SCOM Dashboards - Part 2 - Installing the Dashboard Solution Accelerator

Before reading this post, please ensure you have reviewed my previous posts on SCOM Dashboarding from the links below:

SCOM Dashboards - The Intro
SCOM Dashboards - Part 1 - Installing WSS 3.0

In this post, I will go through installing the Dashboard Solution Accelerator. If you are reading these posts, then you are probably aware of the fact that SCOM 2007 R2 doesn't come bundled with any easy-to-consume dashboards that you might want to use to present your infrastructure data to senior management or 'Level 100' service desk personnel. Instead, the dashboards that come out of the box with SCOM 2007 R2 are really only useful for either SCOM administrators or high level technical staff.

This is similar to the problem that System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and System Center Service Manager (SCSM) administrators were having and Microsoft resolved this by releasing a free solution accelerator dashboard solution for each of these two products - but not (on the surface of it) for SCOM!

The dashboards that these solution accelerators can produce are really impressive and work by injecting SQL queries into Web Parts and selecting the chart type such as Pie Chart, Graph, Scorecard etc. and then presenting the SQL data into a nice graphical interface to be displayed for all the (non-technical) world to see!

What Microsoft don't shout from the rooftops on these solution accelerators however is that  not only are they for SCCM and SCSM but they work perfectly with SCOM too! This post will explain how to install this solution and remove all references of SCSM or SCCM and replace it with SCOM!

For the purposes of this demonstration, I am going to be using the SCSM dashboard as it is newer than the SCCM dashboard and comes with the tabs pre-configured (you can manually create the additional tabs in your SCCM dashboard following the steps in these posts if you currently have that in use though).

To begin, download the SCSM dashboard solution accelerator from the following URL:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=16445

Once you have downloaded the zip file, extract it to a location on your SCOM Management Server (or the server that you have installed WSS 3.0 onto) and using an account with Administrative permissions, double click on the installer as below

 Click next to continue

Input your administrative user account details and your SCOM SQL server and database names as below

On this screen, make sure you specify the server name that you installed the SQL database for the WSS 3.0 website onto in the 'Sharepoint Database Server Name' field and at this point, it is worth making a note of the URL and port number that the dashboard will be accessible from

Click 'Install' to continue

All going well, you should see the screen below when the wizard is finished installing the SCSM dashboard

Browse to the URL and port number that you noted earlier and you should see the default SCSM dashboard window similar to the one below

Now that we have the SCSM dashboard solution installed into our environment, Part 3 will be about customizing it and removing all the references to SCSM and replacing them with SCOM!