Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

SquaredUp for SCOM sits on top of your existing SCOM and makes managing it a whole lot easier. In SquaredUp, SCOM data is displayed in beautiful and easily readable dashboards, which are also interactive. The coolest part is that the dashboards can be drilled into, down to the unit level, providing you clear actionable insights. As we will show in this blog with just a few clicks, you can identify the exact source of an alert, isolate the problem and take the appropriate action quickly.

This latest release of SquaredUp for SCOM and SquaredUp for Azure is focused on addressing the most popular enhancements that our customers have requested.

According to Merriam-Webster, a mustache is 'the hair growing on the human lip' – so let's be clear that when referring to mustache pickers in this blog, we are not suggesting using tweezer-like tools to help you design hipster dashboards. Instead, we are talking about an awesome SquaredUp productivity feature called mustache picker that helps you get quick and effective results when using mustache template syntax within SquaredUp.

Many customers we have are hybrid – meaning they have both Azure and on-prem estate, and subsequently both SquaredUp for Azure and SquaredUp for SCOM deployments. In other cases, some customers are using multiple different deployments of a product, for example for multiple SCOM management groups or multiple Azure tenants.