We are pleased to announce the release of Foglight 5.7.5.7 on February 25th, 2017. It continues a string of quarterly releases focused on usability, maintainability and quality. While I encourage you to read the release notes in detail, I will cover the highlights below.
REST API
The most significant new feature is a REST API to facilitate data access from a Foglight Management Server. Functional areas of the product you can query include Agents, Agent Managers, Alarms, Cartridges, Registry Variables, Rules, Topology and Metrics/Observation data and scripts. The REST API comes bundled in the FMS installation, but is also downloadable directly from support as a cartridge that will run on any 5.7.5 FMS version. Once installed, you can browse the online API document at yourfmsserverURLport. The Rest API is a part of the product we think customers will be excited about, and will get more development attention throughout the year. If you have additional API functions you would like to request, please feel free to contact me at richard.schiller@quest.com.
Alarm Analysis
Another interesting feature we have added is a new “Alarms Analysis” tab on the Alarms UI. It is primarily designed to allow you to determine what rules are responsible for the most alarms in your system. For systems which have not done much alarm tuning, this is a good place to start as a high alarm count can be indicative of rules with thresholds that don’t align well with your system profile. Of course, high alarm counts can also be indicative of areas of your environment that are the most stressed. In either case, the Alarms Analysis tab will help you determine where to look.
Security and Manageability
There are a variety of new security related features in 5.7.5.7. We have added the option for multiple LDAP configurations. Foglight will search across all LDAP configurations, in order, until it either finds a user/credential match or fails across all servers. You will find this feature under Administration/Users & Security/Directory Services Settings. Additionally, we have added an Authorization Token based authentication mechanism that can be used with the API, with Foglight Command Line as well as embedded within a URL string. You can set and delete Auth Tokens on the User Details Page. Foglight command line access is now a separately controlled role. Finally, when script executions are captured in the audit log, Foglight will include the script name.
We have added several usability/manageability issues that I would like to mention. In the service builder, we now show the long name (as opposed to an abbreviated name) and we also let you select agents for inclusion in the service by querying agent tags). In the Registry Variable UI, when you are scoping a registry variable to a specific topology object, you can now search for that object (as opposed to scrolling only) in the UI. With regards to service based emails, we have improved the layout with a new HTML template and added a new option to email on when a service returns to normal state.
Platform Support
From a platform perspective, we have done the following:
FMS
- Added FMS support for Windows 2016 Server and Windows 10
- Upgraded MariaDB JDBC driver to 1.5.4
- Upgraded tomcat to 7.0.72
- Added auto startup option in linux for FMS installer (system.d or init.d)
FMS Repository
- Added (and back-supported) MySQL 5.7.x for FMS 5.7.5.3 and higher
- Added Oracle Exadata 12C Multi-Tenant(CDB/PDB) Support
- Added MS SQL Server 2014 Standard Edition with SP2 and SQL Server 2016
Foglight Agent Manager
- Added support for Windows 10 and Windows 2016
As always, if you would like to discuss the new features with me or make enhancement requests, I can be reached at Richard.Schiller@quest.com
