After HQ is installed, it is time to take it for a spin and see what it can do. This document will show you how to log in, import some initial resources into your HQ inventory and begin managing them with the HQ portal. This walk through assumes a default HQ installation. If you changed anything during your installation (such as port numbers, username or password), be sure to use the values you entered during the install process.
Login to HQ
Using a web browser, navigate to port 7080 of the host you installed HQ on. An example might be http://localhost:7080/ or http://hq.myhost.net:7080/. You will be presented with the HQ Login screen. Enter the default HQ Administrator username and password of hqadmin and hqadmin.
Upon successful login, you will be at the HQ Dashboard.
Import a new platform
The Dashboard consists of several portlets that provide different types of information. The one portlet that will stick out is the Auto-Discovery portlet. It will have several entries for the newly registered HQ Agent on the local machine. The radio button next to this host should be selected. If there are other entries and the radio button is not selected, please select it. Now click Import to import the platform and its servers. The process adds the platform and servers to the HQ inventory as well as enables the default metrics for collection on the newly imported resources. You will know this process has been started when you see the hostname for the platform in the Recently Added Resources dashboard portlet.
View platform metrics
The default metric collection intervals for platform metrics range between 1 minute and 10 minutes depending on the metric. So since we just scheduled these metrics for collection, we need to give it a few minutes to collect the first data points. After the first metrics have been collected, we can view them from the platform metrics page.
To view the metric data, it is necessary to navigate to the platform current health page. There are several ways to do this. One way is to click the Browse Resources link at the top of most any page. Next click on the link of the platform you wish to view the metrics for. This is the Platform Current Health page. This page displays a wealth of information on the health of the current resource (in this case, a platform) as well as information on resources related to this resource. To get more specific metric information or to enable more metrics for collection, click on the Metric Data mini-tab.
This list of metrics represents all the metrics for which HQ has data in the display range. In our case, we just started metric collection a few minutes ago, so there will be very little metric data here. There are still a few things you can do to explore the possibilities in HQ. Each metric has an information 
icon on the right side of the page. Clicking this will open a window with detailed information on the specific metric. You can chart the data for any metric by clicking on the metric name. Alternately, you chart multiple metrics at the same time by checking the checkbox next to the desired metrics and clicking the Chart Selected Metrics button.
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By default, only the "indicator" metrics are configured to be collected. To enable more metrics for collection, click the arrow button next to Show All Metrics at the top of the Metric Data page. This will list all metrics available to collect for the resource type. To enable metrics or change their collection interval, simply check the box next to the metrics you wish to change, enter the collection interval at the bottom of the page and click the arrow button. |
Enable Log/Config Tracking
The Log/Config Tracking feature of HQ allows you to manage log events and configuration changes to your resources. This needs to be turned on for resources you wish to manage in this way. To enable log/config tracking for your platform, click on the Inventory tab for your platform, scroll to the Configuration Properties section at the bottom of the page and click the Edit button to edit the configuration. Check the box for Enable Log Tracking and enter /var/log/dmesg in the Log Files field. Check the Enable Config Tracking box and enter /etc/hosts in the Configuration Files field. Click OK to enable changes.
| Notes on Log and Configuration Files
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Configure an Alert
To configure an alert for your platform, click on the Alert tab. Click the New button to create a new alert definition. We will configure an alert to let you know if this platform ever goes down.
Enter Platform Down! as the name of the alert, select !!! - High priority, optionally enter a description and leave Active set to Yes. Next, select Availability in the metric dropdown. Select < (Less than) and enter 100% in the (absolute value) line. Scroll down, leave Each time conditions are exceeded or met selected and click OK to create the Alert Definition.
Now that the alert definition is created, we need to add notification to it. Click on the Notify HQ Users tab and click Add To List. Check your user (select hqadmin if that is the only user), click the right arrow to move the name over to the notification list and click OK to set notification.
Now the email address associated with the selected user will get an alert notification if this platform ever goes down.