When using Microsoft technologies in your enterprise IT stack, you have a few native options for systems monitoring and alerts. Two recent product developments — folding Operations Management Suite (OMS) functionality into Azure Monitor, as well as the release of the new SCOM 2019 — have reignited the debate to determine whether Azure Monitor can entirely replace the long standing, good-old SCOM (System Center Operations Manager).
In a way, I feel this comparison is a bit unfair, like comparing apples with oranges. Ultimately the two products can work together and overlap in order to eliminate monitoring gaps in your environment. So which monitoring solution would work the best for your enterprise? Let’s try to figure out!
Many customers frequently ask the question whether or not it is possible to fetch a report of up-time of a service being monitored with SCOM. Usually, the answer is – not out of the box. However, you can achieve this using a simple workaround.
One way of doing it is to author your own service monitor, but that involves considerable amount of knowledge and experience of management packs and the underlying coding. It usually takes a lot of time as well. Not everyone has the right knowledge or the time to spend on this so I thought I’d share a quick trick I do to measure uptime of a service and also be able to present it to the concerned parties in the form of a report.
Meet Bruce.
Bruce is a 45-year-old IT manager, with twenty years experience working for ACME Power. Bruce has three photos on his desk – one of his wife, Linda; one of his kids - Davy and Wendy; and one of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Apart from his laptop, Bruce’s desk is pristine. He walked into the office this morning with a big smile on his face and passed out donuts to his colleagues.
Today has been highlighted in Bruce’s Outlook calendar for weeks. It’s day one of a thorough compliance audit of ACME Power’s application and server infrastructure.
You should put a fair amount of thought into designing your SCOM infrastructure. You need to make sure not only that the design works efficiently for the existing requirements you have, but also that you will be able to accommodate the future growth and expand your current Management Group without compromising its efficiency or performance.
SCOM includes the option to autogrow your Operations database. You can enable this to allow the DB to grow in size along with your overall SCOM environment. In my opinion, you should not do so, however, unless you are absolutely forced to.
In a world where we have self-driving cars, cures for complex diseases, and where we’re building houses with 3D printers, some enterprise organizations still manually patch servers which run their mission-critical applications.
Enterprise data center management can fray the nerves of even the most experienced administrators. “To err is human”, as the saying goes, and errors can happen during patching, even with the powerful toolset in Microsoft System Center. A server admin could spend hours struggling with a single patch and cause productivity delays the next day for the systems which don’t get addressed.
There are effective ways of automating these tasks, which come with price tags both directly and indirectly related to patching itself.
Creating a new Management Pack is not complicated—all you need to do is first install Visual Studio Authoring Extensions.
This blog will walk you through how to create your first Management Pack in Systems Center Operations Manager, one that will discover apps by identifying their registry key.
The most common type of Artificial Intelligence (AI) today is process automation, often referred to as Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Many IT guys (and, if you will, gals) fear that process automation will make their jobs disappear.
Let’s be honest, most of us who play individual games like golf are cheaters. We don’t play by the rules of the game 100% of the time. OK, labelling ourselves cheaters may be a harsh indictment of our collective scorekeeping.
Within the tech industry there are many challenges standing in the way of growing tech firms, particularly to those attempting to separate themselves from the rest of the pack.
