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New dashboard pack for SCOM Self-Maintenance MP

We are excited to announce that we have a new dashboard pack on offer – this time for Tao Yang’s SCOM Self-Maintenance Management Pack! Earlier this year, our sister company Cookdown acquired Tao Yang’s MP, which (as its name suggests) basically ensures that SCOM is always running smoothly. It has a bunch of monitors, rules, views and tasks that help you monitor and maintain your SCOM Management Group.

10 reasons why SCOM 2019 needs SquaredUp

If you've used SCOM you know that it is a true monitoring powerhouse, but one that needs a helping hand surfacing data that matters and getting users engaged. The replacement of Silverlight with HTML5 in the SCOM 2019 web console is a welcome enhancement, but the SCOM web console still shares its design with the administration console, which users find slow, complex and hard to get the visibility they need. Enter SquaredUp.

Roll up status from your Grafana dashboards to one big-picture view

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.

SCOM is the most popular tool for monitoring SBC/ VDI

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.

Fill SCOM gaps with Azure Monitor

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.

Tricks with the ServiceNow Filter Navigator

The filter navigator sites in the top left modestly heading up the table of options. Until recently I’ve been using it to just filter the list below, then, someone introduced me to a couple of other cool commands you can run. The below six functions are all run against a table, for my examples I’ve uses sys_user, but any table can be used. I was able to find the New York documentation for this functionality here if you’d like more details.

Simple DateTime checks with ServiceNow Script Includes

I can’t remember the exact reason I created this script include, but after finding it figured I’d draft up a couple quick examples as the logic could be expanded to other checks, plus, I might need it again one day so its good to have on hand. The script include detailed below creates a new class type in ServiceNow that can be used both from the client-side with Ajax, and from the server-side as a simple object call.

Getting Related Record Data on ServiceNow Forms

Sometimes a case comes up where you need to lookup further information on the active record, via is referenced records. ServiceNow makes it pretty painless with the g_form.getReference method, which uses a callback to keep from blocking the rest of your script. The example I have below, and on our GitHub repo, uses getReference in a Client Script as a way to notify uses if they are setting the owner of a CI as an inactive user.