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SCOM

The latest News and Information on Service Center Operations Manager and related technologies.

SCOM integration with OpenAI Chat GPT

We are happy to announce that we have created a SCOM integration with OpenAI Chat GPT. The solution checks for any alert generated in SCOM and then requests the artificial intelligence service to give you possible root causes and fixes to solve the issue. Moreover, it will take into account any other issues the respective degraded component or service is experiencing and consult you accordingly.

NiCE Oracle Management Pack 5.3 released

Oracle is a highly performant and reliable multi-model database management system running online transaction processing, data warehousing, and mixed database workloads. Although Oracle environments are reliable and performant, monitoring dedicated Oracle on-premise or cloud deployments is crucial to safeguard business continuity.

Dashboard Fridays: Sample Kubernetes dashboard

Engineers need to understand the status of microservices run on EKS, like health status of clusters and nodes, to avoid issues impacting business critical microservices. Plus, you need to be able to keep an eye on EKS resources, including whether the Kubernetes cluster has auto-scaled (where enabled). Usually, to view these metrics, it requires looking at each EKS cluster and node group individually in the AWS Console, or via another complex third-party dashboarding tool. The data is siloed and difficult to consolidate.

Dashboard Fridays: Sample Azure Monitor Dashboard

These Azure dashboards built in SquaredUp show some of the capabilities of SquaredUp’s Azure plugin. SquaredUp lets you easily create dashboards for your Azure resources, scoping a new tile with just a few clicks. The Azure plugin provides the ability to show metrics, alerts, and cost, as well leverage KQL queries against Application AppInsights and Log Analytics workspaces - all from one plugin. When scoping a tile, you can also choose whether to group, aggregate, sort or filter the data.

Dashboard Fridays: Sample Kubernetes dashboard

Engineers need to understand the status of microservices run on EKS, like health status of clusters and nodes, to avoid issues impacting business critical microservices. Plus, you need to be able to keep an eye on EKS resources, including whether the Kubernetes cluster has auto-scaled (where enabled). Usually, to view these metrics, it requires looking at each EKS cluster and node group individually in the AWS Console, or via another complex third-party dashboarding tool. The data is siloed and difficult to consolidate.

Your PKI infrastructure is worthless if ...

A common mistake IT organizations make, is having a well-designed Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), but at the same time having client devices, such as monitoring agents for your Citrix NetScalers, which accept to set up any encrypted connection, to any device, no matter what certificate they are presenting. In this case, you basically allow connections to be made to devices you do not know whether they can be trusted. This makes you vulnerable for 'spoofing'.

New Year's (observability) Resolutions

A new year has started and I've been pondering my hopes and dreams for the year to come. In the world of SRE, observability is the most prominent pillar of my work. So, I decided to drill into the topic of observability and what I'd like to see happen in the industry in 2023. Rather than focusing on any tool, technology, or methodology, I'lll be exploring concepts that can be broadly applied in any organization.

High Citrix logon durations

Every Citrix VAD/DaaS engineering team is responsible for a healthy Citrix VAD or DaaS deployment (yes also DaaS). But the most important task is providing great user experience. Is the team sure end users are actually getting that great user experience? Can they prove it? Are they going to be alarmed immediately whenever they are not and find the root cause quickly? Does the team know which users are affected.

Monitor VDA machines and sessions agentless with SCOM

Every Citrix engineer knows it is quite a burden to install, configure and update monitoring agent software on Citrix VDA machines as this requires you to create and deploy new master images every time you need to deploy a new agent version. While it requires some manual actions, the SCOM platform does natively support monitoring through agentless managed devices which you can onboard with the SCOM discovery wizard.