SCOM - Updated Info on Sending Data to Azure OpInsights (SC Advisor)

This week, Microsoft announced that they will be making a small change to the URL for which SCOM sends its data up to Azure Operational Insights - formerly known as System Center Advisor.

This small change is no doubt related to the new name change of the service but also to help facilitate preparations for when they go live with some new Azure regions.

Essentially, the change will only affect sites that are running a connected SCOM-OpInsights scenario behind a proxy and with specific rules in place allowing connection to only certain URL destinations.

IMPORTANT for OpInsights users!

If you are using OpsMgr with Azure Operational Insights behind proxies with specific ACL or rules to only allow traffic to specific destination, please note the following upcoming change that would require an action in your environment.

In order to align the way that OpsMgr and direct agent send data to the service, and as we are making preparations to have a presence in more Azure regions, we have to make a ONE-TIME change to the URLs that the management packs use to post data to OpInsights: 

Where in the past OpsMgr would be talking to ods.systemcenteradvisor.com , with an upcoming deployment (possibly mid of this week, we will update our blog post closer to the deployment as we have a more specific date) OpsMgr will instead start reporting to <yourworkspaceid>.ods.opinsights.azure.com. We recommend you update your firewall/proxy’s ACLs/rules to allow traffic to the new destination *.ods.opinsights.azure.com or your data would start either queuing up on OpsMgr and/or eventually being dropped if the new destination can’t be reached.

As the new management packs will be received, the system will start reporting to the new URL, and you can later remove the previous ods.systemcenteradvisor.com entry which won’t be needed any longer.

So, if you've configured SCOM and SC Advisor/OpInsights in either your own or a customers environment, then I'd advise you to check out the blog post linked above.

There's also a really quick survey that you can take to give some constructive feedback to Microsoft on how you use proxies with OpInsights and SCOM - this can go a long way in helping them understand how future integrated scenarios will be delivered.

System Center Advisor Just Got Even Better!

When I'm working with customers delivering System Center projects, a key component of those engagements always revolves around visualizing the data that we gather through the various products in the suite.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few months, you should have noticed the buzz that's starting to build around the new System Center Advisor platform - which is currently available as a limited public preview here.

Even though Advisor is in preview, we've deployed it for a few customers when we wanted to super-charge SCOM 2012 R2 and get an extra edge on best practices and recommendations around some new (or even problematic) IT services that they were monitoring and it hasn't disappointed!

Anyway, similar to the speed at which the Microsoft Azure team are releasing updates to their platform, the SC Advisor team are doing their own hard work to make it better and better each week.

An example of this is yesterday's announcement by Joseph Chan that now empowers Advisor users to create their own custom dashboards and visualizations on-the-fly.

Here's an example of a custom dashboard that you can create yourself...

These new dashboards can be easily configured by clicking on the 'My Dashboard' option in the right-hand shortcut bar as shown here...

Pretty easy huh?

So, if you want to get started with these new visualizations today, then first have a quick read over Joseph's full post from the link below, then you should have everything you need to know to enhance your monitoring solutions even more than before!

http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2014/10/16/custom-dashboard-in-advisor.aspx

Enjoy!

Join My Upcoming "From Dev to the Datacenter" Webinars on October 1st and 2nd

Tomorrow (October 1st) and Wednesday (October 2nd), I'll be delivering two webinars in conjunction with Savision to discuss the content of our recently released free whitepaper titled: "From Dev to the Datacenter"

We will be presenting the same content in each webinar and you have a choice of timezone depending on where you're located:

US Timezone: Wednesday October 1st, 2014 at 5pm CEST/ 11am EDT

EU Timezone: Thursday October 2nd, 2014 at 3pm CEST/ 9am EDT

During the webinars, you'll see some cool demo's that should help to reinforce how System Center, Visual Studio Online and Savision can work with you to support your DevOps scenarios.

We'll also leave some time for Q & A so feel free to drop by and hit us up with any questions you have on these awesome technologies.

You can find more information on registration for either webinar here and if you haven't yet had a chance to download and read through the free whitepaper, then you can do so from this link.

Hope to talk to you all then!