In a recent project, the management were keen to see some dashboards and insights into their organizations shiny new infrastructure.
Whilst SCOM gives some great data and statistics, it’s not overly helpful in demonstrating the high level view to management out of the box.
This is where Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) steps in..
Background: This engagement included a new Hyper-converged platform (Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct) managed and monitoring with System Center (SCVMM and SCOM), so we had a great foundation to light up OMS and some chosen solutions.
Next step was to extend the platform to use OMS to take advantage of some of the infrastructure based solutions.
Let’s get started..
Firstly, I created an OMS Workspace in Azure. I select the Free tier. Then we connected SCOM to OMS. A simple guide can be found here
Note: the ‘Free’ pricing tier still incurs costs after 60 days if you add the Security and Compliance solutions (the Orange Microsoft ones)
Once we’ve connected SCOM with OMS, we added a small selection of computers to give us enough data to light up the solutions
Below are the computer objects I’ve advised SCOM to connect with OMS
The solutions we will add first are Network Performance Monitor and the Capacity and Performance (Preview) solutions.
We plan to add many more solutions from the gallery but to get up and going fast, these two solutions will be a great start.
Solution #1: Capacity and Performance (Preview)
This solution is extremely simple. Just add it and as long as you add the Hyper-V nodes as demonstrated above, the rest will be done for you.
Let it all bubble up in the background and you’re done! 
Ok, not quite finished. As always, you should use any spare time you have to review the documentation so you know what to expect.
Below are some examples of the results after a day.
Host Dashboard
VM Dashboard
Dashboards have never been so easy!!
Solution #2: Network Performance Monitor
This solution is also very easy, but requires a bit of setup so it knows what to monitor.
Before continuing, review this document which goes over the solution and it’s configuration.
Shortly after adding the solution, the discovered networks and subnets will appear in the portal.
Select the solution tile on the Overview screen and then ‘configure’
Here we see the default network. All subnets discovered by the agents will appear here.
We need to create some logic
Select ‘Add Network’ and name it accordingly.
Select the subnets and add them to the network
Once you’ve created your networks and assigned the subnets, select ‘Subnetworks’ and disable any subnets you don’t want to monitor. For example, any isolated networks
Review any errors on your nodes. I.e. the firewall alerts
You can leave the default monitor or create a new monitor to be alerted on
Example monitor for specific link applying a latency threshold
Save your new rules and create alerts to emails if needed.
Now you’re basically done so go grab some lunch and let Azure do all the heavy lifting..
Network Performance Monitor examples
Network Summary
Node Link
Topology Dashboard
And we’re on the home stretch…
Immediate value, a quick case study…
When we logged back in and demonstrated what we built to the client, we found alerts indicating a network link failure.
This particular network had no production workloads on it yet, but the wheels were in motion to deploy and this caught the issue much faster than their existing process would have.
Selecting the node links showed the topology
We provided this to the networking team and it was resolved in minutes.
+1 for OMS
….. and this is on the free tier!
Quick wrap up…
If you’re using SCOM, unless your constrained by some internal governance you should really be connecting your Management Group to OMS by default.
There are a range of solutions to leverage in the gallery with each providing
Happy dashboarding!
Dan
