ServiceNow is one of the most widely deployed ITSM tools within enterprise IT environments, and for good reason – they provide a highly customisable platform that allows organisations build the tools they need to their exact requirements. But you’ve got more than ServiceNow to manage and monitor – there’s SCOM, Splunk, and Solarwinds monitoring your infrastructure, also your APM and CI/CD tools too.
SCOM is a great solution to monitor your infrastructure. Everything you need for in-depth monitoring is provided out-of-box or with a dedicated management pack. If your organization is genuinely invested with SCOM, you probably also know that you can get in-depth monitoring with SCOM’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) functionality, and collect events across your servers with SCOM’s Audit Collection Services (ACS).
We all know that SCOM is a monitoring powerhouse, but even the biggest SCOM fan can’t deny that the SCOM Console dashboards leave much to be desired. They might look colorful, but unfortunately there’s not much else they can do. You can’t drill down further into an object, and you definitely can’t correlate it with other data you might have on that object that could be related.
If you’re a monitoring admin in your organization, you’re probably all too familiar with the load of different monitoring tools covering different aspects of the business, and also with the massive inconvenience that comes with it.
Monitoring information that matters to you will often come from disparate sources – whether you are a server engineer, a SQL database administrator, or an application owner wanting a 360 view of your applications’ health. For example, you may want to visualise your server metrics from SCOM alongside historical trends from the SCOM Data Warehouse.
We are delighted to have a guest blog from Microsoft MVP Martin Ehrnst! Read on for Martin's expert advice on how best to use Azure Lighthouse. Afterwards, head over here to see how you can get a true single pane of glass for all your Azure tenants using SquaredUp's new Lighthouse features. Azure Lighthouse provides a unified management experience across all your customers (and internal) Azure resources. Depending on your background, you might not know why this is so big.
When troubleshooting a SQL Server issue, you don’t need all of those single-use dashboards in the SCOM console. You really only need one interactive diagram to help you identify the root cause in a few clicks – and SquaredUp’s Visual Application Discovery and Analysis (VADA) tool is just that. With this tool, you can also quickly and easily look at all of the servers that make up an application.
Sometimes an organization gets bogged down with the details. It happens. You have all of this fantastic data in SCOM, and you’re trying to share it, but your users don’t care. That’s not true. They care, but what they don’t care about is the server. To put it another way, they care if the service or application they depend on is working. But here’s the catch, you can’t do this in SCOM.
Once your monitoring is operational for a while, it becomes evident that infrastructure monitoring alone is not enough. Sure, SCOM is excellent when focused on an infrastructure level problem. Do you have an alert that your Windows server is running out of space? Check. Can you check to see if your SQL Server has had a lot of deadlocking recently? Check. Do you know if your Linux server is out of swap space? Can you report on how fast it has been running out? Check.
If you’re building applications and running services in Microsoft Azure, SquaredUp for Azure is a presentation layer that sits on top of the Azure APIs enabling you to produce effective, informative and engaging dashboards.
