As we all might know information is power and on SCOM 2007 that could not be more true. In order for the application to run in its full potential, all the alerts generated within must be credible and well organized / refined according to the company needs, so the IT Teams can be always in guard for upcoming alerts and take the respective action, making the SCOM console always clean and without unnecessary or unwanted alerts.

It is in this particular moment that the IT SCOM Administrators / Engineers enter in the “battlefield”.

All SCOM Alerts can be divided and categorized in three types such as :

    1 ) Critical ( Defined as Integer 2 )

    2 ) Warning ( Defined as integer 1 )

    3 ) Information ( Defined as integer 0 )

This is where, we need to specify according to company needs and IT Administrators what alert should do this and what alert should do that. In order for this to be achieved some time must be spent with the native Microsoft Management Packs and Third Party Managements packs and analyze all the alerts they can generate and therefore refine them.

To start the work, we should check which kind of monitors are active and override them according to the respective needs as I will demonstrate below :

  1 ) Firstly after the management pack and its monitors have been analysed with the IT Teams, we need to select one server on SCOM console which is being managed by a specific Management Pack and open its respective health explorer. LINK

  2 ) After following point number one. We are now inside the health explorer and have acess to all monitors active within that server. It is on this point we override the kind of monitor we wish for the specific object, and select the kind of Alert we want to apply for the specific monitor ( Alert, information or warning ). LINK

  3 ) As soon as it is reconfigured as we want it, save the override to the management pack. At this point we should not have any longer, unwanted “Critical” /  “Warning”  / “Information” alerts.  LINK

  4 ) Apply this steps to all the monitors you want to refine and reorganize.

This steps will not only offer more, reliable information displayed on SCOM as it will also provide a more clear and clean console, so the IT Teams can see what is happening in Real Time in the servers / applications in the management group. And as I said before information is power and this kind of information well sorted out will improve greatly in vast your IT structure and respective resolution in technical issues.

Any doubts or more information please do mail me.

Best Regards,

Paulo J. Mendes

Additionally  the model was updated with a Disaster Recovery Site, of which was already planned some weeks ago however I did not had the time to update on the blog.

The current model is as it follows below ( click over it to see full size ):

I am now upgrading the SCOM SP1 to R2 and starting a implementation of  Service Level Dashboard 2.0 to SCOM, in order to monitor SLA´s of the company and SLO´s defined by administration board. I will cover this two hot topics ( upgrading SP1 to R2 and Service Level Dashboard ) in the next weeks as soon as possible.

Meanwhile for those who do not know the product ( Service Level Dashboard 2.0 and its previous version ) i leave here some useful links below :

Service Level Dashboard : link

Service Level Dashboard 2.0 Download : link 

Best Regards,

Paulo J. Mendes

Best Regards,

Paulo J. Mendes

Best Regards,

Paulo J. Mendes

After nearly one year of working with SCOM 2007 in design and implementation / configuration, i have decided to share my knowledge and perspective about the last SCOM design i have been working on.

In the scenario i am going to explain further, i have been asked to build a Large Enterprise SCOM implementation with redundancy for their IT Operations Team. For that purpose i have made the following infrastructure design below :

In this implementation design i have implemented the following arrangements :

1X : Root Management Server

1X : Management Server

1X : IIS Server with SCOM Web Services ( Web Console )

1X : SQL 2005 with SCOM Reporting Server with Reporting WebServices

2X : SQL 2005 Enterprise 64 bits Cluster with Failover – Passive / Active.

The infrastructure design provides the redundancy and requisites asked in the initial sketch. Also i have divided the access to SCOM Console, the physical console is only available to Administrators and for the IT Operations Team the access is made only through SCOM web console which will offer more mobile easy and comfort for the Team.

I will cover how to create groups and privileges further in another post.

Best Regards,

Paulo J. Mendes