Unified physical and virtual IT management for midsized businesses
A big thank you to everyone who stopped by and asked us questions at the Microsoft Management Summit and the Dynamics Convergence conferences during the last 2 weeks.
In this post I’m going to talk about one area that we received feedback on at the conferences.
Some people told us they wanted to see even more alerts than they were currently seeing – this post is not for you. Other people told us they were seeing too many alerts – this post is for you!
Before starting, check the Improving Default Monitoring blog posting, this will help you make changes and workaround common issues seen with the default monitoring in Essentials 2010.
There are three main things that affect the number of alerts you see:
Essentials is designed to help you proactively monitor your environment and keep it running smoothly. As part of this, we want to help you identify issues that are not causing an outage now, but may in the future. Sometimes, for some environments, the alerts generated can seem a little overwhelming.
To reduce the risk of being overwhelmed by alerts, you can use the following approach:
Essentials 2010 includes a feature to help identify some key management packs that should be installed in your environment. Start by installing these management packs and performing any tweaking to suit your needs before selecting additional management packs to install.
This will help you control the number of alerts and will also allow you to review the knowledge articles included with each alert for guidance on how resolving alerts. If after reviewing an alert you determine that it is not one you want to take action on in your environment, you can use an Override to disable the alert. See the section below for instructions on creating overrides.
In the Reporting workspace, in the Microsoft ODR Report Library is the Most Common Alerts report. Reviewing this report will reveal the alerts you see most frequently. Using this information you can focus your efforts – either using the alert knowledge to troubleshoot the root cause, or if desired, identifying alert(s) to Override to disable monitoring. To run the Most Common Alerts report:
Overrides allow you to make changes to rules that can help reduce the number of alerts you receive. Through an override you can:
The screenshot below shows a monitor that is being selected to have an override applied. Using the override it is possible to either disable the monitor, or change the configuration of the monitor.
It is possible to disabling monitoring of particular rules, and this will reduce the number of alerts you see. In Essentials it is possible to disable a rule on all computers, or just groups of computers, and this provides additional flexibility for you, allowing you to receive an alert on one computer but not another.
Follow these steps to disable a rule or monitor using an Override. Note, the steps are in the Operations Manager documentation, and step 1 does not apply in Essentials.
By using an override to change the thresholds for a rule you can alter when an alerts are generated. This is helpful if you find that an alert is generated sooner they you’d like.
Follow these steps to change the thresholds for a rule or monitor using an Override. Note, the steps are in the Operations Manager documentation, and step 1 does not apply in Essentials.
Feedback on Management Packs helps us to make improvements to them and increase their relevance for your environment. There is a very simple way to provide us feedback on Management Packs – enable Operation Data Reporting (ODR). Our Privacy statement includes information on the data collected and includes a link to sample reports. To enable ODR:
You can also provide feedback in the Management Packs forum.
Management Packs receive updates at various times, and when updating management packs we include feedback from you to improve the monitoring. In Essentials 2010, when there is an update available for a management pack that you have installed, you will receive a notification.
Some of these are written for Operations Manager, however they typically also apply to Essentials since Essentials uses the same monitoring engine and Management Packs as Operations Manager.
Improving Default Monitoring – A guide to resolving common alerts seen during a default installation of Essentials 2010.
Management Packs forum – get help from Management Pack authors, MVPs and other knowledgeable folks in the community.
By Example guides for “tuning” specific Management Packs
4 Tips for Proactive Management Pack Tuning – advice on steps to reduce alerts before you see them
Troubleshooting Alert Storms – in addition to the topics above, also includes guidance on alert suppression
YES! It is finally here!
We are very excited to announce the RTM of SCE 2010.
You can read the official announcement at System Center Nexus, as well as the commentary from longtime SCE product manager, David Mills, at the Because Its’ Everybody’s Business site.
Our original SCE 2007 brought many enterprise management technologies to midsized organizations, almost three years ago. To that end, we provided a unified console that gave you the embedded knowledge of Management Packs (MP’s) and easy to deploy software and system updates. We followed that up with SCE 2007 Service Pack 1, which continued the journey. And we heard very clearly that midsized companies were ready to start taking advantage of virtualization, as a way to reduce costs and scale up your capabilities without scaling out your infrastructure. So, System Center created a workgroup edition of Virtual Machine Manager and we sold it as a bundle, alongside SCE 2007 SP1. Staying true to our vision of continuing to make IT Management easier for midsized organizations, we have continued to enhance our the reporting, monitoring, deployment and update capabilities and added virtualization management and deployment within SCE.
Our original SCE 2007 brought many enterprise management technologies to midsized organizations, almost three years ago. To that end, we provided a unified console that gave you the embedded knowledge of Management Packs (MP’s) and easy to deploy software and system updates.
We followed that up with SCE 2007 Service Pack 1, which continued the journey. And we heard very clearly that midsized companies were ready to start taking advantage of virtualization, as a way to reduce costs and scale up your capabilities without scaling out your infrastructure. So, System Center created a workgroup edition of Virtual Machine Manager and we sold it as a bundle, alongside SCE 2007 SP1.
Staying true to our vision of continuing to make IT Management easier for midsized organizations, we have continued to enhance our the reporting, monitoring, deployment and update capabilities and added virtualization management and deployment within SCE.
SCE 2010 truly delivers unified physical and virtual management within a single experience that has been optimized for your needs, as midsized organizations. Some of the big enhancements include:
Awareness and delivery of only the MP’s that you need, so you have exactly what you need to monitor and report on what is in your environment -- not too much (noise) and not too little (insight). Intelligent filters and customizations for software deployment, so we only attempt to install packages on machines that are suitable to receive them. Optimized software updates, again pulling only what is needed for your environment. And lots of Virtualization management including: - Easy creation of new virtualization hosts - Simple deployment of new virtual machines - Wizard-driven migration of legacy physical servers to virtual machines, or from VMware to Hyper-V
Awareness and delivery of only the MP’s that you need, so you have exactly what you need to monitor and report on what is in your environment -- not too much (noise) and not too little (insight).
Intelligent filters and customizations for software deployment, so we only attempt to install packages on machines that are suitable to receive them.
Optimized software updates, again pulling only what is needed for your environment.
And lots of Virtualization management including:
- Easy creation of new virtualization hosts
- Simple deployment of new virtual machines
- Wizard-driven migration of legacy physical servers to virtual machines, or from VMware to Hyper-V
We are really proud of SCE 2010 and believe that it meets all of the goals that you asked for in an IT Management solution in midsized organizations.
DOWNLOAD THE EVALUATION SOFWARE at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ee470677.aspx
DOWNLOAD THE EVALUATION SOFWARE at
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ee470677.aspx
Throughout this week, you will continue to see updates on our website, blogs, Facebook and tweets.
Website: www.microsoft.com/SCE Blog: blogs.technet.com/SystemCenterEssentials Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SC-Essentials/281028165672 Twitter: @SCEssentials On twitter, you can also watch for #SCE2010 posts from @Jbuff or @DMills_MS
Website: www.microsoft.com/SCE
Blog: blogs.technet.com/SystemCenterEssentials
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SC-Essentials/281028165672
Twitter: @SCEssentials
On twitter, you can also watch for #SCE2010 posts from @Jbuff or @DMills_MS
Our launch wave continues as we get ready for Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas (this week) and Microsoft Convergence in Atlanta (next week). Evaluation software will be available this week and full packaged product (and pricing) will be available by the end of May as it is released into the various Microsoft channels and published to the Microsoft price list on June 1.