SCOM 2012 - Configuring the Service Level Dashboards

With System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2, we had very little to work with in the line of out-of-box- dashboards. As a result of this, I along with other members of the System Center community had to make do with customising solution accelerators and SharePoint sites to bring the data within the Operations Console into a transparent and easy to digest view. I wrote a series of posts on SCOM 2007 R2 Dashboards and you can check them out from the link below if you haven't already seen them:

http://kevingreeneitblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/scom-dashboards-intro.html

Things have changed a lot since those posts though, and with the upcoming release of SCOM 2012, we have a huge amount of dashboard configurations to choose from (widgets, vicinity view etc.), right out-of-box. I'm not going to re-hash all of the functionality of these new dashboards as other community members have already done so but one type of dashboard I will post about is the new and vastly improved Service Level Dashboard. This dashboard is a drastic improvement on the last one and is so much easier to install and configure too.


For the purposes of this post, I'll presume you have already installed SCOM 2012 with all of the relevant agents and management packs and have configured at least one Distributed Application. It is worth pointing out that unlike the previous SLD version 2.0, you don't need to install any specific management pack and this feature is available as soon as you have installed SCOM 2012.

We know that Operations Manager helps deliver IT as a Service (ITaaS) and it does this through the Distributed Application (DA) model. When you have modeled your IT service into a DA, you then have a holistic view of your whole service that presents the service into a single entity within Operations Manager. If we have a single entity, it's logical to then assume that we can attach a Service Level Object to that single entity to report back on it's percentage uptime or downtime over any given period.

To begin, click on the Authoring tab of the wunderbar in the SCOM console, expand 'Authoring' and then click on 'Distributed Applications'. This should then give you a list of the Distributed Applications that you have configured and you can confirm here if the one you want is named and configured properly before you proceed.

Once you are happy that the DA is configured as you want it to be, expand the 'Management Pack Objects' view then right mouse click on Service Level Tracking and select 'Create' to open the Service Level Tracking wizard. This is where we will be creating a new SLA and assigning it to our DA.

From the first screen, enter a name and description, then click Next

At the 'Objects to Track' window, first click at the 'Targeted Class' section on the Select button and choose your DA from the list provided. Then in the 'Management Pack' section, choose an unsealed management pack to save the SLA into and then click Next

In the 'Service Level Objectives' screen, click on the Add button and then select the 'Monitor State SLO' option from the drop down menu

Now input a name for your Service Level Objective, leave the monitor type on Availbility and then choose the percentage of uptime that you want to assign for the SLA that is to be attached to your DA. Specify what states you want to be counted as downtime (or just leave the default of Critical) and then click OK to close the window and then click Next to move on

Confirm your Service Level Objective information is correct and then click Finish

 When the wizard is complete, you will be presented with the screen below confirming all is good to move on

Now, click on the Monitoring tab in the wunderbar, right mouse click on the folder or location that you wish to create the new Service Level Dashboard into, highlight 'New' and then click on 'Dashboard View'

This will open up the 'New Dashboard and Widget Wizard' and from the templates provided, choose the new Service Level Dashboard option, then click Next

Type a name and description for your new dashboard, then click Next again

At the 'Specify the Scope' window, click on the 'Add' button to bring up the 'Add SLA' window. Then choose the SLA(s) that you want to add to the dashboard, click the 'Add' button and when finished, click on OK

Back in the 'Specify the Scope' window, select the timeline that you want the SLA to apply from (I've chosen 1 month), then click the 'Finish' button

In the final two screens, click on the 'Create' and 'Close' buttons respectively to finish the process

When the wizard has completed, you can then click on your new Service Level Dashboard and see the results as below

Much easier than the old Service Level Dashboard configuration!