SCOM 2019 is a monitoring powerhouse. Its capabilities are unmatched. But it also has some serious issues when it comes to unearthing and visualizing the valuable data locked inside. The replacement of Silverlight with HTML5 in the SCOM 2019 web console was a welcome enhancement, but the SCOM web console still shares its design with the administration console, which is slow, complex, and makes it downright difficult to get the visibility you need.

Back in December, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Grafana Labs partnered to launch the Amazon Managed Service for Grafana in a preview to a limited set of customers. Amazon Managed Service for Grafana is a scalable managed offering that provides AWS customers a native way to run Grafana directly within AWS alongside all their other AWS services.

In the last blog post, I walked you through how to connect to the Microsoft Graph API so you can start pulling in the M365 analytics to create a dashboard in SquaredUp. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through exactly how to create this dashboard. This dashboard will allow you to monitor key metrics for Microsoft 365 SharePoint, Exchange Online, and Teams so you can be proactive in assigning storage.

Now that we’ve familiarized ourselves with the basics, let’s get on creating our first dashboard! I spot an familiar tile here, the WebAPI tile. This tile is available in the SquaredUp SCOM and Azure products too. WebAPI tile is the way you bring external data into SquaredUp. As long as the tool you’re connecting to has an API endpoint that returns data in JSON payload, you can work with that data to display the data in a dashboard in SquaredUp.

Creating dashboards is quicker and easier than before with a new streamlined navigation experience, now available in Kibana 7.12. This dashboard-first approach makes it simple for you to create and add visualizations without leaving your dashboard-building flow. Get started directly from a Kibana dashboard with a few simple steps: Select Create Panel and choose what type of visual you want to build.

It’s incredibly helpful to be able to visualize the data produced by your organization’s M365 tenant so you can manage licenses, usage, capacity, and more. SquaredUp dashboards are ideal for this. You can use the WebAPI Tile in SquaredUp to connect to the Microsoft Graph API, which offers a broad set of functionalities for working with Azure via code. Microsoft 365 sits on top of Azure and can be managed via Graph API, too.

Plugins make it easier for Grafana users to get faster time to value. With a few clicks, you can start tapping into the different data stores you and your business already leverage — and see them all in one place in your Grafana dashboard. I’m a huge fan of partner-developed plugins for a few reasons, with my favorite being subject matter expertise. Who better to develop your plugin than the team that knows the product inside out?

If you’re investigating incidents on your Windows hosts, sifting through the Event Viewer can be a painful experience. It’s best to collect and ship Windows Events to a separate backend for easier visualization and analysis – but depending on the solution you choose, this can take some significant legwork. Often, this can require manually configuring a 3rd party tool or agent, just to get started.