This article describes the methods you can use to add your infrastructure to FortiMonitor. Each method varies in effort, requirements, and level of automation. Review the different deployment methods listed in this article to determine which option works best for your environment.

Refer to the following table to see the features and requirements of each option.

For example, if you want to use CounterMeasures, add your infrastructure using the FortiMonitor Agent method. Otherwise, if you only want to monitor SNMP-related metrics, add your infrastructure manually or use OnSight Discovery.

FortiMonitor Agent

The FortiMonitor Agent is a local monitoring utility that is deployed directly on your physical server, VM, or cloud server. It allows you to monitor your server’s resources, processes, and services. The FortiMonitor Agent also supports several plugins to monitor applications like web servers, databases, caches, and so forth. It is also extensible, allowing you to customize it to meet your own needs.

The FortiMonitor Agent can be used to monitor applications running on your servers such as Apache, Cassandra, SQL Server, and more. The Agent is compatible with Windows, Linux, and Unix.

Click on the following links to learn more about the FortiMonitor Agent:

• FortiMonitor Agent

• Install the FortiMonitor Agent

• Automate the FortiMonitor Agent installation

OnSight vCollector installer

The Onsight vCollector sits behind your firewall or within your virtual private cloud. It can perform network checks, SNMP polling, and serve as a proxy for FortiMonitor Agents. It can also be used to provide deeper monitoring on network devices such as switches, routers, and firewalls.

The Onsight vCollector can be installed on a Linux VM, as an AMI in an AWS environment, as a Virtual Machine in Azure, or on any other hypervisor, you are using. Docker images are also available for container-based environments.

Once deployed, an OnSight vCollector can scan your network or private cloud for instances and devices using a specified CIDR range. The discovered instances and devices can be added automatically or manually. Instances and devices discovered by the OnSight can be found under the Discovered Instances tab of your OnSight's details page.

OnSight Automation

You can deploy an OnSight vCollector instance to a Linux VM by following the instructions provided in the OnSight standalone installer. You can also automate the deployment of OnSight vCollectors by following the instructions provided in Automate the FortiMonitor Agent installation.

The following list provides the minimum Linux VM requirements for a standalone Onsight vCollector deployment:

AWS AMI

If you are deploying the OnSight vCollector as an AMI in your AWS environment, follow the procedures in OnSight AMI installation.
The following list provides the minimum requirements for an AWS AMI OnSight vCollector deployment:

• Minimum of a t3.medium instance - as your monitoring expands, we recommend 1 core + 1 GB Ram per 1,000 checks

• See Network connectivity requirements.

Virtual image

A virtual image of the OnSight vCollector is available if you want to deploy it to your hypervisor. For a detailed procedure, see OnSight virtual image installation.

OnSight Discovery

Once you've installed the OnSight vCollector, you can use it to discover your infrastructure. The OnSight discovery tool allows you to scan your infrastructure and automatically add devices to your FortiMonitor account. After installing the OnSight, you can customize how the tool searches for new devices. You can define an IP range, the re-scan frequency, and the scan type to determine precisely what devices should be added. Servers and devices discovered by OnSight can be found under the Discovered Instances tab on the OnSight page.

Click on the following link to learn more about the OnSight Discovery tool:

• OnSight discovery

FortiMonitor Cloud Discovery

OnSight Cloud Discovery allows you to scan your infrastructure from different cloud platforms (AWS or Azure). Data gathered from these cloud platforms should be used as an augmentation of, not a replacement for, the data obtained by the FortiMonitor server agent and external monitoring. The server agent can provide more detailed and accurate data across any OS distribution or application you may be running on your compute instance. Also, FortiMonitor’s external monitoring ensures you're getting the full picture of your current operating environment as well as a view into what your customers are experiencing.

• To grant FortiMonitor access to Cloudwatch, see AWS monitoring

• To grant FortiMonitor access to Azure, see Azure monitoring

Add a basic instance

Manually adding an instance allows you to monitor publicly available websites, endpoints, servers, services, and more via FQDN or IP. To add a basic instance, perform the following steps:

1. Ensure you are logged in to the FortiMonitor control panel.

2. From the navigation menu, click Add.

3. In the modal that appears, locate the Website/Endpoint card then click Select.

You are now in the add instance flow. From here, you can configure details about your instance and how you'd like to monitor it.

If you want to monitor instances that are not publicly accessible, add your instances using the Onsight vCollector method.

Add a network device (Basic)

You can add a network device for basic accessibility monitoring using an OnSight vCollector.

1. Ensure you are logged in to the FortiMonitor control panel.

2. From the navigation menu, click Add.

3. Locate the Network Device (basic) card from the Infrastructure and Resource Catalog then click Select.

You are now in the add instance flow. From here, you can configure details about your instance and how you'd like to monitor it.

Add via API

You can add your infrastructure to FortiMonitor via FortiMonitor’s API. For more information, see the following topics:

• API

• API keys

• View the API library