SCOM - New Management Packs for Connecting to OMS

Microsoft have just announced the following three new management packs to connect your SCOM environments to Azure Log Analytics/OMS:

• For SCOM 1801, download the management pack from here. 
• For SCOM 2016, download the management pack from here. 
• For SCOM 2012 R2, download the management packs from here.

These new MP's contain a new on-boarding wizard (shown below) that enables your SCOM environments to communicate with the new OMS/Azure API's.

For all new SCOM to OMS connections, you need to import the relevant management pack to your environment first.

If you've already configured an OMS connection, then you don't need to deploy the new management pack for now however, if you need to reconfigure that connection again, you will then need to import it.

SCOM 1807 - What's New

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the General Availability of the latest release of our favourite monitoring platform - SCOM 1807.

SCOM 1807 is the second release this year in Microsoft's new Semi-Annual Channel licensing model and it follows hot on the heels of its predecessor SCOM 1801.

As promised by Microsoft, I found the in-place upgrade process from 1801 to 1807 seamless and not much different than deploying a typical Update Rollup to your SCOM environment.

Key Features

This release comes bundled with a lot of new useful features to play with. Here's a rundown on what you get:

New HTML5 dashboard PowerShell Widget

Use this new PowerShell widget to execute scripts for a more customised visualisation within your HTML5 dashboards.

Effective Configuration Web Console Dashboard Drill Down

Clicking on a monitored object from the HTML5 dashboard console now gives users the option to view the effective configuration information of specific rules or monitors.

Scheduled Maintenance Mode from the Web Console

This is a feature that people have been requesting for quite some time and since SCOM 2016, it has been possible to create and configure scheduled maintenance mode from the full console. With SCOM 1807, we now get this functionality in the HTML5 web console.

Create and Manage HTML5 Dashboards from My Workspace

If you wish to use the built-in Role Based Access Control feature of SCOM to restrict operator access to just the areas of monitoring they need to see, then with SCOM 1807, those operators can use the My Workspace area to configure user-specific dashboards that are only applicable to themselves.

Improved Network Monitoring from the Web Console

A key area of monitoring for most customers is to gain visibility of the health and performance of their network devices and although the full SCOM console has some very handy network monitoring capabilites, there was very little you could work with from the web console. This has changed in SCOM 1807 and now, we can pivot from a monitored network device in one of our custom dashboards such as this....

To a new Network Summary dashboard like this....

Then from there, we can drill down even further to an interface performance dashboard like this...

Cleaner Alert Resolution Management from the Web Console

If you drill down into an alert from the HTML5 web console, you now get a cleaner management experience for changing the resolution state and viewing all properties of the alert from one screen.

Icon Sizing in the Topology Widget

This is a simple but very useful new feature for anyone who uses the 'Topology Widget' for their dashboards. With SCOM 1807, we can now re-size the icons that we use to display health status for our objects (small or large are the only two options at the moment)...

Enable/Disable the APM Feature During Agent Deployment

Now, this is something that could have really saved a lot of time and hassle when SCOM 2016 first launched. I blogged at the time about how the SCOM 2016 agent was crashing IIS application pools and this caused a lot of pain for us when we realised it was the APM feature that comes bundled into the agent installer and can only be removed using command line/scripting.

Although that issue was resolved in SCOM 2016 through an Update Rollup release, there are still a number of other reason why you might want to not install the APM component of the agent onto your SCOM-monitored servers and with SCOM 1807, you can now enable or disable the APM feature during initial installation as shown here....

Linux Agent Log Rotation

In the past, customers have complained about the SCX log frequently filling up on their Linux agents - causing the system disk space to run out and the system becoming unresponsive. The only solution then was to manually clear out the logs but in SCOM 1807, Microsoft have introduced a logrotate feature to address this issue and stop system disk space from filling up.

SQL Support

If you're looking to deploy SCOM 1807 as a fresh installation and want to deploy the latest release of SQL alongside it, then you might be disappointed to know that you can't install it directly onto a fresh deployment of SQL 2017. Instead, you must first install SQL 2016 and then upgrade that installation to SQL 2017.

Also, if you're currently running SCOM 1801 with SQL 2016 and wish to upgrade to both SCOM 1807 and SQL 2017, then you must first carry out the SCOM 1801 to 1807 in-place upgrade and once that's complete, then you can upgrade SQL 2016 to SQL 2017.

Conclusion

I was already a big fan of SCOM 1801 and after working through the simple in-place upgrade to 1807 and playing around with all of these new features and enhancements, I'm really looking forward to working with our customers and getting this release deployed on a wider scale. This experience also bodes well for the Semi-Annual Channel licensing model as it's the first time I have performed an in-place upgrade of SCOM in production without it breaking anything!

Awarded Microsoft MVP 2018 for Cloud and Datacenter Management!

Last Sunday (1st July) I received a very welcome email into my inbox stating I'd been renewed as a Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP for 2018!

This email from Microsoft confirms that I'm now moving into my 7th year as an MVP and it's always a relief when it comes in as there's no guarantee that any of us will get renewed - no matter how much you think you've contributed to the community over the past year.

The MVP program enables me to network and interact with some of the best technical brains in the industry and I'm very lucky to work for an employer (Ergo) that supports me on this journey. Each year, they have given me the projects, tools and time that I need to enable me work with Cloud and Datacenter technologies in the Microsoft space - which in turn, helps me to contribute back to the community through this blog, my social media channels and to attend/speak at conferences where I can maximize my learning curve.

Due to some internal changes to the MVP award program, this year is the first time my renewal has come up in July (I'm originally an October awardee) and as such, it's 18 months since my last renewal date. Over those last 18 months, I've kept myself busy in the community by presenting at conferences such as Experts Live Europe, the Cloud and Datacenter Conference Germany, Experts Live NL and SCOM Day Sweden. I've also spent some time authoring with some awesome MVP friends on the 'Inside the Microsoft Operations Management Suite (v2)' book.

Thanks to my family, to everyone in Microsoft and the MVP community for their help and advice over the last year and also thanks to my friends and work colleagues at Ergo for helping me get this far in the program!