Getting Started With Fuse HQ

Fuse HQ is a set of tools that let you monitor a wide range of activity on any group of machines that you can access via HTTP. It is highly customizable, letting you determine what activity you want to see, what conditions cause alerts and what actions are taken in response, and who has access to the tools.

This book focuses on using Fuse HQ to monitor other components of the , Fuse Message Broker and Fuse ESB. As installed, Fuse HQ can automatically detect and monitor these and many other processes, including, for example, Web servers, database servers, and CPU activity. In addition, you can develop plugins that enable monitoring of other processes that are not automatically supported.

A Fuse HQ system comprises one or more agents, a server, and a database.

The components of your system that Fuse HQ can monitor are called resources. From the resources available on your system, you choose the specific ones that you want to monitor. This set of resources is your inventory. The inventory comprises both basic resources and composite resources.

Basic resources include platforms, servers, and services.

You combine selected basic resources, according to your own criteria, to define and add to your inventory two types of composite resources: groups and applications.

The Fuse HQ agent automatically discovers your platforms and resources (as well as many other types of resources) and sends information about them to the server. The Fuse HQ server lets you monitor their state and activity from any Web browser. You use the Fuse HQ Dashboard (the UI's home page) and related views to select the resources you are interested in and inspect details about their availability and levels of activity.

In addition to monitoring the resources in your inventory, you can perform various control actions on some of the servers and services. For example, with Fuse Message Broker, you can start and stop a broker or send a text message to a queue or topic. Available control actions depend on the specific type of server or service.

Fuse HQ can show you at a glance where problems are occurring or are likely to occur. Resources that are unavailable are automatically highlighted. You can define custom alert conditions based on any metric values and events that the selected resources generate. For example, you can choose to be notified when the number of messages on a given queue exceeds a specific value. As another example, you might define an alert to be raised whenever a resource logs a warning message.

You can use Fuse HQ to view entries in the log files of any of the platforms and servers in your inventory. Configuration options let you specify precisely which events you want Fuse HQ to capture for each resource. Using the event-tracking feature is far more convenient than opening the individual files, which may be scattered across the network and typically are cluttered with messages that are not of interest. You can also define alerts to be triggered by logged events.

Each user of the Fuse HQ Portal has a login ID and password. Two factors determine what a given user can see and do when logged in: the user's role, and the resource groups that are assigned to that role. The role consists of a set of permissions that allow specific actions (such as viewing, modifying, or creating) on each different resource type. The groups delimit the resources to which the user has access.

As installed, Fuse HQ provides two predefined roles: A Guest role allows view-only access to all resource types, and a Super User role allows unrestricted access to all resources and functions. The Super User role is exceptional in that no group assignment is required in order to enable access to resources.

The first person to log in to Fuse HQ uses the administrator ID and password chosen during installation. This account belongs to the Super User role, enabling the administrator to create custom roles and assign users and groups to them. A user can have multiple roles.

The Fuse HQ Dashboard, shown in Fuse HQ Dashboard, is the starting point for each session.

Figure 1.1. Fuse HQ Dashboard

The discussions in this book assume that you have a working Fuse HQ system. Specifically, make sure that:

For installation procedures, see Installing Fuse HQ.

	Note
	With Fuse HQ versions 4.0 and earlier, the server host and all agent hosts must have static IP addresses to ensure stability.

Start Fuse Message Broker first, followed by the Fuse HQ Server and then the Fuse HQ Agents. Starting Fuse Message Broker first is not a requirement, but by doing so, you ensure that the HQ Agent will discover it and report it to the HQ Server immediately.

To start the Fuse Message Broker:

If Fuse Message Broker is not already running, start it as follows:

To start the Fuse HQ Server:

It is recommended that you install the Fuse HQ Server as a Windows service or, on non-Windows platforms, include it in a startup script so that it runs automatically each time the host is booted. See Starting and Stopping the Fuse HQ Server in Installing Fuse HQ for details.

To start the Fuse HQ Agent:

You can install the Fuse HQ Agent as a Windows service or include it in a startup script. However, the first time you run the Agent, you must start it from a command shell and provide certain required information. Fuse HQ stores this information so that subsequent sessions can start without user intervention. See Starting and Stopping the Fuse HQ Agent in Installing Fuse HQ for details.

You can log in to Fuse HQ from any machine, provided firewall settings allow HTTP communication between that machine and the Fuse HQ Server host. In the address field of your Web browser, enter the following URL:

http://fuse-server-IP-address:7080

	Note
	This URL assumes that the Fuse HQ Server was installed with the default HTTP port, 7080. If not, substitute the correct port number. You can find this and other installation settings in the file hq-server-install.conf in the install_dir/data directory. The HTTP port setting appears in the file as server.webapp.port.

The Fuse HQ login prompt appears, as shown in Fuse HQ login prompt.

Figure 1.2. Fuse HQ login prompt

To log in for the first time, enter the administrator ID and password (both hqadmin by default) that were specified on installation of the Fuse HQ Server, and click LOGIN. The Fuse HQ Dashboard appears (Figure 1.1).

Among the user administration tasks you perform, you should change the as-installed administrator password before implementing Fuse HQ in a production environment.

This section describes how to add a platform resource to Fuse HQ, where a platform resource is identified with an Agent running on a particular host.

This tutorial assumes the following starting point:

To add a platform resource to the set of resources monitored by the Fuse HQ Console, perform the following steps:

This tutorial explains how to start monitoring a application on a particular host, assuming that an Agent is already running on that host.

This tutorial assumes the following starting point:

To add resources and view their properties in the Fuse HQ Console, perform the following steps:

Navigation controls shows examples of some of the controls described in the sections that follow.

Figure 3.1. Navigation controls

The Fuse HQ user interface is filled with the familiar blue text that indicates clickable links. Almost anywhere that the name of a resource or other entity appears, you can click it to jump to the logical place for focusing on that item. In the case of a resource, that place is usually the resource's Current Health screen (see Monitor tab (Current Health screen)).

These hyperlinks provide an intuitive way to find the information and tools that you need, so use them freely. Your browser's Back command makes it easy to return to your starting point.

Superimposed on the black strip at the top of the screen are the four main tabs, Dashboard, Resources, Analyze, and Administration. Click these tabs and their sub-entries to go to the views described in The Dashboard and Other Views .

In addition to this main menu, various small menus with self-explanatory options appear as appropriate for different functional areas.

Immediately below the black strip at the top of the screen is a breadcrumb path that identifies the resource you are currently browsing.

The breadcrumb path includes, from left to right, the category, type, and name of the current resource. You can click either of the first two nodes in this path to navigate back to a browse list of all resources of the same type or category.

Click the Fuse HQ logo at the top left corner of any page to return to the Dashboard.

The Dashboard (see Figure 1.1), the Fuse HQ home page, appears when you log in. Its purpose is to provide convenient access to the information you are most interested in. Therefore, you have considerable control of the content that appears on your Dashboard.

The Dashboard displays information in two columns, in frames called portlets (see Dashboard Columns and Portlets).

Figure 3.2. Dashboard Columns and Portlets

Dashboard Portlets summarizes the portlets that are available on the Dashboard.

To go to the Resources view from the Dashboard (or from most other Fuse HQ screens), hover the cursor over the Resources tab on the black strip near the top. Then select Browse from the drop-down menu. (Alternatively, you can select the self-explanatory options Currently Down or Recently Viewed.)

The Resources view provides comprehensive lists of resources in the inventory, filtered by category and optionally by type. For example, Resources View shows the Resources view filtered to show all servers.

Figure 3.3. Resources View

Often you will want to proceed from the Resources view to see detailed information about a specific resource. Clicking a button to the left of each name takes you quickly to a specific tab on the resource page for that item: M for the Monitor tab, I for the Inventory tab, or A for the Alerts tab. Clicking the name itself takes you to the Monitor tab. See Resource Pages for more information.

The Resources view also lets you perform important inventory-management tasks: defining groups and applications, and removing resources from the inventory.

To group or delete resources, select them by clicking their check boxes at the left. (To select or deselect all items in the current list, click the check box in the list header row.) Then click the Group or Delete button. (Note that deleting a resource removes it from the inventory, but has no effect on the resource itself. If you decide to add a resource back to the inventory after deleting it, you can perform a new auto-discovery on its host platform.)

To define applications, click Tools Menu at the top right and select New Application. This menu also gives you another way to define groups, and an option to manually add certain types of platforms.

To go to the Analyze view from the Dashboard (or from most other Fuse HQ screens), hover the cursor over the Analyze tab on the black strip near the top. Then select one of the three options on the drop-down menu: Reporting, Alert Center, or Event Center.

The Reporting page lets you generate a variety of reports in various formats. The Alerts Center and the Events Center show all alerts and events for the entire system.

To go to the Administration view from the Dashboard (or from most other Fuse HQ screens), click the Administration tab on the black strip near the top.

This view provides links to various administrative tasks, notably management of users and roles. Click any link on the page to perform the indicated task or view data contributed by installed plug-ins.

For every resource in the inventory, Fuse HQ presents detailed information in a set of tabbed pages. The available tabs and their content depend on the nature of the resource in question, but all basic resources (platforms, servers, and services) and compatible groups have a Monitor tab, an Inventory tab, and an Alert tab. Mixed groups and applications do not have all of these tabs.

Resources that allow control actions have a Control tab that provides access to these actions. For example, the Control tab for a Fuse Message Broker queue lets you send a text message to the queue.

Clicking any resource name almost anywhere in Fuse HQ takes you directly to the Monitor tab for that resource. (There are a couple of exceptions: Clicking a platform name in the Auto-Discovery portlet takes you to the Auto-Discovery Results screen for that platform; and clicking the name of a mixed group, which does not have a Monitor tab, takes you to the corresponding Inventory tab.)

These pages are designed to help you navigate easily through the hierarchical structure that includes the resource. In the top left corner of every page is a Map button. Clicking this button reveals a tree diagram showing the current resource along with the other resources associated with it. In general, "parents" appear below and "children" appear above the current resource, as applicable. For example, in the map tree for a server, the host platform (parent) appears below the server, and hosted services (children) appear above. You can click any resource in the tree to go to the resource pages for that item.

The Tools Menu at the top right of each page provides options appropriate to the current resource type.

A prominent label at the top right identifies the resource category of the current item: platform, server, service, group, or application.

The Monitor tab, also called the Current Health screen, provides the most detailed information available about the performance and activity of a given resource. The right column of this page offers both graphical and numerical displays of metric data collected from the resource during a specified time period. The left column, headed by a sub-tab labeled Resources, shows resources related to the current one and provides controls for specifying which metrics are charted in the graphical display.

In the right column, to switch between the graphical and numerical displays, click the Indicators and Metric Data sub-tabs. To see a full-size chart for any individual metric, click the metric name on either tab.

On the Indicators sub-tab:

Column charts appear for each selected metric. The horizontal axis is a time line that applies to all charts in the display. Click a circle in the row either above or below the charts to highlight and display the precise time of a specific point on the axis.

The colors of the circles in the top row indicate availability, as follows: green, 100 percent available; yellow, partially available; red, unavailable; orange, paused; and gray, no data collected.

If log tracking is enabled for the resource, a blue square appears just above the bottom row of circles for any time segment during which Fuse HQ has recorded an event. Click the blue square to display the available log messages.

You can remove and rearrange the charts, and save any configuration as a custom view that is specific to the current resource. To move a chart up or down in the column, use the and buttons above the top right corner of the chart; to remove the chart from the column, click the button. To save the current view, select Create New View in the View field at the top right corner of the display area, enter a name, and click .

On the Metric Data sub-tab:

Metric values are shown in a tabular format. Various controls allow you to specify the refresh rate, the data collection interval, and other settings. You can select one or multiple metrics in the table and click Chart Selected Metrics to display a full-size chart.

The Metric Data tab offers a convenient way to establish baselines, which are useful for defining alerts and tracking trends, among other purposes. To automatically set the baselines for one or more metrics to the LOW, PEAK, and AVG values currently shown, select the metrics and click Set Baselines.

	Note
	Additional baseline-setting controls appear at the bottom of each full-size chart (provided the chart shows only a single metric).

On the Resources tab:

The related child and parent resources of the current resource are listed. To the right of each related resource name is an availability indicator and a balloon icon. Hover the cursor over the balloon to display a popup window with additional information (and, in some cases, active links) pertaining to the resource.

The other options available on the Resources tab vary according to which tab is selected in the right column. With the Indicators tab open, you can use the available controls to add charts for metrics of these related resources to the display in the right column. With the Metric Data tab open, you can filter the metrics that appear in the table.

To add metrics for a related resource, select the Indicators tab on the right. Then, in the left column, check the related resources for which you want to see metrics, and click View Metrics. The metrics collected from the selected resource appear in a list below. You can then add a chart for any of these metrics to the Indicators tab by clicking the right arrow button to the right of the metric. Remember that you have the option of saving any set of charts on the Indicators tab as a view that you can recall whenever you are monitoring the current resource.

To filter the display on the Metric Data tab, check the desired categories and types, enter a search string if desired, and click the right arrow button to the right of the Search field.

The Inventory tab includes a number of portlets containing different types of information about the current resource and others that are related to it. The exact set of portlets available depends on the type of the current resource. Only one portlet is open at a time. To open a different portlet, click its title bar.

Where appropriate, the portlets provide controls that let you edit the resource's properties or change relationships with composite resources. For example, you can add a resource to a group or remove a service from an application.

For the most part, working with the portlets and controls on the Inventory tab is intuitive. It is worth mentioning here that when you want to enable event tracking for a resource, you do so in the Configuration Properties portlet on the resource's Inventory tab.

The Alert tab has two sub-tabs, Configure and Alerts.

The Configure sub-tab lets you define the conditions that trigger an alert on the current resource. These conditions can be based on any metric data or logged event that the resource makes available to Fuse HQ. In addition to defining the conditions, you can specify actions that Fuse HQ should perform when the alert is triggered, such as sending e-mail notifications or executing a script.

To keep the flow of notifications orderly and create an audit trail, you can pair an alert with a corresponding recovery alert. The primary alert detects the problem, initiates the specified response, and then disables itself to prevent repeating the response with every data-collection cycle. The recovery alert detects the return to normal conditions, executes its own response (typically, sending notification that the resolution has occurred), and re-enables the primary alert.

The Alerts sub-tab lists the alerts that have been triggered on the resource and lets you acknowledge them or mark them as fixed.