Application Event Log Test

How often should the test be executed.

The IP address of the host for which the test is being configured.

Specify the port at which the target host listens to.

Specify the name of the Proxmox node that you wish to monitor in this text box. By default, this parameter is set to none indicating that the test monitor all the nodes in the target hypervisor.

Administrators of some high security Proxmox environments might not have permissions to internally monitor one/more VMs. The eG agent can be configured to not obtain the 'inside view' of such ‘inaccessible’ VMs using the Ignore VMs Inside View parameter. Against this parameter, you can provide a comma-separated list of VM names, or VM name patterns, for which the inside view need not be obtained. For instance, your Ignore VMs Inside View specification can be: *xp,*lin*,win*,vista. Here, the * (asterisk) is used to denote leading and trailing spaces (as the case may be). By default, this parameter is set to none indicating that the eG agent obtains the inside view of all VMs on a Proxmox Hypervisor by default.

Note:

While performing VM discovery, the eG agent will not discover the operating system of the VMs configured in the Ignore VMs Inside View text box.

Typically, when performing VM discovery, the eG agent automatically discovers the operating system on which every VM runs, and all the IP addresses that each VM supports. If two are more VMs on a target Proxmox hypervisor are in a VM cluster, then the eG agent will also auto-discover the cluster IP address. Since the cluster IP address is shared by all VMs in the cluster, this IP address will be in the discovery list of every VM in the hypervisor. In this case, if the eG agent attempts to obtain the 'inside view' of each VM in a cluster using their cluster IP address, incorrect metrics may be reported sometimes. To avoid this, you may want to instruct the eG agent to not use the cluster IP address when collecting 'inside view' metrics. For this, specify a comma-separated list of cluster IP addresses to be excluded in the Exclude IP text box.

By default, the eG agent does not support the inside view for VMs executing on Windows NT operating systems. Accordingly, the Ignore WINNT flag is set to Yes by default.

Administrators of some virtualized environments may not want to monitor some of their less-critical VMs - for instance, VM templates - both from 'outside' and from 'inside'. The eG agent in this case can be configured to completely exclude such VMs from its monitoring purview. To achieve this, provide a comma-separated list of VMs to be excluded from monitoring in the Exclude VMs text box. Instead of VMs, VM name patterns can also be provided here in a comma-separated list. For example, your Exclude VMs specification can be: *xp,*lin*,win*,vista. Here, the * (asterisk) is used to denote leading and trailing spaces (as the case may be). By default, this parameter is set to none indicating that the eG agent obtains the inside and outside views of all VMs on a virtual host by default. By providing a comma-separated list of VMs/VM name patterns in the Exclude VMs text box, you can make sure the eG agent stops collecting 'inside' and 'outside' view metrics for a configured set of VMs.

Refers to the type of event logs to be monitored. The default value is application.

Using this page, administrators can configure the event sources, event IDs, and event descriptions to be monitored by this test. In order to enable administrators to easily and accurately provide this specification, this page provides the following options:

• Manually specify the event sources, IDs, and descriptions in the Filter text area, or,

• Select a specification from the predefined filter policies listed in the Filter box

For explicit, manual specification of the filter conditions, select the No option against the Policy Based Filter field. This is the default selection. To choose from the list of pre-configured filter policies, or to create a new filter policy and then associate the same with the test, select the Yes option against the Policy Based Filter field.

If the Policy Based Filter flag is set to No, then a Filter text area will appear, wherein you will have to specify the event sources, event IDs, and event descriptions to be monitored. This specification should be of the following format: {Displayname}:{event_sources_to_be_included}:{event_sources_to_be_excluded}:{event_IDs_to_be_included}:{event_IDs_to_be_excluded}:{event_descriptions_to_be_included}:{event_descriptions_to_be_excluded}. For example, assume that the Filter text area takes the value, OS_events:all:Browse,Print:all:none:all:none. Here:

• OS_events is the display name that will appear as a descriptor of the test in the monitor UI;

• all indicates that all the event sources need to be considered while monitoring. To monitor specific event sources, provide the source names as a comma-separated list. To ensure that none of the event sources are monitored, specify none.

• Next, to ensure that specific event sources are excluded from monitoring, provide a comma-separated list of source names. Accordingly, in our example, Browse and Print have been excluded from monitoring. Alternatively, you can use all to indicate that all the event sources have to be excluded from monitoring, or none to denote that none of the event sources need be excluded.

• In the same manner, you can provide a comma-separated list of event IDs that require monitoring. The all in our example represents that all the event IDs need to be considered while monitoring.

• Similarly, the none (following all in our example) is indicative of the fact that none of the event IDs need to be excluded from monitoring. On the other hand, if you want to instruct the eG Enterprise system to ignore a few event IDs during monitoring, then provide the IDs as a comma-separated list. Likewise, specifying all makes sure that all the event IDs are excluded from monitoring.

• The all which follows implies that all events, regardless of description, need to be included for monitoring. To exclude all events, use none. On the other hand, if you provide a comma-separated list of event descriptions, then the events with the specified descriptions will alone be monitored. Event descriptions can be of any of the following forms - desc*, or desc, or *desc*,or desc*, or desc1*desc2, etc. desc here refers to any string that forms part of the description. A leading '*' signifies any number of leading characters, while a trailing '*' signifies any number of trailing characters.

• In the same way, you can also provide a comma-separated list of event descriptions to be excluded from monitoring. Here again, the specification can be of any of the following forms: desc*, or desc, or *desc*,or desc*, or desc1*desc2, etc. desc here refers to any string that forms part of the description. A leading '*' signifies any number of leading characters, while a trailing '*' signifies any number of trailing characters. In our example however, none is specified, indicating that no event descriptions are to be excluded from monitoring. If you use all instead, it would mean that all event descriptions are to be excluded from monitoring.

By default, the Filter parameter contains the value: all:all:none:all:none:all:none. Multiple filters are to be separated by semi-colons  (;).

Note:

The event sources and event IDs specified here should be exactly the same as that which appears in the Event Viewer window.  

On the other hand, if the Policy Based Filter flag is set to Yes, then a Filter list box will appear, displaying the filter policies that pre-exist in the eG Enterprise system. A filter policy typically comprises of a specific set of event sources, event IDs, and event descriptions to be monitored. This specification is built into the policy in the following format:

{Policyname}:{event_sources_to_be_included}:{event_sources_to_be_excluded}:{event_IDs_to_be_included}:{event_IDs_to_be_excluded}:{event_descriptions_to_be_included}:{event_descriptions_to_be_excluded}

To monitor a specific combination of event sources, event IDs, and event descriptions, you can choose the corresponding filter policy from the Filter list box. Multiple filter policies can be so selected. Alternatively, you can modify any of the existing policies to suit your needs, or create a new filter policy. To facilitate this, a button is provided adjacent to the Filter parameter, once the Yes option is chosen against Policy Based Filter. Clicking on the button leads you to a page where you can modify the existing policies or create a new one (refer to the Monitoring Unix and Windows Servers document). The changed policy or the new policy can then be associated with the test by selecting the policy name from the Filter list box in this page.

The eG agent can either use WMI to extract event log statistics or directly parse the event logs using event log APIs. If the UseWMI flag is Yes, then WMI is used. If not, the event log APIs are used. This option is provided because on some Windows systems (especially ones with service pack 3 or lower), the use of WMI access to event logs can cause the CPU usage of the WinMgmt process to shoot up. On such systems, set the UseWMI parameter value to No. On the other hand, when monitoring systems that are operating on any other flavor of Windows (say, Windows 2012 or above), the UseWMI flag should always be set to ‘Yes’.

By default, this test connects to each virtual guest remotely and attempts to collect “inside view” metrics. In order to obtain a remote connection, the test must be configured with user privileges that allow remote communication with the virtual guests. The first step towards this is to specify the Domain within which the virtual guests reside. The Admin User and Admin Password will change according to the Domain specification. Discussed below are the different values that the Domain parameter can take, and how they impact the Admin User and Admin Password specifications:

• If the VMs belong to a single domain : If the guests belong to a specific domain, then specify the name of that domain against the Domain parameter. In this case, any administrative user in that domain will have remote access to all the virtual guests. Therefore, an administrator account in the given domain can be provided in the Admin User field and the corresponding password in the Admin Password field. Confirm the password by retyping it in the Confirm Password text box.

• If the guests do not belong to any domain (as in the case of Linux guests) : In this case, specify "none" in the Domain field, and specify a local administrator account name in the Admin User below.

  Prior to this, you need to ensure that the same local administrator account is available or is explicitly created on each of the virtual machines to be monitored. Then, proceed to provide the password of the Admin User against Admin Password, and confirm the password by retyping it in the Confirm Password text box.

  If key-based authentication is implemented between the eG agent and the SSH daemon of a Linux guest, then, in the Admin User text box, enter the name of the user whose <USER_HOME_DIR> (on that Linux guest) contains a .ssh directory with the public key file named authorized_keys. The Admin password in this case will be the passphrase of the public key; the default public key file that is bundled with the eG agent takes the password eginnovations. Specify this as the Admin Password if you are using the default private/public key pair that is bundled with the eG agent to implement key-based authentication. On the other hand, if you are generating a new public/private key pair for this purpose, then use the passphrase that you provide while generating the pair. For the detailed procedure on Implementing Key-based Authentication refer to Troubleshooting the Failure of the eG Remote Agent to Connect to or Report Measures for Linux Guests.

• If the guests belong to different domains - In this case, you might want to provide multiple domain names. If this is done, then, to access the guests in every configured domain, the test should be configured with the required user privileges; this implies that along with multiple Domain names, multiple Admin User names and Admin Passwords would also have to be provided. To help administrators provide these user details quickly and easily, the eG administrative interface embeds a special configuration page.

  To access this page, simply click on the icon adjacent to the Admin User text box. To know how to use the special page, refer to Application Event Log Test.

• If the Inside View Using flag is set to ‘eG VM Agent (Windows)’ - In this case, the inside view can be obtained without domain administrator privileges. Therefore, set the Domain, Admin User, and Admin Password parameters to none.

eG Enterprise also provides you with options to restrict the amount of storage required for event log tests. Towards this end, the DD for information and DD for Verbose flags have been made available in this page. By default, both these flags are set to Yes, indicating that by default, the test generates detailed diagnostic measures for information events and warning events. If you do not want the test to generate and store detailed measures for information and verbose events, set these flags to No.

To ensure that the test does not generate and store detailed measures for warning events, set the DD for warning flag to No.

While monitoring a Proxmox Hypervisor, the Report By User flag is set to No by default, indicating that by default, the VM operating systems on the target hypervisor are identified using the hostname specified in the operating system. On the other hand, if you want the desktops to be identified using the login of the user who is accessing them, set this flag to Yes. In other words, in VDI environments, this test will, by default, report measures for every username_on_virtualmachinename.

This flag becomes relevant only if the Report By User flag is set to ‘Yes’.

If this flag is set to Yes (which is the default setting), then this test will report measures for even those VMs that do not have any users logged in currently. Such guests will be identified by their virtualmachine name and not by the username_on_virtualmachinename. On the other hand, if the Report Powered OS flag is set to No, then this test will not report measures for those VMs to which no users are logged in currently. 

Refers to the frequency with which detailed diagnosis measures are to be generated for this test. The default is 1:1. This indicates that, by default, detailed measures will be generated every time this test runs, and also every time the test detects a problem. You can modify this frequency, if you so desire. Also, if you intend to disable the detailed diagnosis capability for this test, you can do so by specifying none against DD frequency.