Hi, everyone, and welcome to Foglight Skills 101. Today we'll explore the importance of upgrading Foglight and how to do it successfully. I'm happy to introduce our speaker. His name is Alex Tarte. He's an expert in performance monitoring and he has a really deep understanding of what Foglight can truly do. And we'd love for you to get involved. Please feel free to drop your questions in the chat as we go along, and we'll have a live Q&A at the end where Alex and the team will answer them. And with that, I will hand it over to Alex.
Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. My name is Alex Tarte. I'm one of the product specialists for Foglight. In this session, we'll talk a bit about the importance and the process of upgrading your Foglight environment. Our agenda for today will cover several key areas. We'll start by discussing the primary motivations behind upgrading. Next, we'll look into some of the obvious challenges, including how to prepare for it and how to perform the upgrade.
We'll then talk about specific considerations and best practices when upgrading high availability and Federation environments. We'll also highlight the significant security enhancements and latest features introduced in recent releases. And at the end of the presentation, we'll have time to answer some of your questions.
So why upgrade? One of the reasons would be getting access to the latest fixes for known issues. This can be applicable for different parts of the product, including core components and the various cartridges. There's also some new security enhancements. This could be, for example, updates to third party libraries, which include security fixes. There's also access to new features. Foglight is constantly improving, so new features get added with the different releases.
We'll look into some of the latest security enhancements and features later in the presentation. Support for newer platforms here, it could be that you're looking to upgrade operating systems or databases to versions which have been added as supported in a newer Foglight release. There's also a simpler upgrades when coming from a more recent release.
What I mean here is that, for example, upgrading from an older release may increase the complexity of the upgrade as depending on the versions and the type of cartridges the upgrade path may require going through multiple phases. For example, an upgrade to version 71 is only supported from versions 61 and 63. So if you're coming from an older release, you may need to go through an intermediate upgrade before doing the final upgrade to the desired version.
And last but not least, it would be staying current with version of the product are still fully supported. We encourage our customers to be on a fully supported release as this ensures that support and development teams can provide the best assistance possible whenever an issue arises. We'll usually provide support for the current and prior versions of the product. But for more information about our product life cycle, you can visit our support portal where you will find information about the versions and the dates for which each product is under full support, limited support, and support discontinued.
All right. So now moving on with our next topic. Let's talk about some of the challenges you would encounter doing an upgrade. One would be that there are multiple components that may need to be upgraded at any given time. So a Foglight environment is generally a combination of multiple components. We can have core components such as the management servers and managers and also the various cartridges for different agent types.
Depending on the type of upgrade, you may need to upgrade multiple components together due to various requirements between them or a single component can be upgraded as long as versions remain compatible. We also have a different type of configurations. We have stand alone installations and we also have high availability of Federation environments. The process to upgrade those does not differ much between them, but there are specific considerations for the layer two that will be shaking later on. There's also part of the challenges would be the preparation steps before the upgrade and going through the actual order for the different components that will be reviewing in the upcoming slides.
All right. Let's now talk about how to prepare for the upgrade. As we mentioned, before performing the upgrade is important to prepare and plan for it. So we first recommend to review the available documentation. This can include the Upgrade Guide with information on how to go over the upgrade for different configurations, the upgrade order and best practices. We also have the release notes for the core components and the cartridges. This can include details about the upgrade path and cartridge specific considerations such as what documentation to look for.
The system requirements and platform support guide, this one will have details on the operating-- supported operating systems for Foglight Management Server, Foglight monitors and supported backend database platforms. We also have notices in the support portal for some of the components. We may put notices in the support portal if there's a known issue that should be taken into consideration when performing the upgrade.
The download links in these cases will show an upgrade caution icon as we can see here, and that will usually point to a knowledge base article with additional information on how to proceed. In the support portal, we'll have sections for each product. We have Foglight, Foglight, for Databases, and Foglight Evolve, including the documentation listed here.
Before the upgrade, we also suggest to review the current configuration of the Foglight environment, such as what version of the components are currently used, operating systems, a type of deployment and available resources. This, along with information in the documentation, can help identify if there is any changes that may be needed before moving forward with the upgrade, define the upgrade