Welcome to Foglight > Monitoring Infrastructure > Monitor HyperV > Administering Hyper-V Agents

Administering Hyper-V Agents

The Hyper-V Agent Administration dashboard contains links to agent administration tasks that you can use to manage Hyper-V agent instances, set the alarm sensitivity, and review and remove Hyper-V objects.

This section covers the following key areas:

Accessing the Hyper-V Agent Administration dashboard
Configuring monitoring agents
Reviewing object instances and deleting expired data
- Instances and Limits view

Accessing the Hyper-V Agent Administration dashboard

This tab consists of the Administration area and the Agents view commands.

To access the Hyper-V Administration dashboard:

Log in to the Foglight browser interface.
On the Welcome page, click Monitor Hyper-V or click Hyper-V in the left navigation panel. The Hyper-V Dashboard is displayed.
Click on the Administration tab and then on Agents sub tab. Or, you can directly navigate to Hyper-V > Hyper-V Agent Administration in the left navigation pane. The Hyper-V Administration dashboard is displayed.

Administration area

The Administration area contains links to administrative tasks that you can initiate from this tab:

Rule Configurations: Sets the level of alarms that the system generates, stores, and displays.
Agents: Review existing Hyper-V/SOFS/SCVMM object instances. For more information, refer to Agents view commands.
Advanced Options: Review and delete Hyper-V object instances that are no longer needed. For more information, refer to Reviewing object instances and deleting expired data.

Agents view commands

The Agents view shows a list of existing agent instances and a set of agent management commands at the top of the list. Use it to verify that your agents are collecting data from the monitored environment.

The following commands are available:

Add: Starts a workflow for creating new agent instances. For more information, refer to Configuring monitoring agents.
Refresh: Refreshes the list of agent instances and their states.
Activate: Activates one or more selected agent instances. Activating an agent instance starts the agent process on the machine on which the agent is installed.
Deactivate: Deactivates one or more selected agent instances. Deactivating an agent stops the agent process on the machine on which the agent is installed.
Start Data Collection: Starts the data collection for one or more selected agent instances. Starting an agent’s data collection causes the agent to begin monitoring the Hyper-V server and to send the collected metrics back to Foglight.
Stop Data Collection: Stops the data collection for one or more selected agent instances. Stopping an agent’s data collection causes the agent to stop monitoring the Hyper-V server.
Edit Properties: Starts a workflow for editing the properties of one or more selected agent instances. Each agent comes with a set of properties that it uses to configure its correct running state. For more information, refer to Configuring agent properties.
Remove: Deletes the selected agent instance.
Update Agent: Updates the agent package to the latest version.

Updating the agent package using this command generates the previously existing credentials. However, if you update the agent package by re-deploying its .gar file through the Agent Status page, the credentials need to be re-created. To do that, select an agent instance, click Edit Properties, and configure the required credentials on the Credentials tab of the Edit Tab Manager dialog box.

To perform any of the available commands, select one or more check boxes in the left-most column and click the appropriate button. For example, to start an agent’s data collection, select the check box in the agent row and click Start Data Collection.

Agent tabs

The Agents page contains three tabs: Hyper-V Agents, SCVMM Agents, and SOFS Agents. Each tab displays a list of the existing Hyper-V, SCVMM, or SOFS Agent instances and shows their status. Use it to verify if your agents are collecting data from the monitored environment.

The page displays the following data:

Active: Indicates if the Hyper-V Agent process is running.
Agent Name: The name of the Hyper-V Agent instance.
Agent Version: Indicates if the agent is running the latest version of the agent package, or it needs to be updated.
Alarms: The total numbers of Warning, Critical, and Fatal alarms.
Data Collection: Indicates if the Hyper-V Agent is collecting data from the monitored environment.
Download Log: Allows you to download the agent log file.
Edit Properties: Allows you to edit the agent’s properties.
Foglight Agent Manager Host: The name of the machine on which the Foglight Agent Manager and the Hyper-V Agent process are running.
Hyper-V Server (Hyper-V Agents tab only): The name of the monitored Hyper-V server.
SCVMM Server (SCVMM Agents tab only): The name of the monitored Hyper-V Virtual Machine Manager.
SOFS Server (SOFS Agents tab only): The name of the monitored SOFS server.

Configuring monitoring agents

Hyper-V Monitoring in Foglight uses the Hyper-V, SCVMM, and SOFS agents to collect information about your virtual environment:

Hyper-V Agents collect information from monitored Hyper-V servers. A Hyper-V server is a physical component required to begin building a virtual infrastructure. Hyper-V servers provide hypervisor-based architecture for controlling and managing resources for the virtual machines that run on it.
SCVMM Agents collect information from Virtual Machine Managers (VMM). A VMM allows you to manage host, networking, and storage resources when creating and deploying virtual machines to virtual clouds.
SOFS Agents collect information from monitored SOFS servers.
A SOFS server is a Windows Server cluster with some form of shared storage. SOFS servers provide highly available file-based storage for applications and general use.

When Hyper-V, SCVMM, and SOFS agent packages are successfully deployed, you can create agent instances, activate them, and start their data collection. To perform these steps in a single operation for one or more monitored hosts, use the Agents area on the Hyper-V Configuration dashboard.

When you add an agent instance, the agent process is created on the Agent Manager host. Activating the agent instance starts that agent process. When you start an agent’s data collection, the agent process starts collecting data from the monitored host and to sends it to Hyper-V Monitoring in Foglight.

To create, activate agent instances, and start their data collection:

Log in to the Foglight browser interface.
On the Welcome page, click Monitor Hyper-V or click Hyper-V in the left navigation panel.
On the Administration tab, under Agents, open the Hyper-V Agents, the SCVMM Agents tab, or the SOFS Agents tab, as required.
Click Add to launch the Agent Setup wizard. The Agent Setup wizard appears, and displays the Prepare page.
Review the information on this page.
- If you want to configure WinRM settings automatically, download the appropriate script, and follow the instructions provided with the scripts.
- Configure these settings manually.
  When done, click Next. The Agent Setup wizard refreshes, and displays the Select FglAM Client page. The page shows a list of all hosts that already have the Agent Manager installed and running, and to which you can deploy the HyperV Agent package.
Select the Agent Manager on which you want to create the Hyper-V Agent instance, and click Next.
Hyper-V Agents only- On the Discover or Manual page that appears, you can indicate if you want to manually specify the Hyper-V Server that you want to monitor, or to choose between the servers running in a given domain.
Select one of the following options:
Discover: Select this option if you want to choose from the available Hyper-V Servers running in the desired domain. Click Next and proceed to Step a mentioned below.
Manual: Select this option if you want to manually specify the name of the Hyper-V Server. Click Next and proceed to Step b mentioned below.

a. Discovering Hyper-V Servers only: On the Enter Domain Credentials page that appears, specify the information needed to search for the running Hyper-V Servers.
- Provide the following information, and then click Next.
  - Domain: Type the fully qualified name of a domain to search for the Hyper-V Server. For example, myDomain. com.
  - User: Type the user name to be used by the agent to be used to query Active Directory on the selected domain using the syntax Domain\UserName. For example,myDomain\jsmith.
  - Password: Type the password associated with the above user name.
  - Enable SSL for LDAP: Select this option to enable SSL for LDAP connection. The Agent Setup wizard refreshes, and displays the Select Servers page. The page shows a list of all Hyper-V servers that you have access to, based on the domain name and user credentials you provided in this step.
- Select one or more Hyper-V Servers that you want to monitor and click Next. The Agent Setup wizard refreshes, and displays the Agent Properties page.
- By default, the options for collecting CPU, disk, memory, and network metrics are selected. Review these settings, and make any changes, if required. When done, click Next.
- Proceed to Step c mentioned below.
b. Manually specifying a Hyper-V Server only. On the Manual Agent Properties page that appears, specify the information needed to search for the running Hyper-V servers. Click Next.
c. On the Credential Verification page that appears, review the existing set of credentials. If the wizard determines that the selected Agent Manager has any credentials configured for the host on which the Hyper-V Server is running, they appear listed on this page.
SCVMM Agents only: On the Input Agent Properties page that appears, type the name of the SCVMM server, and click Next.
On the Credentials Verification page that appears, select one of the following options:
- Do not configure a credential: Select this option if you want to configure the credential for this resource at a later time. Click Next and continue with Step 12.
- Add host(s) to a new credential: Select this option if you want to add the host to a new credential. This option is suitable if none of the existing credentials have the connection details needed to access the new host. Click Next and continue with Step 10.
- Add host(s) to an existing credential: Select this option if you want to add the host to an existing credential. This option is suitable if an existing credential has the security data needed to access the new host, but you need to edit its resource mappings to include this host. Click Next and continue with Step 11.
Create a new credential.
a. On the Credential Type page that appears, select the credential type from the available options.
b. Click Next. The Credential Properties page appears.
c. On the Credential Properties page, type the required properties, and click Next. The Credential Name and Lockbox page appears.
d. On the Credential Name and Lockbox page, provide a name to uniquely identify the credential, and select a lockbox in which you want to keep the credential. A lockbox can be used to group credentials for access and/or security. In smaller Foglight installations, using the default System lockbox should be sufficient.

If a lockbox is password protected and is not released to the target Foglight Agent Manager, you can provide the lockbox password on the last page of the wizard.

Click Next.
The Resource Mapping page appears.
e. On the Resource Mapping page, indicate which hosts you want to associate with this credential. Click Next.
The Policies page appears.
f. Optional- On the Policies page, define one or more policies for this credential. A policy defines the number of times a credential can be used, the number of allowed authentication failures, the time range during which the credential is valid, or the length of time the credential data can be cached on the client.
For example, you can specify the number of times the credential can be used, or the time period during which it can be used.
g. Click Next and proceed to Step 12.
```
Use an existing credential.<br/>
```
a. On the Credential page that appears, select an existing credential to contain this host.
b. Click Next. The Resource Mapping page appears.
c. On the Resource Mapping page, indicate which hosts you want to associate with this credential. You can either select the host that you are about to start monitoring, all monitored hosts, or hosts whose name contains a specific text string.
d. Click Next and proceed to Step 12.
On the Connectivity Diagnostic page that appears, select the Hyper-V servers you want to diagnose connectivity and click Next to perform diagnostic. If no connectivity diagnostic is required, unselect any Hyper-V servers and click Next.
Wait for a few seconds until the Connectivity Diagnostic Result page appears. Click the Diagnostic Result and the Connectivity Diagnostic Result Detail page appears. Click on the failed items to see the possible reasons.
Click Next after connectivity diagnostic completes.
On the Summary page that appears, review the information provided about the host and the monitoring agent.
Click Finish.
The new host is added to the Hosts dashboard after a short delay. The monitoring agent is created. If the operation is successful, the Agent Setup message box appears. Review the information and close the message box.
The agent instances created to monitor the new host appear on the Administration tab, in the Agents area.
Close the dialog box. The Agent Management dashboard refreshes, showing the newly created Hyper-V Agent in the list.
If required, reconfigure the agent properties or credentials. For example, you can specify the name of the monitored Hyper-V server or the authentication schema.
a. Select an agent and click Edit Properties. The Edit Agent Tab Manager dialog box appears, showing the Hyper-V Agent properties on the Agent Properties tab.
When multiple agents are selected, you can only edit the properties that are common to all selected agents.

b. Review and edit the agent properties, as required. For additional information about these properties, refer to Setting the Hyper-V Agent Configuration properties.
c. Open the Credentials tab, and review the available credentials.
d. If required, you can create a new credential for this agent, or associate it with an existing credential.
- New credentials: Click New Credential and use the Create Credential Wizard that appears to provide the required information. For more details, refer to Step 10.
- Existing credentials: Click Add to Existing Credential and use the Create Credential Wizard that appears to provide the required information. For more details, refer to Step 11.
Activate one or more agents. On the Agent Management dashboard, select the agents that you want to activate and click Activate.
Start the data collection for one or more agents. On the Agent Management dashboard, select the agents whose data collection you want to start and click Start Data Collection.
Click Refresh. The Active and Data Collection columns show green check marks indicating that the agents are active and collecting data. If the agent unexpectedly fails or stops, this is an indicator of an incorrect configuration. Unknown host names or invalid WinRM configuration can cause the agent to fail. Incorrect configuration causes the agent to stop.
If this happens, the agent generates an observation containing a message with more information about the failure.You can view the message contents in the Data Browser. For example, to find out any massages related to the Hyper-V Agent, in the Data Browser, navigate to Hyper-V > Hyper-V Agents > <Hyper-V Agent instance> > Messages > History > <message>.

Configuring agent properties

The Hyper-V, SCVMM, and SOFS Agents collect data from your virtual infrastructure and sends it to Foglight. The agents keep track of resource utilization metrics and alerts you when certain pre-defined thresholds are reached.
When an agent connects to Foglight, it is provided with sets of properties that it uses to configure its correct running state. Each agent is provided with a combination of two types of properties: agent properties and shareable properties.

Default versions of these properties are installed with Hyper-V Monitoring in Foglight. However, you can edit the default shareable and agent properties, configure agent properties that apply only to a specific agent instance, and create edited clones of shareable properties that are used by a subset of agents of a certain type.

There are two ways to access the Hyper-V, SCVMM, and SOFS Agent properties:

On the Hyper-V Environment dashboard, on the Administration tab, select an agent instance and click Edit Properties (see Configuring monitoring agents).

This method only allows you to edit the Configuration properties, but not the Data Collection Scheduler properties.
On the Agent Status dashboard, select an agent instance and click Edit Properties. This method provides access to the full set of Hyper-V Agent properties, and is described in this topic.

To modify the Hyper-V/SCVMM/SOFS Agent agent properties using the Agent Status dashboard:

Log in to the Foglight browser interface.
Navigate to Administration > Agents > Agent Status in the left navigation panel.
On the Agent Status dashboard, select the instance of the Hyper-V, SCVMM, or SOFS Agent whose properties you want to modify, and click Edit Properties.
Indicate that you want to edit the properties of the agent instance. A list of agent properties appears in the display area.

Setting the Hyper-V Agent Configuration properties

To monitor a desired Hyper-V server, ensure the Configuration properties of Hyper-V Agent are set up as required.

To set the Hyper-V Agent Configuration properties:

Locate the Configuration properties of the Hyper-V Agent.
Set the Configuration properties as follows:
- Host Name: Type the fully qualified host name of the machine on which the monitored Hyper-V Server is running.
- Collect CPU metrics: Select this option if you want to collect CPU metrics from the monitored Hyper-V environment.
- Collect disk metrics: Select this option if you want to collect disk metrics from the monitored Hyper-V environment.
- Collect memory metrics: Select this option if you want to collect memory metrics from the monitored Hyper-V environment.
- Collect network metrics: Select this option if you want to collect network metrics from the monitored Hyper-V environment.
- Enable FSM Integration: Select this option if you want to enable the integration with Foglight for Storage Management.
- Enable Storage Space Direct Collection: Select this option if you want to collect Storage Space Direct (S2D) metrics from the monitored Hyper-V environment.
- Connection Type: Specify the connection type. Quest recommends using WinRM as the connection type, as DCOM will be removed in future release.
- WinRM port: Type the port number of WinRM.
- Use HTTPs: Select this option if you want to use the HTTPS protocol.
- Inventory update request timeout (sec): Type the number of seconds after an inventory collection times out.
- Connection timeout (sec): Type the number of seconds after a connection times out.
- WMI request timeout (sec): Type the number of seconds after a WMI request times out.

Setting the SCVMM Agent Configuration properties

To monitor a desired System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), ensure the SCVMM Agent’s Configuration properties are set up as required.

To set the SCVMM Agent Configuration properties:

Locate the SCVMM Agent’s Configuration properties.
In the Configuration area, in the SCVMM Host Name box, type the name of the machine on which the Virtual Machine Manager is running.

Setting the SOFS Agent Configuration properties

To monitor a desired SOFS server, ensure the SOFS Agent’s Configuration properties are set up as required.

To set the SOFS Agent Configuration properties:

Locate the Configuration properties of the SOFS Agent.
Set the Configuration properties as follows:
- Host Name: Type the fully qualified host name of the machine on which the monitored Hyper-V Server is running.
- Collect CPU metrics: Select this option if you want to collect CPU metrics from the monitored SOFS environment.
- Collect disk metrics: Select this option if you want to collect disk metrics from the monitored SOFS environment.
- Collect memory metrics: Select this option if you want to collect memory metrics from the monitored SOFS environment.
- Collect network metrics: Select this option if you want to collect network metrics from the monitored SOFS environment.
- Enable Storage Space Direct Collection: Select this option if you want to collect Storage Space Direct (S2D) metrics from the monitored Hyper-V environment.
- Connection Type: Specify the connection type. Quest recommends using WinRM as the connection type, as DCOM will be removed in future release.
- WinRM port: Type the port number of WinRM.
- Use HTTPs: Select this option if you want to use the HTTPS protocol.
- Update request timeout (sec): Type the number of seconds after a collection times out.

Reviewing object instances and deleting expired data

Foglight collects data from monitored environments and creates a data model in real-time. The resulting topology model consists of nodes where each node is an object instance of a particular object type. Each type of monitoring environment can have a unique set of object types. Hyper-V Monitoring in Foglight includes a set of topology object types and their definitions. When Foglight collects data from your Hyper-V environment, it builds the topology model that consists of the instances of the object types defined by Hyper-V Monitoring in Foglight. By default, a monitored environment can result in up to 50,000 object instances being created by a single object type. This value is controlled by the foglight.limit.instances registry variable.

Registry variables have a global default value and type-specific scoped values. This means that different object types can have different instance limits.

Explore the Instances and Limits view to see the existing Hyper-V object types. To access this view, on the Hyper-V Agent Administration dashboard, click Review Instances and Limits.

The Instances and Limits view displays the list of the existing Hyper-V object types, and for each type it shows the type name, instance limit, instance count, instance limit utilization, and the type status given as the highest severity level associated with an instance of that type.
This information can give you insight into the size of your database and whether additional adjustments are required to improve your system performance. For example, if an object type results in a high number of object instances, this may result in performance bottlenecks. To prevent them, check if any of these are updated recently and, if not, delete them from the database, as described below.

To view the list of existing registry variables or to edit them, click Edit Registry Variable in the top-left corner. For more information about this view, refer to Instances and Limits view.

To review and delete expired data:

On the Hyper-V Agent Administration dashboard, click Review Expired Data. The Expired Data View and Removal dialog box appears.
In the Expired Data View and Removal dialog box, select a category of object type that you want to review, and enter the number of days during which the object instances were not updated.
For example, to view the object instances that are not updated in 30 days and are created when monitoring virtual machines, select HPVVirtual Machine, and in the Minimum days since last updated box, type 30.
Click Next. The Expired Data View and Removal dialog box refreshes, showing the object instances that meet the specified requirements.
Observe the results.
- If you want to delete all of the object instances, click Next.
- If you want to modify your search, click Previous, make your changes, and observe your results again. For example, to show fewer instances, click Previous, and increase the time period. When satisfied, click Next.
- If you do not want to delete any objects, click Next. The Expired Data View and Removal dialog box refreshes.
To delete the selected object instances, select the check box. To keep the selected object instances, ensure the check box is clear.
Click Finish.

Instances and Limits view

This view displays the list of the existing Hyper-V object types. This information can give you insight into the size of your database and whether additional adjustments are required to improve your system performance.

The following data is displayed:

Instance Count: The current number of object instances of this type.
Instance Limit: The maximum number of object instances of this type that can be instantiated.
Object Type: The type of the topology object.
Status: The current status representing the highest severity level associated with an instance of that type.
Utilized: The percentage of the object limit instance that is currently utilized.