Foglight® 5.9.8

Release Notes

December 2020


Contents

Welcome to Foglight

What's New

Resolved issues and enhancements

Known issues

Third party known issues

Upgrade and compatibility

System requirements

Product licensing

Getting started with Foglight

About Us

 


Welcome to Foglight

Quest's Foglight® solution simplifies application performance monitoring and reduces the skills and effort required to manage applications, the user experience, and the supporting infrastructure.

Unlike other solutions, Foglight uses a single code base, and has a model-driven design that couples fast deployment and accelerated time-to-value. It offers the modular flexibility required to deliver a range of capabilities and sophistication to meet the needs of any organization—from those still focused on technology-centric monitoring to those that have completed the transition to application-centric or transactional monitoring.

Foglight performs equally well in physical, virtual, and mixed infrastructure environments, providing visibility into issues affecting the application and end-user experience. Intuitive workflows help you quickly move from the symptom to the root cause in the application, database, infrastructure, or network to resolve issues, reducing mean time to resolution. Predefined and drag-and-drop dashboards provide insight that is tailored to each stakeholder. By offering comprehensive visibility into your monitored environment, Foglight helps ensure that cross-functional teams collaborate on and prioritize issues that matter most to the business.

These Release Notes cover the resolved issues, known issues, workarounds, and other important information about the 5.9.8 release of Foglight. Review all sections before starting the installation.

 


What's New

The 5.9.8 release of the Foglight Management Server contains the following new features and enhancements:

 

User Experience Enhancement

 

Security Enhancement

 

Support Platforms and Browsers

 

Foglight Agent Manager

The Foglight Agent Manager (FglAM) is upgraded to version 5.9.8. For more information about the Foglight Agent Manager 5.9.8, refer to the Foglight Agent Manager 5.9.8 Release Notes.

Note: The FglAM 32-bit platforms will not be supported after FglAM 5.9.8.

 

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure cartridge was upgraded to version 5.9.8. For more information about the Foglight for Infrastructure 5.9.8, refer to the Foglight for Infrastructure 5.9.8 Release Notes.

 


Resolved issues and enhancements

The following is a list of issues addressed and enhancements implemented in this release. For a list of resolved issues for the Foglight Agent Manager and the Infrastructure cartridge at the time of the Foglight 5.9.8 release, see the Foglight Agent Manager 5.9.8 Release Notes and Foglight for Infrastructure 5.9.8 Release Notes.

 

Defect ID

Resolved Issue

FGL-2003

Fixed an issue when clicked on myWorkspace following warning appears: com.quest.nitro.service.derivation.DerivationService - Fail to synchronize derivation definition DerivationDefinition.

FGL-20153

Fixed an issue where log analyzer might not get the latest logs.
FGL-20315 Fixed an issue where users cannot select rule variable in Rule Editor dashboard when there is only one item in the table.

FGL-20451

Fixed an issue after changing the password in secondary property lists the Save button might not be enabled.
FGL-20467 Fixed an issue where the Retention Policy Roll-up configuration does not allow 0.
FGL-20477 Fixed an issue when configuring the action parameter for Send SNMP Trap Action exception occurs.
FGL-20519 Fixed an issue where FMS fails to generate database table information in support bundle due to a connection issue.
FGL-20597 Fixed an issure where exporting license usage report might fail on some cases.

FGL-20598

Optimized the license usage calculation logic for Evolve_Flex.

FGLCM-182

Fixed an issue when the name of the alarmed object is null, ServiceNow Integration throws NPE.

FGLCM-339

Fixed an issuewhere the Foglight subscription license might fail to update due to DNS cache in Java.

FGLCM-367

Fixed an issue where the fglcmd tool might throw exception caused by bugs in filesupload library.

FGLCM-371

Fixed an issue when the custom API is registered or unregistered the Rest API dashboard might not be updated.

 


Known issues

The following is a list of issues known to exist at the time of this release.

Note: Check the release notes for each cartridge you will be using for known and late-breaking issues with that cartridge. 

For a list of known issues for Foglight Agent Manager in this release, see the Foglight Agent Manager 5.9.5 Release Notes.

Workflow Automation is Not Supported in Federation or High Availability Configurations

Foglight for Automation is not supported:

 

See below for details. These limitations will be addressed in a future release.

Workflow Automation is Not Supported in High Availability Configurations

When a Foglight Management Server running in High Availability mode fails over, all in-progress tasks fail and the system cannot recover them.

Workflow Automation is Not Supported on Foglight Federation Masters

The Foglight Cartridge for Automation should not be installed, and workflow automation must not be used, on a Foglight Federation Master. This is because active tasks that update topology objects are not permitted on the Federation Master. Workflow automation may be installed and used on the Federated Child(ren) as usual.

Management Server

Defect ID

Known Issue

WCF-15913

Custom rules (which are copied from existing cartridge rules) will drop some tables or charts that exist in the original Alarm dialog. Contact Quest Support for workaround.

FGL-20162

Running Foglight 5.9.5 on Windows Server 2008 requires upgrading PowerShell to version 3.0.

FGL-19877

Upgrading to version 5.9.3 completes successfully but the installation log contains shortcut creation failures.

FGL-19479

The Management Server UI will possibly be displayed abnormally if Tomcat version is upgraded.

 Workaround: Clear the cache data of your web browser.

FGL-19431

If you toggled enable/disable state for Alarm Integration, Incident Integration, Clear Integration Alarm, or QMX Agent Host Connection Rule rule in the Integration cartridge, its enable/disable state will be reset after upgrading to 5.9.x from 5.7.5.8. 

FGL-19283

When upgrading the Management Server from 5.7.5.8 to 5.9.x, unexpected CartridgeDeploymentException shows in the log file.

Workaround: This exception only occurs in environments with those cartridges which define Java Archive or JBoss Artifacts component, like Integration and IntelliProfile cartridges. JBoss Server has been removed from the Management Server 5.9.x. As a result, JBossDeploymentHandler, which was used to handle above components, has also been removed from the Management Server 5.9.2 or later. If you encounter this issue, you could ignore it as this exception does not impact upgrade of the Management Server and relevant cartridges. 

FGL-18953

EU appliances may fail connecting the Foglight Management Server after the initial installation of Foglight Management Server.
Workaround: Restart the Foglight Management Server after the installation. 

FGL-18611

LDAP accounts may fail binding to the OU group whose name includes backslash characters '\'. This can prevent Foglight to authenticate LDAP users.

FGL-18470

FSMService availability calculations do not work as expected in a service hierarchy.

FGL-18125

FoglightShutdownAction.checkInUsedPort() does not load port settings from server.config during an upgrade.

FGL-18122

In a Windows Single-Sign ON (SSO) with untrusted multiple domains, only the user with the keytab file-corresponding group can be imported.

FGL-18076

The Management Server data-driven multiple severity rules may fire multiple times for the same severity in case of concurrent data submissions.

FGL-18075

The rule engine may pass non-persisted alarm IDs to rule actions. This can prevent some alarms, that are generated multiple times against the same scoping object, from firing.

FGL-18034

PostgreSQL fails to start up while installing the Management Server with an embedded PostgreSQL database on a Korean OS.

FGL-17845

Failing to start the Management Server with the --host=*.*.*.* option due to a failed attempt to start the embedded database.

FGL-17826

LDAP users may have to log in twice to get proper role assignments.

FGL-17769

Foglight is configured with a list of default ciphers. Some of these ciphers are potentially vulnerable ciphers. A review of the ciphers that will be available in a future release is ongoing.

Workaround: Edit the list of ciphers by completing the following steps:

  1. Open the following file for editing:

    • Releases prior to 5.7.1: <FMS_HOME>/server/deploy/jboss-web.deployer/server_https.xml

    • 5.7.1 release and later: <FMS_HOME>/server/tomcat/server.xml

  2. In this file, specify a list of ciphers in the ciphers attribute of the secure connector:

    <Connector executor="tomcatThreadPool" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192" URIEncoding="UTF-8" scheme="https" secure="true" SSLEnabled="true" clientAuth="false" keystoreFile="../../config/tomcat.keystore" keystorePass="nitrogen" sslProtocol="TLS" sslEnabledProtocols="TLSv1.2,TLSv1.1,TLSv1" bindOnInit="false" ciphers="COMMA_SEPARATED_LIST_OF_CIPHERS"/>

For complete information, visit http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/config/http.html.

FGL-17768

The Management Server distribution layout contains some confusing directories under server/jboss.

FGL-17415

ObservationQueryPlan$QueryStep.getDayIndex(...) can result in ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsExceptions during a Daylight Savings Time (DST) change.

FGL-17162

Core monitoring policy derivations are not deployed on a Federated Master.

FGL-17055

Excluded objects are sometimes included in a Federation topology synchronization.

FGL-17015

A Foglight Agent Manager that is no longer in use maintains a stale disconnected RemoteObject instance under the host object. This causes the host to appear as undefined on the Hosts dashboard, even though the host is monitored by Foglight for Infrastructure.

FGL-16508

When federation.config does not contain any queries, TopologySynchService mistakenly logs the following warning:

WARN Obsolete federated topology object purge will not be performed because the following federated servers are not connected: ...

FGL-16487

Topology loading can fail for topology objects that have been converted to DataObjects.

FGL-16439

Type-based exclusions in federation.config do not apply to referenced objects.

FGL-16432

String observations containing reserved characters in script agents are not supported.

FGL-16388

The alarm email notification code does not persist any information about notification alarms that were previously sent. If the server is restarted, all alarms appear as new, and the notifications are resent.

FGL-16166

Hibernate/JDBC errors occurring while loading rules return an empty list.

FGL-16163

Cleared credential alarms are found when querying for alarms that are not cleared.

FGL-4498

Simple rules that report alarms directly are not affected by blackouts.

FXM-880

Diagnose link doesn't work on the Master FMS.

Browser interface

Defect ID

Known Issue

FADUI-1149

An attempt to import external groups results in the following error:

Could not execute the requested operation, error(s) had occurred: Failed to retrieve groups, please make sure you correctly configured the Directory Services, check log for details.

The log, however, does not contain any errors.

FGLUI-11228

After changing the value of the registry value, some of the performance calendars may disappear from the list.
Workaround: To correct the display and allow performance calendars to be deleted, return to the main Manage Registry Variables page, then navigate back to the appropriate registry value.

FGLUI-11009

When editing properties from the Agent Status dashboard or the Agent Properties dashboard in Chrome 17, some edit fields are not available.
Workaround: Use a different browser when editing agent properties through these dashboards.

FGLUI-10834

The Cartridge Inventory page is currently unable to alert users if a cartridge install fails due to lack of space in the server's temp directory. An error is written to the log files.

FGLUI-10788

When editing secondary agent property tables from either the Agent Status or Agent Properties dashboards, performing Add and Delete operations at the same time results in all Added items being deleted.
Workaround: Add items to the table, save them, and close the popup window, then edit the secondary property again and delete the rows that need to be deleted. Finally, save and close the popup window. This ensures that the added items remain.

FGLUI-10504

Selecting the time range "All" on the Service Details dashboard can result in the page getting stuck refreshing. Avoid using the "All" time range on this page.

FGLUI-10456

Selections made on the Service Selector tab of the Select services and tiers to monitor dialog box of the SOC become unselected when you switch to the Tier Selector tab and back again.

FGLUI-10323

The first time the Environment Report is run it may generate a warning: "com.quest.wcf.core.component.RenderPDFContext - Text ... did not fit. in view ..."
This is a benign warning that is caused by one of the values read from the environment being too large for a page.

FGLUI-10036

Credential alarm messages sometimes contain UUIDs for objects related to the alarm.
Workaround: Show the Alarm Detail dialog for these alarms to resolve the objects to identifiable names.

FGLUI-8261

When using a Federation Master that is a newer version than the Federated Child, it is possible to get warnings about missing metrics. This occurs when new metrics have been added to the Federation Master's version. The warnings indicate that the Federated Child does not provide these metrics, and they will cease when the Federated Child is upgraded to the same version as the Federation Master.

FGLUI-7817

When editing secondary agent property lists, the Delete Selected Row(s) button marks the rows to be deleted by graying them out. Save changes must be selected to delete the selected rows. If a required field is blank, then a value must be entered before the row can be marked for deletion.

FGLUI-7729

In the Service Builder and Service Operation Console (SOC) dashboards, when alarm filters are configured, they are applied to the main dashboards (Service Builder and SOC dashboards) and to some first level popups only. The alarm filters are not applied throughout all popups/drilldowns at any level.

FGLUI-7593

When reviewing Alarms on a Federation Master, you are able to open a link to view the rule that fired the alarm on the Federated Child. This involves opening the console of the Federated Child. If the Federated Child is of an older version than the Federation Master, an error page is displayed.

FGLUI-7377

Under rare conditions, if the session is allowed to expire while viewing some of the views in the Administration dashboard, the process of logging in again displays the Administration view without any decoration around the side panels.

Workaround: To clear this condition, close the browser. Do not save your session if the browser prompts you to save the last session configuration. Instead, start the browser and log in again.

FGLUI-7356

The column layout on the Agent Status Page does not allow resizing of columns, which can result in the host name appearing truncated.

FGLUI-7333

An error message stating "Error getting value of context entry with key:timeRange" can appear in the logs when using the popup menu on the Origin field of the Alarm Details dialog.

FGLUI-6874

If a Federation Master Server connects an older version Federated Child, the Federated Child may have some of the objects that are no longer associated with the Management Server Performance Report and Foglight Server Diagnostic views on the Federation Master. This results in some data about the Federated Child being unavailable to this report and views.
Workaround: Go to the Federated Child to view detailed information.

FGLUI-5990

Inconsistency in the number of alerts shown in the "All Alarms Chart" and "Alarm List with Filter" in the Alarms dashboard.

FGLUI-5708

Display all available scoping objects in the condition editor for copied and user-created rules.

FGLUI-4628

On systems with a large numbers of hosts, the Host Table view can be slow to display.
Workaround: Use the hide column feature to hide the sparkline (small graph) columns. This significantly improves the display performance.

FGLUI-4544

Foglight 4 Tabular views generate an error when the time range has "Auto" granularity.

FGLUI-3509

The edit rule definition for an alarm from a Federated Child brings up a page for editing a rule on the Federation Master, rather than for the rule that triggered the alarm. This occurs because it is not possible to perform administration from the Federation Master.

FGLUI-3440

When the user pastes data using right-click > Paste to a box that automatically updates itself (for example, the edit agent properties screen), the user interface does not automatically refresh itself.
Workaround: After pasting into an Agent Properties text field, press the Spacebar > Backspace, and click the Save button.

FGLUI-3430

When agent activation fails, the "Activating" status box does not show the status of the failed start agent.

FGLUI-1906

The Service Levels Details page does not show cleared alarms for Service Level Policy.

FGLUI-257

Seconds should be displayed in the startTime and endTime in the WCF under Browse > Data when granularity is set to "raw".

WCF-13385

QP5 needs to be upgraded to the latest version.

WCF-12581

In Internet Explorer 8, when the number of dashboard nodes in the navigation panel exceeds the maximum that can be displayed without a scrollbar, the scrollbar does not immediately appear.

WCF-10580

Tree Table list nodes should not be clickable or dwellable.

WCF-7344

PDF charts and files that were requested through a proxy fail and result in a Connection Refused error. Note that this error only applies to requests made by the Management Server.

WCF-5895

Vertical scrollbar not shown for the text area.

 


Third-party known issues

The following is a list of third party issues known to exist at the time of this release. For a list of third-party issues related to the Foglight Agent Manager at the time of the Foglight 5.9.8 release, see the Foglight Agent Manager 5.9.8 Release Notes.

Defect ID

Known Issue

FGL-5691

The Foglight Management Server generates an "Unable to load Java VM shared library to start JVM" message when attempting to start the Management Server on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5.0 VMware machine.

This is caused by the SELinux security code on newer RedHat systems. There are two workarounds:

  • Enter the following command (as root):

    chcon -t textrel_shlib_t <foglight_home>/jre/lib/i386/server/libjvm.so
     

  • Disable SELinux on the system in question.

This issue is addressed in the Sun JDK 1.6.0 release notes:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/6u4-140071.html
Bug: 6538311
This bug affects both Foglight Management Server executables (fms and fmsha).

FGL-3677

Installation: Console Mode. Returning to a previous step in the installation process after being prompted for a user password, the input is not recognized.
During a console mode install, it is possible to return to the previous step by typing "back" and then pressing the Enter key. If done while the installer is asking the user to enter a password, all subsequent user inputs are automatically changed to asterisk symbols (*) and are unreadable by the console.
Workaround: Type quit and reinstall again.

FGL-2882

Installation: Console Mode. Some characters of the Administrator's password are not hidden if typed too quickly.
This issue has been observed when installing Foglight on some older machines.
Workaround: Avoid typing the password fast.

WCF-9735

When typing words containing "ss" in the online help search, a null pointer exception is generated.
This is a known issue for applications that use Oracle's default implementation of the Java Help Search functionality.

 


Upgrade and compatibility

Important:

See the Foglight 5.9.x Upgrade Guide for information about upgrading Foglight and for a list of the latest cartridge versions that are compatible with Foglight Management Server 5.9.8.

 


System requirements

For information about system requirements for this release, see the Foglight 5.9.x System Requirements and Platform Support Guide.

Final platform support notice

The following operating systems are not supported in this release:

The following platforms are not supported in this release:

Final browser support notice

Support for Microsoft® Internet Explorer® 8, 9, and 10 is discontinued as of this Foglight® release.

Microsoft ended the support for these versions on January 12, 2016. For more information, visit https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle?p1=13418.

 


Product licensing

Foglight includes a licensing capability that restricts access to those features that are defined in the license. All Management Server installations require a license that grants access to server-specific parts of the browser interface and the features associated with them. Foglight cartridges are also license-protected. While some cartridges are covered by the base Foglight license (such as Foglight Agent Manager cartridges and the Cartridge for Infrastructure), others may require an additional license.

To activate a trial or a purchased commercial license:

  1. On the navigation panel, under Dashboards, click Administration > Setup  > Manage Licenses.
  2. Click Install.
  3. In the Install License dialog box, click Browse.
  4. In the file browser that appears, specify the location of the license file.
  5. In the Install License dialog box, click Install License.

 


Getting started with Foglight

Contents of the release package

The Foglight 5.9.8 release package contains the following:

  1. Quest Foglight® 5.9.8
  2. Product documentation

Installation instructions

See the Foglight 5.9.x Installation and Setup Guide set for installation instructions.

Additional resources

Additional information is available from the following:

Globalization

This section contains information about installing and operating this product in non-English configurations, such as those needed by customers outside of North America. This section does not replace the materials about supported platforms and configurations found elsewhere in the product documentation.

This release is Unicode-enabled and supports any character set. In this release, all product components should be configured to use the same or compatible character encodings and should be installed to use the same locale and regional options. This release is targeted to support operations in the following regions: North America, Western Europe and Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, Far-East Asia, Japan.

This release has the following known capabilities or limitations: The server will be enabled for Global Operations, but not localized to any particular locale. Some legacy agents cannot support multi-byte locales.

 


About Us

Quest creates software solutions that make the benefits of new technology real in an increasingly complex IT landscape. From database and systems management, to Active Directory and Office 365 management, and cyber security resilience, Quest helps customers solve their next IT challenge now. Around the globe, more than 130,000 companies and 95% of the Fortune 500 count on Quest to deliver proactive management and monitoring for the next enterprise initiative, find the next solution for complex Microsoft challenges and stay ahead of the next threat. Quest Software. Where next meets now. For more information, visit https://www.quest.com/.

Technical support resources

Technical support is available to Quest customers with a valid maintenance contract and customers who have trial versions. You can access the Quest Support Portal at https://support.quest.com.

The Support Portal provides self-help tools you can use to solve problems quickly and independently, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The Support Portal enables you to:

 


Copyright© 2020 Quest Software Inc.

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