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The information herein is for informational purposes only and represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation as of the date of this presentation. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information provided after the date of this presentation. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

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This session will discuss how to work with dashboards and data visualization in Microsoft System Center 2012 - Operations Manager.

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Data visualization is essential for operations management. If you don’t know what’s going on in your environment, you cannot manage it well. New dashboards in Operations Manager provide rich, flexible, and consistent data visualization.

Operations Manager also has integration with Microsoft Visio® drawing and diagramming software, which enables you to create custom data visualizations.

Using Microsoft SharePoint® libraries as a mash-up source imports this data from dashboards. As well, you can add your own custom data to a SharePoint page and make that available to select people in your organization.

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Customer feedback to Microsoft is that it is essential for Operations Manager to continue to drive down the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their management infrastructure and drive down the time to value.

Similarly, increasing the visibility into the health of your applications and improving the manageability of the management infrastructure is also important.

The core tenets of Operations Manager are driving simplicity, personalization, reliability, and consistency.

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With Operations Manager, Microsoft is striving to help you reduce the total cost of ownership of your management infrastructure. Overall, Operations Manager is making it easier and less expensive to manage your data center and private cloud.

Operations Manager provides a holistic view of application health and provides simple and powerful visualizations that decrease the time to value. These new features improve visibility into what’s going on in your environment, and lower the mean time to recovery (MTTR).

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Operations Manager increases your data visualization capabilities by giving you the data you need, when you need it, and in the right form, so other people in the organization can access the data. It is simple to create custom dashboards by using a set of templates and widgets. You can personalize these dashboards, and other individuals can also customize and personalize them once they are produced.

Operations Manager gives consistent views across all consoles, so you see the same dashboard in the Windows® console, and in SharePoint. Operations Manager uses SharePoint to provide rich data to your different customers in your organization.

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Customers have said that they need quick access to data to ensure efficient operations. Dashboards provide this quick access and allow the IT pro to create exactly the type of data that you need.

Dashboards give a quick view of the key performance indicators (KPIs) you need in one place without having to navigate. You can put alert data, state data, and performance information, and show these in different ways in easy-to-use dashboards that are also easy to author.

You can publish these dashboards to SharePoint, and make them available to people that do not use the Operations Manager console. This dashboard format will be familiar to many people, as the SharePoint experience is very common in the enterprise.

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The UI architecture in Operations Manager provides different ways to visualize data with the operations console. The operations console is based on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) technology, and a web client. The SharePoint web part is based on the Microsoft Silverlight® browser plug-in.

The operations console connects directly to the Operations Manager software development kit (SDK). Both the web client and the SharePoint web part can connect through the web server and then to the SDK.

Dashboards can be written to pull data from either the Operations Manager database or the Operations Manager data warehouse, or both depending on the type of data that you would like to show.

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This slide shows the architecture of both the operations console and the web console.

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A dashboard is made up of components; the basic makeup includes a host that shows the UI, and a template that specifies the layout.

You can add a widget, which is made up of a UI control, such as a grid or chart control, and the data provider, which is providing alert, state, service level agreement (SLA), and performance data.

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Comparing dashboards and reports, both are flexible for showing data, but they serve different purposes.

Dashboards provide a quick at-a-glance view, showing if things are up and running, and provide some supporting data.

Reports are useful for in-depth and long-term analysis and drilling down into historical data.

Dashboards focus on KPIs, whereas reports dive deep in the data and details.

Dashboards can use a big screen display, for application status for example. Reports are more likely to be sent by mail.

Dashboards are more customizable, whereas reports are not as customizable and frequently use prebuilt formats.

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Operations Manager is designed to provide a consistent experience. By creating a dashboard as a web part, you can open it in the Operations Manager console or a web console and see the same thing, providing consistency across the platform.

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Here is an example dashboard, shown in the operations console.

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Here is the same example dashboard in the web console.

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And the same dashboard view again is provided in SharePoint.

In most cases, you see the same dashboard, just with a different shell around it—either the Windows client, or Microsoft Internet Explorer® web browser, or SharePoint.

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Operations Manager ships with dashboards out of the box. These dashboards are preconfigured to provide data for a particular application. For example, Operations Manager includes network dashboards, such as a dashboard for Operations Manager itself and an SLA dashboard. Microsoft is working with partners to ship dashboards for technologies such as Microsoft SQL Server® database software, Microsoft Hyper-V® technology, and our Linux/UNIX investments in Operations Manager.

Dashboards are defined in management packs, so shipping a new dashboard means a company or team just needs to release a new management pack.

You also can create custom dashboards to fit your needs. You can select the KPIs, the scope, or visualization you want to look at through the dashboard.

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This is an out-of-box dashboards introduction.

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Operations Manager ships with out-of-the-box dashboards for doing network monitoring and showing the health of each Operations Manager management pack. Various groups inside Microsoft are working to get management packs published for their products as well. Through this effort, Microsoft is driving for consistency of the dashboards.

For Microsoft partners, Microsoft provides templates for summary and performance dashboards, so there is a similar user experience and styling best practices across all of these.

When dashboards are ready, they are released to the management pack catalog for easy access and downloading.

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Here is an example of network dashboards.

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As an example, the network summary dashboards show data for all the network devices that have been discovered.

For example, we can show nodes with the slowest response, the highest CPU, or interfaces with the highest utilization.

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Operations Manager allows you to drill down from a summary dashboard to a pivot dashboard.

You can right-click the nodes to drill down and see specific information about that node.

Thus, you can see the devices that are directly connected to a particular node and see information on properties in real time.

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With Operations Manager, you can also drill down into a vicinity dashboard, instead of the network node dashboard.

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Through the interface table, you can drill down and see information about a single interface on a detailed dashboard or pivot dashboard.

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You can see information such as bytes sent, packets sent and received, properties of the interface, and information on errors.

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This is an example of service level dashboards.

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Service level dashboards can be configured to show service level objectives, and both current service levels and historical values.

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The configuration of the service level dashboard is straightforward. You just have to select the service level agreement that you want to display and the time range.

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This is an example of cross-platform dashboards

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Operations Manager has UNIX and Linux cross-platform dashboards, such as the computer summary on the slide that shows the machines using the most processor time and memory. You can see the state of all the computers and the file systems you are monitoring, as well as the alerts for these.

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You can drill into each machine and see the details on the computer, the file system, performance data, and so on.

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You can also drill into the file system and see capacity and performance.

You get rich data here, providing seamless information from dashboard to dashboard, providing you with the relevant data because the KPIs have already been selected.

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With custom dashboards, you can create dashboards for your own application needs.

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Creating a custom dashboard is straightforward. You decide where you are going to store it in Operations Manager, and in what file folder. You choose a template that specifies the layout. Further, you select the types of widgets that specify the types of data that you want to see.

After the dashboard is created, users can subsequently personalize it, and display it in SharePoint.

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The slide shows layouts for custom dashboards.

The grid layout is fixed, allowing you to choose the number of cells and the layout type.

Column layouts let you add widgets to each column.

The summary dashboard is preconfigured with widgets; you just specify the performance and state data details for objects you want to see.

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This slide lists the widgets that are shipping with Operations Manager, including alerts, performance, and instance details widgets.

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Follow along with this demo showing the experience of creating new dashboards.

Starting in the Operations Manager console, follow the menus to create a new dashboard view.

In this example, you select the grid layout that has three cells in it. Give the new view a name, such as app dashboard.

Because dashboards are stored entirely as management packs, creating a dashboard means managing the import of a management pack.

To add a widget such as the alert widget, pick things that are off all Windows computers . You can control grouping, sorting, and columns; thus, you can see all the alerts shown.

You can add a performance widget as well; again, take all Windows computers and look at the processor objects such as processor type, and show just how hot these machines are running. Take the defaults, auto scale, and create. You will see the performance widget and the associated charts. You can see the processor usage and see the context sensitive filters, so if you want to look for a particular machine, you can filter on that. You can change the machine settings, by hiding or including specific columns.

A nice thing is being able to see this dashboard in multiple consoles. You can see the display in the Operations Manager console and in the web console. You can see that they look very similar, with the same alerts, performance counters, and

other information. You can extend these and add in state for example.

Select the objects, and you can look at specific objects and include whatever you want. For example, search on a specific computer and you will get the results for that specific Windows computer. As well, you can search on the database, such as the customer database. You can add objects one by one or select groups of objects. This is helpful because creating a group in Operations Manager requires administrator privileges, but anyone who can create a new dashboard, namely an author, can do these themselves.

Here, two objects have been added and filtered by class. The dashboard will show objects in all health states; leaving the standard set of columns, and we will see that again in the web console.

You can see the new state widget that was created. If you want to customize with alerts, you can swap the order. You can move these around. You can also personalize this widget for each separate user by changing the display preferences.

Additionally, there are other widgets to show details of specific instances such as performance and displaying the top or bottom information.

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In Operations Manager 2007 R2, creating a dashboard was intensive. You had to create all of the views, store them somewhere, and create a fifth element, a dashboard, with a link to these views. You had to manage all of these elements, which is cumbersome.

Now in Operations Manager 2012, it is more streamlined as you just choose a layout and choose and configure the widgets.

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As a view ahead, Operations Manager has an SLA widget that has configuration for service levels and time range.

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Operations Manager also has an object SLA widget, where you choose an object and time range and it will show you the SLAs for that object.

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To recap, you have seen what Microsoft has done with dashboards, improving the ability to visualize data and make your operation run better.

You’ve seen how easy it is to create dashboards, and you can do it from both the Windows console and the web console.

You’ve seen a demonstration of how easy it is to customize data visualization with multiple layouts and multiple different widgets.

You’ve also seen how dashboards and widgets are delivered through management packs; this is key for extensibility as partners can deliver additional dashboards for their existing and new management packs.

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The next set of slides show another way of doing health visualization with Operations Manager.

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With the Visio add-in for Operations Manager, you can export a diagram from Operations Manager into a Visio diagram. Then you can modify that diagram: move the shapes around, put them in different places, add logos, and add arrows, whatever makes it easier for you to understand. And then you can publish that diagram into SharePoint, and make it more broadly available.

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Here are some examples that show this integration with Visio. You can show application data flows in different ways: maps, rack diagrams, and other diagrams that are tied to the health state of those computers or storage units.

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The first Visio add-in scenario is exporting from a diagram view. Starting in Operations Manager, you export the diagram view to a Visio document. You can open that Visio document, edit the document, change it, and publish it to SharePoint.

Alternatively, in the second scenario you can start from existing or blank diagrams in Visio and associate the shapes in Visio with elements in Operations Manager. Then you can see the health state and can take that live diagram and put it on SharePoint.

Let’s look at the scenario of taking the diagram in Operations Manager and exporting and making it live in Visio.

This example uses a distributed app called the Contoso app. It has three databases and one web site. While in the diagram view, click the Export to Visio button that looks like a little Visio icon; save it to the desktop, as a Visio drawing file.

Open Visio, and you can see it is connecting to the management server, you can see that each one of these has health state, and see the last date that it was refreshed.

You can go to Operations Manager and configure it for refreshing. You’ll see that the diagram will pull back to Operations Manager every 60 seconds and update the state of all the objects. This is good, but you can see this already in Operations Manager. What is really powerful is that you can start to make this your own. You can change the views, eliminate the arrows, and start to customize it in a flow that you like.

You can leave the app on top of the databases, and start to insert text boxes for the title. You can insert additional graphics, and really make it your own. For example, you can choose another shape such as the Windows computer. Clean it up and make it fit.

The other scenario is starting from scratch; let’s

make a dashboard. You open a new diagram. In this case, you go to the Operations Manager tab. You configure by pointing to a server. Insert the shapes. Choose website, billing site, and so forth. Zooming in, you can see them. You can choose database, and insert.

As well, you can choose any shape in Visio and make it the name of a computer you have. You can link to a computer or distributed application. Choose a Windows computer, and fill in color, with a data graphic based on the health state. It will be green if the computer is healthy. Lastly, add the status box to show the last update, which helps track the data you are looking at.

This is a way to add an overall dashboard. It works well overall when used this way. You can trim it down and make it a good size.

To recap, you have created a live Visio diagram from scratch. You can use images, or export from Operations Manager to use as your starting point. See the blogs for more information.

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To recap, Operations Manager offers a simple way to expose operational health data, with complete customization.

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SharePoint integration will bring this all together.

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The idea with SharePoint integration is to bring all of these things together: Operations Manager dashboards, live Visio diagrams, and possibly other data that you have created. You can put it all together in SharePoint, where it acts as a mash up. You can bring together all of this disparate data all in one place, and make it available to those that need it. You can make some data available to business owners, or application teams, or another set of data to executives or operations. This works as a great place to pull information in and distributed it out.

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This demo will show how this all works together by building a simple mash-up page using SharePoint. Start in SharePoint with a new page called Contoso mash-up. Now that you are on the page, insert the Visio diagram you made earlier. Switch back to Visio, and save it as a web drawing. Go back to SharePoint and select the drawing. Checking it from here, there is the diagram, you can enable it to be updated.

Go back to the mash-up page, edit the page, and insert the Visio web part. Add this to the diagram. Configure this; browse to the URL to find your dashboard web drawing. Now you can see it and zoom in.

Now add information from Operations Manager such as a dashboard. Go to System Center and add the dashboard viewer. You will see that you can edit the web part and choose the management group. With a dashboard link, you get the URL of the dashboard. Put the URL back in SharePoint, and the dashboard will load up.

Now, this one page in SharePoint will display the dashboard from Operations Manager and the other dashboard created in Visio. All of this is updating live, and it gives you some idea how you can use this. It is up to you to customize this and make it work depending on your needs.

With SharePoint integration, you can take Operations Manager dashboards, and make them available in SharePoint. You can take Visio diagrams and draw data live from Operations Manager and make that available in SharePoint.

You now have the familiar SharePoint interface, something that everyone in an organization is comfortable using. This provides a means to make operational data visible to others who are not typical Operations Manager customers or users.

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The key takeaways are how data visualization is essential for effective operations management, and how new dashboards add rich, flexible, and consistent data visualization.

Further, you see how Visio integration enables highly customizable data visualization, and how to use the Visio add-in capabilities.

This all leads to SharePoint as an ideal data mash up. You should learn how to display dashboards and live Visio diagrams in SharePoint, with the additional resources provided.

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