Getting Familiar with eG Admin Interface

An important step in installing and configuring the eG manager and agent is to administer the eG Enterprise system. Administering involves discovering the environment to be monitored, managing the components, configuring tests, defining thresholds, configuring role-based access to the eG web console, and many more. To perform these operations, you need access to the Admin module of the eG web console. Who has access to the Admin interface differs according to the deployment model of the eG manager. You can pick from the following deployment models:

  • Enterprise: This model is ideal if your eG manager will be monitoring only your organization's IT infrastructure. In this case, eG's agent-based/agentless monitors will be deployed on and will pull metrics from the components in your infrastructure only. The employees of your organization will be the primary stakeholders and consumers of the performance data so collected.

    Such a model is typically, administrator-driven. In other words, an administrator will be responsible for performing all administrative activities related to the eG manager - this includes, installing agents, managing the components, configuring thresholds, tests and alerting, managing users, building segments and services, defining zones, and more. The other stakeholders - i.e., the employees - will usually be vested with only monitoring rights, or in some special cases, very limited administrative rights, as the administrator deems fit.

  • SaaS: This model is ideal if you are a Managed Service Provider (MSP), providing infrastructure hosting and management services to multiple customers. Monitoring is quiet often a cloud-based service that an MSP offers to each of their customers. If you are an MSP, you will want the eG manager to not just monitor your infrastructure, but also that of your customers. This means that an eG manager centrally deployed in the MSP infrastructure will be managing agents deployed in the customer infrastructure as well.

    The SaaS model also helps where a single eG manager manages agents used by different departments (eg., Development, Testing, Support etc.) / support groups (Europe Support, EMEA Support, USA Support etc.) / IT domains (Network administration, Database administration, Windows administration etc.).

    With the SaaS model, eG Enterprise fully supports mult-tenancy. Unlike the Enterprise model, in SaaS, the administrator will not be the sole custodian of administrative rights. Instead, these rights will be delegated to the individual tenants - say, MSP customers, department heads/workers, support personnel who are part of different support groups, or IT domain experts. The tenants are thus empowered to deploy the agents they want, manage the components they wish to monitor, and customize accesses, monitoring, and alerting based on the requirements of their infrastructure. The central administrator will continue to hold unrestricted administrative rights, which will enable him/her to manage monitoring licenses of the tenants, oversee performance and problems across tenant infrastructures, and even override a tenant's monitoring configuration if required.

From the above discussion, it is clear that in the case of the Enterprise model, it is the administrator who is authorized to configure the target environment for monitoring and manage user accesses to the eG web console. This topic applies only to the Enterprise deployment model, and describes the various functions that an eG administrator can perform using the Admin module of the eG web console.

Figure 1 : The eG login screen

To access eG Enterprise using a web browser, connect to the URL http://<eG Manager IP>:>eG ManagerPort>, if the manager is configured without SSL. If the manager is configured with SSL, connect to the URL https://<eG Manager IP>:>eG ManagerPort>. Figure 1 shows the eG login window. The user has to login from this window in order to access eG Enterprise. The eG Enterprise system is predefined with a default administrator account with a login of admin and password admin. An administrator can also login using any other Username, provided the role assigned to that user name allows him/her access to the eG administrative interface. To know more about user roles and user profile creating in the eG Enterprise system, refer to Adding New User Roles and Adding New Users topics.

Note:

While specifying the URL, please take care of the following aspects:

  • If the host name was provided when installing the manager, use this name (and not the IP address) for accessing the user interface via the web browser.
  • If the host name is provided, make sure that forward and reverse lookups for this name are enabled via the DNS service in the target environment.

If an administrator forgets the login Password, he/she can click on the Forgot Password link in Figure 1. Doing so invokes Figure 2 wherein the administrator would have to provide the Username for which the password details are required, and then click the Get password button to retrieve the password.

Figure 2 : Retrieving password

If the Username specified is valid, then the password will be emailed to the user with the given Username.

Note:

The eG manager will be able to send password details by mail to a user, only if:

  • The Username specified in Figure 2 has been configured to receive email alerts, and a valid email ID has been assigned to the user; please refer to Adding New Userstopic to know how to configure a user profile to receive email alerts of issues.
  • The mail server has been properly configured to handle eG alerts. In the MAIL SERVER SETTINGS page of the eG administrative interface a valid mail host and eG Administrator mail ID should have been configured. Please refer to Configuring the Mail Server for more details with regard to the same.

Once the administrator has logged in, the eG manager may indicate an expiry of the license.