Being able to visualize the logs from your infrastructure is crucial - both for identifying potential issues and identifying opportunities for improving performance and utilization. However, when it comes to SCOM and Azure, monitoring can be a bit confusing. That is why, we at SquaredUp, have made it our mission to help you make sense of all the data being collected with beautiful visualizations and dashboards that can be shared with the rest of your organization and displayed on wallboard monitors.

One of the big problems we hear about with Azure is managing costs and understanding where the money is being spent. In fact, when we launched SquaredUp for Azure back in 2019, the ability to visualize costs quickly became one of the most popular features. It helped our customers (and ourselves, too) get a grip on Azure costs – by making it easy to identify under-utilized resources and take the appropriate action to reduce costs.

One of the most common complaints about SCOM is the noisiness of alerts from Management Packs. Getting on top of these alerts can be a huge challenge and often the thing that most gets in the way of an organization getting value out of SCOM. In SquaredUp for SCOM 4.7, our recent feature-packed update, we bring you three new alert-handling super-powers to help you get on top of alerts.

Wait, what? An activity log in SCOM? Did I read that right? You sure did! If you haven’t heard it yet, Microsoft recently published some auditing reports as part of SCOM 2019 UR2 that enable you to track management pack actions, override tracking, management pack objects, etc. The official Microsoft release notes are here.

Summer is in full swing, and the latest release of SquaredUp for SCOM and SquaredUp for Azure is now available. Welcome to version 4.7! This release is jam-packed with great functionality which our Product Engineering teams here at SquaredUp have been working hard on for the last few months. Here’s a quick round up of everything that’s been added and enhanced in version 4.7. There will be a series of blog posts covering the features in the coming weeks so stay tuned for more.

Following the release of Azure Monitor for VMs in January 2020, some changes have been made to how its performance data is stored in Log Analytics. The most significant of these changes is that this data is now stored in the InsightsMetrics table rather than in the Perf table, as we discussed in our ‘What is Azure VM Insights?’ article.

Microsoft recently announced general availability of Azure VM Insights, aka Azure Monitor for VM. This service is basically a set of features that allow you to monitor your VMs in more detail, from collecting the telemetry from your VM to displaying it meaningfully – all with a single click. I am satisfied with Azure VM Insights for the most part, but I also have some mixed feelings about it. Read on to find out why.

In the Azure Monitor Learning Path, we talked about metrics and collecting data in a Log Analytics workspace to be operated on with KQL. As a part of it, we also talked about Monitoring Solutions and how they help you collect data into the workspace that is more focused for specific purposes. In that series, our main focus was on the Log Analytics Agent and I briefly talked about Diagnostics extension.

The short answer is “yes they can” but let me elaborate. In 2009 I joined the team behind Mobile World Congress, an event brand that hosts over 100k attendees in Barcelona, 75k in Shanghai and 22k in Los Angeles. I spent the next 9 years with the GSM Association, owner of Mobile World Congress, and Global Expansion Summit organizing over 50 large scale events across all 5 continents.

To our SCOM Community – thank you for making the first worldwide virtual SCOM event such a huge success! As co-hosts of SCOMathon 2020 that took place last week, we are happy to have provided a platform for the SCOM community to get together, learn and connect.