Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 2021

Building powerful tailored SCOM dashboards with Enterprise Applications (Part 2)

In my last blog post, we focused on creating 29 Enterprise Applications (EA). We also spent some time talking about our Critical Service Offerings (CSO) and Supporting Service Offerings (SSO). And finally, we looked at three out-of-box dashboards. If all you needed was to create a dashboard to control the boxes’ color quickly, you already have what you need.

Better Dashboarding - Grafana or SquaredUp?

As part of my job as a tech evangelist and a pre-sales engineer here at SquaredUp, I often find myself talking to a lot of people. And understandably, when you as a consumer are trying to evaluate a product that you may potentially invest in, it’s only natural that you want to compare different products and decide which one’s better and/or offers more value for money and why.

VMware Management Pack Update Release (20.11.2156.0)

Our first release for 2021 of the OpsLogix VMware Management Pack for Operations Manager is now released. This version includes mostly fixes to issues reported since the previous release but also a new PowerShell function to manage your licenses. And once again, we fully support the new version of VMware vSphere 7 and vSAN.

Get ready for SCOMathon 2021 | The Big Survey

SCOMathon 2020 was one of the highlights of Microsoft SCOM community-driven events last year. Within a 16-hours marathon on all things SCOM, high-class tutorials were delivered to an excited audience of over 1.000 participants, eager to learn the latest hot topics to evolve their SCOM knowledge. Not to mention the overwhelming runner’s high when crossing the finishing line along with so many like-minded people.

Building powerful tailored dashboards: end users, management, infrastructure

In my position, I get to work with a wide variety of organizations that each have a different level of monitoring maturity. But I’ve noticed an emerging pattern that I’ll call the ‘Critical Service Offering’ or ‘Executive Level Status’ dashboard. At their most basic level, these dashboards should communicate the current health of the application, provide some historical context and, most importantly, not be tied to infrastructure monitoring.

Bringing SCOM Override Sprawl Under Control With PowerBI

Have you ever wondered where all your SCOM overrides are stored? Want to easily find the source and target of each override? In this webinar, we showcase our new PowerBI based tool, designed to turn your override spaghetti into orderly overrides. Using our Microsft PowerBI Sankey Diagrams you can easily see your override MPs scope and destination, enabling you to visualize and then take control of your overrides with Easy Tune, our free alert tuning solution.

Building powerful tailored SCOM dashboards with Enterprise Applications (Part 1)

In my position, I get to work with a wide variety of organizations that each have a different level of monitoring maturity. But I’ve noticed an emerging pattern that I’ll call the ‘Critical Service Offering’ or ‘Executive Level Status’ dashboard. At their most basic level, these dashboards should communicate the current health of the application, provide some historical context and, most importantly, not be tied to infrastructure monitoring.

Download PowerBI Diagram for visualizing overrides using Sankey

Did you catch our recent webinar on how PowerBI makes it possible to visualize override sprawl in SCOM with Sankey Diagrams and want to give our Sankey diagrams a go yourself? You are in the right place. Before you dive in, take a look at our blog explaining the “why” to using Sankey PowerBI diagrams to see your overrides, and how to take action based on what you see here.

Free SharePoint Online Monitoring until May 31, 2021

Microsoft SharePoint Online empowers 200 million monthly active users worldwide through simple sharing and seamless collaboration, driving team efficiency, maximizing knowledge velocity while bringing a rich digital experience to every device. Launched in 2001, SharePoint celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2021, welcoming new users on a daily basis. Make sure your SharePoint Online users are delighted with the speed and smooth interaction with your Microsoft SharePoint Online services.

Kusto: Table Joins and the Let Statement

In this article I’m going to discuss table joins and the let statement in Log Analytics. Along with custom logs, these are concepts that really had me scratching my head for a long time, and it was a little bit tricky to put all the pieces together from documentation and other people’s blog posts. Hopefully this will help anyone else out there that still has unanswered questions on one of these topics.

Kusto: Custom Logs in Log Analytics

In this article, I’m going to discuss custom logs in Log Analytics. Along with table joins and the let statement that I discuss in another blog, custom logs is a concept that I struggled to wrap my head around for a long time, as there don’t seem to be very many comprehensive guides out there as of yet. Here is a summary of everything I have managed to piece together from documentation and other people’s blog posts.

Experience Center launched!

We have launched a brand new Experience Center that is able to demo you online a live Citrix CVAD environment being monitored by MetrixInsight for CVAD SCOM Management Pack. This way you can click around all by yourself to get a good impression of the Management Pack's capabilities. Request access here and browse through the Management Pack whenever you want during one month. Enjoy!

Overcome security challenges with ServiceNow CMDB population

Networks always start off small and simple, but over time they can become increasingly complex. You start with a small network consisting of a simple Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) with broad connectivity. However, once your security team get involved and add DMZs, routers, firewalls, etc you will find it hard to keep track of the intricate web you have created to support your business network.

Top integration tools to populate your CMDB

A Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is critical in supporting services such as Incidents and Change & Asset Management. Most companies dream of having a beautifully populated CMDB, but struggle with how to make this a reality as the process can be quite daunting! But never fear there are loads of tools you can buy to do just this! Typically, there are three types of solutions designed to populate your CMDB, these are either agent-based, scanner, or integration style tools.

How to build the ideal dev team dashboard

So you’ve now finally finished putting all the pieces together – transitioned to Azure, deployed resources, deployed applications, got familiar with Azure Monitor and set up all the monitoring. You’re now collecting all the monitoring, application performance and security data for your Azure resources in Log Analytics workspaces, ready for analysis. (Head over to our Azure Monitor Learning Path if you're still figuring out how to do all that.) But is only the collection enough?

Looking ahead: SquaredUp 5.0 and beyond

Welcome to 2021, a year we are all entering full of hope. None of us knows quite what 2021 holds in store with regards to the global pandemic, but no doubt it will be another year of huge change. That will mean continued pressure on IT organizations across all industries to adapt and deliver new services to the business and users, all while keeping costs as low as possible. As we start a new year, many of you reading this will be considering your monitoring strategy in 2021 and beyond.

Working with On-prem machines in SquaredUp for Azure

If you’ve been using SquaredUp for Azure, you’re familiar with its abilities to treat Azure native virtual machines . You can create a number of amazing and useful visualizations with them, such as displaying their health state, performance charts, costs, and so on. This is all excellent and super useful, but one question we frequently get asked is: how do I do these things with my on-prem servers that I’ve connected to Azure Monitor?

Bringing override sprawl under control with PowerBI

Picture this scenario - the final SQL 2008 server is decommissioned and all replacement SQL servers are monitored using the SQL version agnostic MP - finally! But, before cracking open the bubbly, you will want to pull out the MPs relating to SQL 2008 from SCOM. Easy…? Just delete them from the console… wrong!