hosts where agents are installed this ensures that the eG administrative interface is not crowded with a wide variety of applications that an administrator might not even be interested in monitoring This can be achieved only if discovery is performed using the eG agents The agents use a port scanning technique to discover the applications executing on the hosts on which they are installed Since every agent performs the discovery and communicates the results to the eG manager the location of the eG manager will not in any way impact the discovery process i e even if the eG manager is behind a firewall and is not able to access the components in the target environment the eG

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