the journey of a senior system center consultant ... · the journey of a senior system center...

Amsterdam - New York – Ottawa - Dallas

www.savision.com

[email protected]

November 2014

The Journey of a Senior

System Center Consultant

Implementing BSM

AUTHOR: APPROVED CONSULTING, JONAS LENNTUN


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1.1 How it all began

In the beginning, systems management focused on managing and monitoring servers and technology. This solution was designed to simply catch errors for each individual server and technology in the best way possible. Unfortunately, the implementation often led to a gap between IT and the business -the organization’s expectations of IT were rarely met.

1.2 Business Service Management to the rescue

More and more organizations adopted the ITIL framework and they soon realized that their monitoring solution needed to be aligned with the ITIL view on how IT services should be delivered and monitored. This had a great impact on the future requirements of IT-monitoring solutions.

1.3 Building BSM Monitoring with Operations Manager

With the introduction of Distributed Applications in Operations Manager 2007 you thought the answers to your prayers had been heard. Finally, you had a way to set up your servers and components in a way that reflected the business service design, and a way to measure their availability. So the work began to create the best BSM monitoring solution on the market upon Microsoft Operations Manager. After working hard to bring everything together, we soon got stuck at some of the limitations in the product - static membership of objects, the presentation layer for the service owners, and the time consuming task to have everything up and running in a large environment. Even though we had the beginnings of a great tool for designing service monitoring, sadly a lot of functionality was still missing.

1.4 System Center 2012 is released – Now has everything been

solved?

Unfortunately not. Nothing was fixed to solve some of the major problems for creating and maintaining the solution to be the product you all hoped for. Sure, some improvements were made in Operations Manager 2012 and Operations Manager 2012 R2 - like a new visualization layer using dashboards and widgets was added- but users were still stuck with the traditional client console or the Silverlight-based web console that were hardly designed for service owners or decision makers in mind. And, there were no fixes introduced for the major problems encountered in creating and maintaining business services. Each step required to create a BSM monitoring solution still needed to be done manually and while templates were provided for 3-tiered applications, they only covered – at best - 10 percent of the services that you need to monitor. You still needed to perform the slow and tedious work of creating and building groups, distributed applications, service level tracking, dashboards, notifications, health rollups, and then configure security.


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Sadly, the renaming distributed applications wasn’t. The only way to really rename a distributed application – where the change is reflected everywhere - is to modify the database directly – a technique that isn’t supported by Microsoft. So when the day comes and you realize that you really should have finished the work with setting the naming conventions - and the request from management comes saying that you need to rename your IT services to reflect the correct names to the business…well then you are up for a big challenge.

1.5 Introducing Savision’s Live Maps Unity

After working with System Center for many years, I am actually very surprised that nobody came up with a solution to these problems sooner. Everything in our world now is about saving money, saving time. Over the last year, we have been using Savision’s Live Maps Unity at every possible opportunity and have saved countless hours and dollars. Both we - as a senior consultants - as well as our customers are very positive with the result. I believe that Savision’s Live Maps Unity enables the best Business Service Management solution for System Center out on the market right now and I want to tell you why! The Unity release, which is an extension of Savision’s flagship solution - Live Maps - provides an easy way to model IT services and keep them dynamically up-to-date. It provides business views and clear end-to-end views on top of System Center data. It lets business, IT management, the helpdesk, and IT engineering teams speak the same language and results in faster incident resolution times, a decrease in the number of incidents, less business downtime, lower monitoring costs and a more pro-active IT Department that is aligned with the needs of the business.


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1.6 How do you benefit from this?

Savision’s Live Maps Unity dramatically reduces the time spent setting up service monitoring compared to native Operations Manager. Using wizards to get through the necessary steps to configure the most critical parts of the service is accomplished with only a couple of mouse clicks. Savision’s Live Maps console is intuitive and easy to use even for users without experience in the Operations Manager console. The possibility to create dynamic membership rules in Unity instead of relying on static object members in the service is a huge step forward. It is one thing to do all the work and get it up and running but a completely different challenge to have everything remain up to date in a constantly changing IT environment. Maintaining a solution with explicit members would soon result in an out-of-date monitoring solution. Unity’s presentation layer lets decision makers and service owners have complete visibility into the health and availability state of the business services and it provides IT administrators with quick drilldown functionality to find the root cause of service outages.

1.7 How much time will you save?

Of course we knew that it was going to be a time savior in our BSM projects but we had never measured the time it actually took. The result was a stunning 80% of the time we had previously used to spend in the Operations Manager distributed application designer. The measurement was repeated by independent sources that all arrived at the same conclusion. You save both time and money by using Savision’s Live Maps Unity when implementing business service monitoring.


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1.8 What about synchronizing the CI objects to Service Manager?

Have you ever tried the process of creating and updating business services for the purpose of getting them into Service Manager? Then you really know about how hard a struggle it is to just get them over to Service Manager. And then, the service needs to be updated every time a static member is changed in the distributed application. Plus, all the dependent objects need to be imported into Service Manager. If you have done this you know how much work and time you need to invest.

1.9 So what is the best solution?

Savision’s Live Maps Unity makes synchronizing business services into Service Manager a breeze. The big difference between how Savision’s Live Maps and Operations Manager handle the content of distributed applications is that Savision’s Live Maps is built upon group membership rules instead of static object references. This makes a huge impact in how Configuration Items (CI) can be synchronized to Service Manager. Instead of a complex process involving sealing the objects and importing them over, you simply install Savision’s Live Maps Connector in Service Manager and set up the connection to your Operations Manager environment. Live Maps takes care of the rest, giving you a complete list of your business services and related CI objects that are automatically synchronized and updated.


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1.10 Summary

Even though System Center Operations Manager works perfectly fine without this solution, I personally wouldn’t want to return to the days before I started using Savision’s Live Maps Unity in my projects. Maybe some might see it as only a “nice-to-have” product but sometimes it is very nice to save so much time and effort. Savision’s Live Maps Unity creates an easy to use and understand BSM solution, by combining the best of both worlds with System Center Operations Manager.

1.11 About Approved Consulting

Approved Consulting is a competence-driven company that delivers services for managing, monitoring and measuring IT-service delivery. With a focus on business value we differ from many other players and are therefore a leader in Microsoft System Center Operations Manager in Sweden We offer visual solutions for rapid troubleshooting, notifications, trend reports, follow-up - all for a total and especially proactive monitoring of IT services and components. We connect business with technology. For more information, please visit: www.approved.se

1.12 About Savision

Savision is the market leader in business service and cloud management solutions for Microsoft

System Center. The company’s monitoring and visualizing capabilities bridge the gap between IT

and business by transforming IT data into predictive, actionable and relevant information about

the entire cloud and datacenter infrastructure. Savision's intuitive and customizable dashboards

provide context for each business service.

Savision’s solutions scale from small to medium businesses, government bodies as well as

Fortune 500 companies operating in different fields and have been adopted by over 700

organizations worldwide. Founded in 2006, Savision is headquartered in the Netherlands with

offices in Dallas and Ottawa and is privately held.

For more information, please visit: www.savision.com

http://www.approved./

http://www.savision.com/


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APPENDIX

Step-by-step Guide to create a business service monitoring solution with Operations Manager

Step-by-step Guide to create a business service monitoring solution with Live Maps Unity

Copyright © Approved AB

Business Service Monitoring

Page 1 (33)

Business Service Monitoring With Operations Manager 2012 / 2012 R2

Overview

Description This document describes the steps how to create an example business service

monitoring solution in Operations Manager 2012 / 2012 R2.

The solution set up for monitoring will be a basic 3 tier application built up on the

blank distributed application template and some dependencies to infrastructure

objects. For the examples we have installed and used the DotNetNuke solution.

A business service monitoring solution with Operations Manager can be configured

in a couple of ways but this solution is to easy compare the steps with Live Maps

Unity.

Prerequisites Before you start this guide you should have met the following prerequisites:

System Center Operations Manager 2012 / 2012 R2

Internet connection for the web watcher node if no local IIS can be used

Imported management pack for SQL, IIS, Windows Server

For best experience, have a web application running on IIS with SQL

Server hosting the database.



Page 2 (33)

Management Pack

Creating and importing the Management Pack Create a new management pack from the Operations Manager Console using the

following example but with your own preferred name.

Example:



Page 3 (33)

Web Application Availability Monitoring For this example we have created a Web Application Availability Monitor pointing

out the Partner Extranet start page.

Under Authoring right click Management Pack templates and click on “Add

monitoring wizard”. Choose the “Web Application Availability Monitoring”

template and choose next.

Name the Monitor “Partner Extranet (OpsMgr)” and save it in the newly created

management pack.

In the “What to monitor”, put “Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) – Start Page” In the

names column and choose a URL that works, for example www.microsoft.com.

Add an internal location for the monitor and complete the wizard.

http://www.microsoft.com/



Page 4 (33)

Distributed Applications When creating the complete model for all objects in the business service a

distributed application will be used. The name of the distributed application could

differentiate from the naming convention of the management pack. In the

distributed application it’s important to reflect the business referred name of the

service.

Creating the Distributed Application Using the Operations Manager Console go to Authoring and right click Distributed

Applications and choose “Create new distributed application”.

Name the Distributed Application with the extension OpsMgr because we will have

another business service created with Live Maps to compare with.

Name the Distributed Application “Partner Extranet (OpsMgr)”.

Provide a description that explains what the monitoring does and choose the

“Blank (Advanced)” template. Save it to the same management pack that was

created earlier in this guide.

Populate the distributed applications with all the objects that is necessary to keep

the service up and running following these steps:

Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) End-User Click in the advanced search. In the “search for” choose “Web Application

Availability Monitoring Test” hit search and choose the “Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) –



Page 5 (33)

Start Page” and click add and Ok. If the object is not available wait until

Operations Manager has completed the work to start monitoring the Web Site.

Right click on the object under Advanced Search Results and choose add to ->

new component Group. Name the group “Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) End-User”.

In the Object view, check the box next to Object or All Objects to be able to put

other types of objects in the same component group.

Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) Application

IIS Web Sites

Click in the advanced search. In the “search for” choose “IIS Web Site” click

search and choose the IIS Site you want to add.


new component Group. Name the group “Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) Application”.



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In the Object view, check the box next to object or the All Objects to be able to

put other types of objects in the same component group.

IIS Application Pools

Click in the advanced search. In the “search for” choose “IIS Application Pool” hit

search and choose the Application Pool you want to add.


“Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) Application”.

SQL Databases

Click in the advanced search. In the “search for” choose “SQL Database” hit

search and choose the SQL Database you want to add.


“Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) Application”.

Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) Infrastructure

Windows Servers

Click in the advanced search. In the “search for” choose “Windows Server” hit

search and choose the Windows Servers you want to add that hosts the objects

selected in the Application Group.



Page 7 (33)


new component Group. Name the group “Partner Extranet (OpsMgr)

Infrastructure”.

In the Object view, check the box next to object or All Objects to be able to put

other types of objects in the same component group.

Repeat the steps to add other devices if requested such as other network

equipment and add to the group above.

Save and close the distributed application



Page 8 (33)

Rollup Monitors

Service Availability After the Distributed application is created a dependency rollup monitor needs to

be created for the health of the entire service. This monitor enables custom alerts

of the complete service in case of service outage.

Using the Operations Manager Console go to Authoring->Management Pack

Objects and click on “Monitors”.

Using the scope filter out to only view the created distributed application objects.

Click on “View all targets” and Filter the scope by management pack to easily find

it.

Under “Entity Health” right click “Availability” and choose “Create a monitor”-

>”Dependency Rollup Monitor.

In the wizard that starts enter the following information.

Name: Business Service Health Rollup Monitor

Description: This is a health rollup monitor that is used to send out custom

notifications from a Distributed applications with custom text and options.

Monitor target: This should already reflect the distributed application.

Save the monitor in the same management pack as created earlier in this guide.

Click on next and in the monitor dependency locate the “(Object Membership)”

Select the last of the options and select “Availability”.

Click Next.

In the health Rollup policy use the default settings and click next.

Under alerting enable the monitor to generate alerts.



Page 9 (33)

Choose the right settings when to generate alerts.

In the Alert properties enter the following

Alert Name: Business Service Health Rollup Monitor

Priority: High

Severity: Critical

Alert Description: This is an alert from the Business Service Partner Extranet

(OpsMgr). The Service has a downgraded component that has affected

the availability of the business service.

Click on create to finalize the Health rollup monitor.

Component Group Availability For this example we only want to create health rollups for the End-User perspective

and the Application perspective of the business service. This is created the easiest

way with the Distributed Application Designer.

Open up the business services created earlier with the Distributed Application

Designer in Operations Manager.

Click on the Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) End-User component group. In the

Component Group details pane, click on the “Configure Health Rollup –

Availability”.



Page 10 (33)

Configure the overrides to enable the monitor, generates alert=true, Auto-Resolve

Alert=True, Alert Priority=High.

Repeat this task for the Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) Application Component Group

but not for the Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) Infrastructure Component Group.

Save the distributed application.



Page 11 (33)

Service Level Tracking To be able to view dashboards and reports the builds upon SLA tracking a Service

Level Tracking objects needs to be created.

Using the Operations Manager Console go to Authoring->Management Pack

Objects and right click on “Service Level Tracking” and choose Create.

Enter as followed:

Name: Partner Extranet (OpsMgr)

Description: Service Level Tracking for the Business Service Partner Extranet

(OpsMgr).

Click next.

Select a class of object to target and choose the created distributed application

created earlier in this guide and click ok and then next.

Business Service Availability Tracking In the service level objective the most common thing to monitor is the availability

of the business service. Click on add and choose “Monitor State SLO”.

Enter as followed:

Service Level Objective Name: Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) Availability

Targeted Class: Leave default

Monitor: Availability

Service Level objective goal: use default 99%

State: Leave as default.

Click ok

Business Service End-User Availability Tracking In the service level objective the most common thing to monitor is the availability


Enter as followed:

Service Level Objective Name: Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) End-User

Availability

Targeted Class: Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) End-User




Page 12 (33)



Click ok

Business Service Application Availability Tracking In the service level objective the most common thing to monitor is the availability


Enter as followed:

Service Level Objective Name: Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) Application

Availability

Targeted Class: Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) Application




Click ok

Business Service Infrastructure Availability Tracking In the service level objective the most common thing to monitor is the availability


Enter as followed:

Service Level Objective Name: Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) Infrastructure

Availability

Targeted Class: Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) Application




Click ok and finish the wizard.

We now have SLT configured for each component group as well as the entire

business service.



Page 13 (33)

Presentation

Service Detailed Overview In the monitoring pane, use the view folder created by default when the

management pack was created.

Create a new Microsoft Dashboard using the Grid Layout.

Name the dashboard “Service Detailed Overview”



Page 14 (33)

Use the 5 Cell template width the layout below and create the dashboard.

Service Health Click to add the first widget.



Page 15 (33)

Use the State Widget from Microsoft and click next.

Name the Widget “Service Health” and click next.



Page 16 (33)

Click add and find the Distributed Application as shown below and add it to the

widget.



Page 17 (33)

Set the Class Scope to “User Created Distributed Application” to get the columns

for the service.

Leave the criteria as default. And click next.



Page 18 (33)

Configure the display preferences as shown below and finish the configuration of

the widget.



Page 19 (33)

Service Component Health Click in the middle top widget place holder to add the second widget.

Use the State widget from Microsoft and click next.

Name the widget “Service Component Health” and click next.



Page 20 (33)

Click on add and find the distributed application components from each

category.



Page 21 (33)

Scope down to Distributed Application Components and click next,

Leave the default criteria and click next.



Page 22 (33)

Configure the display preferences as shown below and finish the configuration.



Page 23 (33)

End-User Experience Click to add the third widget in the upper right top.

Use the Performance Widget from Microsoft and click next

Name the widget “End-User Experience” and click next.



Page 24 (33)

Add the Partner Extranet (OpsMgr) Distributed Application for related performance

counters.



Page 25 (33)

Click add and choose the web test performance counters as shown and click

next. It can take a couple of seconds before the object list gets populated.

Set the time range to default 24hrs and click next.



Page 26 (33)

Use the default chart preferences and finish the configuration.



Page 27 (33)

Service Level Tracking Click to add a new widget in the middle pane.

Select the SLA Widget from Microsoft and click next.

Name the widget “Service Level Tracking” and click next.



Page 28 (33)

Click on add to choose the SLA(s) to display and add the Partner Extranet

(OpsMgr) SLA and then click add. Let the default of 24hours be set and click next

and finish the configuration.



Page 29 (33)

Active Service Alerts At the bottom pane click to add a new widget.

Select the alert widget from Microsoft and click next.

Name the widget “Active Service Alerts” and click next.



Page 30 (33)

Find the Distributed Application “Partner Extranet (OpsMgr)” and click ok and next.



Page 31 (33)

In the display criteria, select all columns except Resolved and Closed as below and

click next.

In the display options use the default but add the resolution state to the columns to

display.



Page 32 (33)

Service Level Overview To get a good overview of the service level create a new dashboard view under

the same folder based on the Microsoft Service Level Dashboard template and

name it to “Service Level Overview”.

Add the Distributed Application “Partner Extranet (OpsMgr)” to the SCOPE and set

the SLA to 1 month.



Page 33 (33)



Page 1 (12)

Business Service Monitoring With Savision Live Maps 2012

Overview

Description This document describes the steps how to create an example business service

monitoring solution in Operations Manager 2012 / 2012 R2 with Savision Live Maps

2012.

The solution set up for monitoring will be a basic 3 tier application built up on the

blank distributed application template and some dependencies to infrastructure

objects. For the examples we have installed and used the DotNetNuke solution.

Prerequisites Before you start this guide you should have met the following prerequisites:

System Center Operations Manager 2012 / 2012 R2

Savision Live Maps 2012 Enterprise Edition

Internet connection for the web watcher node if no local IIS can be used

Imported management pack for SQL, IIS, Windows Server

For best experience, have a web application running on IIS with SQL

Server hosting the database.



Page 2 (12)

Management Pack

Creating and importing the Management Pack Create a new management pack from the Operations Manager Console using the

following example but with your own preferred name.

Example:



Page 3 (12)

Web Application Availability Monitoring For this example we have created a Web Application Availability Monitor pointing

out the Partner Extranet start page.

Under Authoring right click Management Pack templates and click on “Add

monitoring wizard”. Choose the “Web Application Availability Monitoring”

template and choose next.

Name the Monitor “Partner Extranet (LiveMaps)” and save it in the newly created

management pack.

In the “What to monitor”, put “Partner Extranet (LiveMaps) – Start Page” In the

names column and choose a URL that works, for example www.approved.se.

Add an internal location for the monitor and complete the wizard.



Page 4 (12)

Create Service Start the Savision Live Maps Authoring Console and from the Start Page click on

Create Service.

Name the Service “Partner Extranet (LiveMaps)” and type optional text in the rest

of the fields. Click Next.

Chose the management pack created before in the guide as the holder for the

service and click next.



Page 5 (12)

In the type window change it to Web Application Availability Monitoring Test and

type the name “Partner Extranet (LiveMaps) in the search field and then add it to

the selected end-user components view and then click next.

In the application selection view change the type to Web site and search for the

IIS Web Site you have configured and add it to the selected application

components view. Repeat the task for the Database and IIS Application Pool and

click next.



Page 6 (12)

In the Infrastructure view the windows servers that hosts some of the application

view components will automatically be added to the infrastructure. Add other

dependencies if necessary and click next.

Click finish to complete. The wizard will now create all necessary parts of the

service which will take a couple of minutes.



Page 7 (12)



Page 8 (12)

Service Level Agreement Click in the SLA Tab to configure any changes to the service level objectives.



Page 9 (12)

Security Click on the security tab to configure which roles have the permissions to see the

service.



Page 10 (12)

Notifications Click on the security tab to configure which part of the service that will generate

alert messages in Operations Manager when an affected component has been

downgraded.

You can for each part configure if the alert is an availability alert, performance

alert, security alert, configuration alert or an entity alert.

Configure the Alert Settings as below.



Page 11 (12)

Presentation

Service Overview Start the Operations Manager console or the Live Maps Web Console and

navigate to the “All Service Dashboard” created by Savision Live Maps.

Here you find an executive overview of the service status that can be used for wall

screens etc. The service that has a downgraded component will be showing at the

top.

Service Detail Click on the name of the service created by this guide to jump into the service

detailed view.

Here you find information about the service as well as alerts related to the service.



Page 12 (12)

Service Level Detail Clicking on the Service Level tab will show you information about the service level.

It will also show you when the service level breach will occur.

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