If you’ve ever worked with SCOM then you’ll know it needs a little love to get the most out of it. Together with Tao Yang MVP, I co-presented a session called “20 Operations Manager Tips in 20 Minutes” at Experts Live USA this year which brings together many of the SCOM tips and tricks we’ve accumulated over the years. That session wasn’t recorded, so we decided to publish the tips here for everyone to benefit from. It’s time to get your SCOM game on.

Have you ever wanted to detect a monitoring condition on an agent (Lets call it ProdWebser-01) and follow up the condition with a custom to either remediate the issue or get additional data for the alert? Great Idea, leveraging the agent is one of the best strengths of SCOM.

As you well know, many organisations are now moving to Office 365 in either a hybrid environment (Exchange on premise with Office 365 integration) or full cloud capacity. Yet, Microsoft still remains unable to provide much detail on how issues or outages impact your resources specifically – it's just not enough to know that globally "Some users or tenants may be affected". Your business needs to know if users are suffering and what proportion are impacted.

If you’re developing a management pack with custom UI and/or .NET modules you’ve gone through the steps of getting your DLL recognized by the engine and loaded as an Assembly or DeployedAssembly depending on the project (here’s an SCSM example). Durning an ongoing project constantly updating the resource mpx file to have the correct QualifiedName can be frustrating, time-consuming, and error-prone.

OpsLogix has acquired Approved Consulting, a recognized expert of professional and managed services in monitoring, automation and analytics for IT-operations. Providing edge competence for the Microsoft stack, both on-premises as well as in the cloud, OpsLogix and Approved will jointly expand their capabilities to support customers with a combined product and service portfolio to secure mission critical IT.

We are delighted to announce the availability of Squared Up version 4.3, continuing our approach of bringing you frequent updates to the product. Version 4.2 was released just two months ago, and 4.1 two months before that. Each new release brings bug fixes, quality improvements and in this case some cool new features too. For a demo of these new features take a look at the webinar 'Squared Up – v4.3 Release'.