Earlier this year, our partner GripMatix released a feature-packed Citrix management pack (MP) that helps improve the monitoring of Citrix environments using SCOM. This was warmly received by our customers who preferred not to shell out for the premium ‘Citrix Platinum’ license, and so don’t have access to SCOM MPs directly from Citrix.
Google “SCOM and Azure” and the top hits will tell you all about “Moving from SCOM to Azure Monitor”, “Changing of the guard…”, and “Microsoft explains why it replaced SCOM with Azure Monitor” etc. If you only read the marketing, you’d be forgiven for thinking SCOM is being replaced. Microsoft’s marketing push on Azure Monitor has no doubt caused some uncertainty about the position of SCOM.
In this blog we are going to discuss how you can use Cookdown’s PowerShell MP to create SCOM tasks written in PowerShell and how you can visualise the output of your tasks in a much more efficient and user-readable format – using SquaredUp.
We are delighted to welcome guest blogger Brian Wren of Microsoft. Brian is something of a superstar in the SCOM world – and you will see why when you check out his technical guides on TechNet or Microsoft Learn. His series on Management Pack Authoring for SCOM is a definitive guide that has helped many of us get started with a difficult topic. It is fair to say that when Brian works his magic, he makes the complicated perfectly understandable.
Hybrid monitoring has increasingly become a priority in the SCOM community. A growing number of enterprises are running workloads both on-prem and in the cloud, with some of us creating new workloads in the cloud, and others engaging in a gradual migration to the cloud – a process that often takes place over a number of years. How can we deliver a complete monitoring strategy for our hybrid environments via SCOM?
Most of us SCOM users have our servers and infrastructure pieces monitored – but more often than not, the hypervisor remains a big black box where there is no level of monitoring whatsoever. Any kind of outages that come from that lack of monitoring blindside our administrators, and people eventually grow to lose confidence in the platform itself.
If you’ve ever worked with SCOM then you’ll know it needs a little love to get the most out of it. Together with Tao Yang MVP, I co-presented a session called “20 Operations Manager Tips in 20 Minutes” at Experts Live USA this year which brings together many of the SCOM tips and tricks we’ve accumulated over the years. That session wasn’t recorded, so we decided to publish the tips here for everyone to benefit from. It’s time to get your SCOM game on.
As you well know, many organisations are now moving to Office 365 in either a hybrid environment (Exchange on premise with Office 365 integration) or full cloud capacity. Yet, Microsoft still remains unable to provide much detail on how issues or outages impact your resources specifically – it's just not enough to know that globally "Some users or tenants may be affected". Your business needs to know if users are suffering and what proportion are impacted.
Welcome to Part Two of our two-part series on REST APIs. Now that you’ve learnt all about what REST APIs are and how they work, let’s have a look at how you can get the most out of your REST APIs. We will illustrate this through the example of integrating Squared Up with the ServiceNow REST API.
A question we often get asked is: What exactly is a REST API, and how does it work? While APIs have long had their place in basic developer lexicon, their growing importance to all IT professionals is becoming hard to ignore. The growth in the number of APIs increased by its fastest ever rate in 2019 and, as a consequence of this API explosion, there are now over 22,000 publicly available APIs (according to leading online journal ProgrammableWeb).
