With SCOM 2007 you have the ability to monitor a service within your infrastructure with Distributed Applications.
Distributed Applications are basically made up of different components that make your service.
For instance let’s think of a web shop. Which are typically made up of
1x Webserver
1x Database server
1x File Server
and/or a authentication service like AD
All these components make the service. So if one of these components go down your service goes down.
So Distributed Applications allow you to monitor your service, with SCOM 2012 you have a better options of monitoring the SLA (Service Level Agreement) for that service.
By default you have an Distributed Application view in SCOM 2012 which includes the health of your SCOM Management Group
IF you wish to create a new DA monitoring, go to the authoring pane, and choose Distributed Applications right click and choose create new..
Give the DA a describing name and description. There are already some templates avaliable to choose from but we are going with the Blank one so we can cover all the steps.
And always put the DA in a separate MP, for instance you should have one MP with all the DA.
Then click OK, Now we enter the Distributed Application designer. From here we draw how the different components are attached to each other, on the left side you have the search fuction so we can find the different compoents we wish to add.
For the purpose of this post, I’m just going do create a new SCOM DA.
First of now I just added the Management Servers from the left side as an component, next I add the Management Group to the mix, and then I create an relationship between the two, since the servers depend on the Management Group.
As an example, the webserver is dependent on the database server to get its information, the database server on the other hand is not dependent on the webserver. The designer window will now look like this.
Now lets save this layout. Click the Save button.
Now back in the authoring pane you will now see the newly created DA. Now we are going to create a SLA monitoring. Further down in the authoring pane you can see the Service Level Tracking.
Right click and click create.
Give it a name and choose the new service as a target class.
Next under service level objectives click Add. Give it a name, choose Availability type and leave the rest at the default. Since will monitor SLA based on critical events on the target “My Service” DA. So if a critical event were to happen on that service my SLA would fall. After you have created the SLA monitoring go back to the my workspace pane, Right click on my workspace and press new dashboard view, and select Service Level Dashboard.
Under Scope add the new SLA monitor you just created, (You could for the record here add multiple SLA’s to view on the dashboard.
And choose the time scope (Default is 24 hours) click next and create.
You can now see that the new SLA widget appears under Favorite viewes and I get a fancy overview of the SLA for my DA.
You can also generate reports of the SLA (If you have SQL reporting services installed)
ill give more detail when regarding monitoring of a large service including network devices and SAN solutions in a later post, but this is just to give you the general idea of how you can monitor your services using SCOM 2012.