Golan Shem-Tov here with the Solutions Architects team at Quest.
Foglight gives users powerful tools and capabilities to change the user interface and make the display more meaningful. These series of Blogs (Fun with Foglight) are meant to be short 15 to 20 minutes mini tutorials that expose the fun side in foglight and help users build views that are useful and meaningful. This article will cover the topic of images to foglight and using them in reports and dashboards.
IMPORTANT: These are advanced topics, try this in a test environment until you are comfortable with the process. Engage quest Professional Services for more complex tasks.
Step 1 – Adding an image to Foglight.
For this example we decided to use the following image to foglight, use it as a button in drag/drop dashboard and use it in reports.
You can use your company logo or other images (foglight accepts png, jpeg, gif and other formats).
To add this image to Foglight you need to navigate to configuration > Definitions
Add a new system module by clicking on the green "+" sign at the bottom of the definitions window.
Give the new module name, description and choose the roles that will have access to the views (operator will let any user with “operator” role see this view).
Custom system module enables us to work in a self contained environment that does not impact the out of the box modules and can be exported/imported to another environment.
When selecting the new module you will see that it is empty, choose the “files” tab and click on the “add” button.
In the “New File” window click on the “Browse” button, locate and add the new image you want to use.
At this point you have an image that was uploaded to foglight and can be referenced.
You can reference that image from a new drag and drop report by choosing “customize header “ or “customize footer” from the right action panel.
Then click on the edit icon on the right side of “select image”.
Navigate to the new image from the list of modules and select it.
You can then click on “create PDF” in the right action panel to see the icon in a report.
You can also use this image in the out of the box reports according to the instructions in KB article https://support.quest.com/SUPPORT/index?page=solution&id=SOL41198
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Step 2 – Adding the new image to a view.
Now that we have the new image uploaded to foglight, lets add it to custom portlets that can be added to a drag and drop dashboard.
Select your module’s view tab and click add.
From the new view window, click the “…” button and choose common > image
Give the new view a name, check the “public” box and under "purposes” choose pagelet and portlet.
Go to the “configuration tab and click on the “edit” button in the value column.
Navigate to your module and choose the new image
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Step 3 – Adding a flow to image click.
Switch to the “flow” tab and click on the selection line .
Uncheck the “leave unspecified” line and click on “flow type” drop down menu.
The common and simple uses for this, in the case of an image, are “next page”, "popup" and “External URL”:
- “Next page” will let you navigate to a different foglight view and navigate back using the bread crumbs. If you select the “Hosts” as the next page clicking on the image will navigate to the Hosts page.
- "Popup" will open a popup window with one of the other views that exist in the system when you click on the image. In this case the alarms window will be opened every time you click on the image.
- “External URL” will send you to a specified URL or open a new browser window with the specified URL
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Step 4- The end result.
Create a new dashboard, then from the list of views drag to the new view to the dashboard.
Click on the image and you can see the Hosts dashboard with navigation back using the cookie crumbs at the top of the page
If you chose popup you will see a popup windows with the view you selected and if you chose “External URL” you will see a new browser window with the selected URL.
In Fun with Foglight part 2 we will learn how to use an image as a background for a custom dashboardand and put on it alerts for different monitored components with navigation. This is useful for high level dashboards where you can use application and services architecture/flow sketches and put alerts for applications/services with drill down to existing dashbords. In Fun with Foglight part 3 we will learn how to use images as state renderers giving you the ability to choose your own images for normal/warning/fatal/critical states.