GSM monitoring with SCOM 2012 SP1

As a part of Service pack 1 for SCOM 2012, Microsoft has added a new feature called GSM (Global Service Monitoring) It allows you to monitor your services from Microsoft’s datacenters.
Lets say for instance that you have a large web-shop in Europe. You can use GSM to monitor your web-shop from various location in Europe, for instance London or Paris.
This would also pinpoint for instance if you have customers in France that have trouble accessing the web-shop but not in England you can view the GSM status to see if it has trouble accessing the service as well, or it is experiencing latency issues.
This type of feature requires that you have an subscription with Microsoft (Right now this service is a beta, if you wish to try it you can sign up here –> https://connect.microsoft.com/site1286/Survey/NominationSurvey.aspx?SurveyID=14053&ProgramID=7588 )

The installation is pretty much next, next finish. But after that you need to go into administration –> management packs and import the management packs.
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After the installation is complete, you can go into the administration tab can you can see (Global Service Monitoring) there. It might appear a bit to the far right if you have low resolution on the server, in my case I had an VM where I forgot to adjust the resolution on the screen so I didn’t see all the settings on the right. Now for the purpose of this demo I’m going to setup a regular http monitoring request to www.microsoft.com and www.vg.no
This just does a regular HTTP GET request to the webserver and if the service is available as it should it should respond with at 200 OK.

First of I forgot to install the Identity Provider (If you haven’t installed it, it will say so in the console.
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After that is done we can setup a subscription
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So from here you just enter the subscriptiob ID you got from MIcrosoft.

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Next you need to state if the monitor requires to go trough an Proxy Server and which of the management servers have internet access.

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Then click next and choose “Start Subscription”
Now I can choose to add a monitor
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In my case Im going to choose Web Application –>

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Give this monitor a name and place it into a management pack.

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Next we add values to what websites we want to monitor.
And im going to monitor VG.no and Microsoft.com

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Now I have to choose a location to setup this monitoring, since I’ve used London and Paris earlier in this post I’m going to continue using them Smile
So I choose Paris and add both sites, and the same for London as well.

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If I choose “Change Configuration” I can change what kind of reponse code from the HTTP server  I wish to have and how often to poll it.
Click then Next –> Finish.

Now after the services are set up I can go back the the GSM pane and on the right side I can press View GSM tasks.
Here I can now see that my monitoring for www.microsoft.com and www.vg.no are responding as they should on regular http get requests.

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You can as well setup more complex monitoring such as TCP, services etc. if you wish.

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