Blog activity

Hello everyone, I have not been very active on my blog as of late (read: the last year :)) But part of my new years resolution is to pick up blogging again so expect to see some new content here soon! Aside from SCOM blog posts, I will be covering Azure topics as well as … Continue reading Blog activity →

Contextual alert reports from within Squared Up.

Hello everyone, I don't like creating reports in SCOM, never have. It is tedious and time consuming. Ever since I started working with Squared Up as a 3rd party tool I have tried to create dashboards instead of reports to please customers. This has worked well so far, and has saved me a lot of … Continue reading Contextual alert reports from within Squared Up. →

Tuning alerts in SCOM – Part 2

Hello, This post continues on my previous post, on how to deal with tuning alerts in SCOM. Like I mentioned before, getting a hold on the shear amount of alerts in SCOM can be a huge challenge. As you may or may not know, there are two types of alerts in SCOM: Monitor Alerts Monitors … Continue reading Tuning alerts in SCOM – Part 2 →

Tuning Alerts in SCOM – Part 1

Introduction Hi Everyone, One of the obstacles when deploying SCOM for the first time is getting a handle on the amount of alerts. One of the reasons in my opinion, why SCOM sometimes has a bad reputation. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to relieve you of some of the 'alert burden' … Continue reading Tuning Alerts in SCOM – Part 1 →

Extending monitoring with Squared Up Web API – A Citrix Netscaler example.

Introduction Today I will talk about an interesting use case for Citrix Netscaler monitoring with the Squared Up Web API tile. Keep in mind that this is only used for visualization purposes, as the Web API tile will not alert on anything. I am using the Web API tile to supplement the Netscaler management pack … Continue reading Extending monitoring with Squared Up Web API – A Citrix Netscaler example. →

Hyper-V Integration Services script to update your Windows VM’s

Hello everyone, A while back I blogged about an issue with SCOM management servers taking too long to snapshot, which caused the resource pools to become unstable. As these management servers ran on Hyper-V, updating the integration services significantly shortened the backup snapshotting process, causing a lot less resource pool failures. Since the release of … Continue reading Hyper-V Integration Services script to update your Windows VM’s →

Free MP to monitor Lenovo (IBM) Servers

Hello Everyone, If you've used the Lenovo or IBM hardware management pack, you'll notice that some features are quite lacking. The monitoring of the blade chassis work fine as it is standard SNMP, but the IMM monitoring (which is Lenovo's equivalent of HP's ILO or Dell's IDRAC) leaves much to be desired. In other words, … Continue reading Free MP to monitor Lenovo (IBM) Servers →

Monitoring Windows Clusters in SCOM – Limitations

Hello everyone, Another quick post today. I was having issues at a customer with SQL cluster monitoring. The SQL server was quite beefy, an HP server with 1,5 TB of memory running Server 2012 with 25 SQL instances, of which 13 were failover cluster instances, the others were SQL availability groups. As SCOM has to … Continue reading Monitoring Windows Clusters in SCOM – Limitations →

Quick Tip: SCOM Resource Pool failures due to backups.

Hello Everyone, Just a quick tip, I was having issues at a customer where every night during backup, the resource pools would become unavailable. When this occurs, your distributed applications and other agentless managed objects will become red/grey depending on the health rollup. This was very annoying, because it made the people in the control … Continue reading Quick Tip: SCOM Resource Pool failures due to backups. →

Integrate external website monitoring with SCOM & UptimeRobot

Hello Everyone, Today I want to talk about a little management pack I made together with the help of Martin Erhnst, who helped redesign the MP to work with the new API. Uptimerobot is a website that allows you to create up to 50 web checks for free. This includes TCP, Ping, HTTP checks. It … Continue reading Integrate external website monitoring with SCOM & UptimeRobot →