Top tips to extend SCOMs monitoring
In today’s monitoring world most SCOM admins are pulling data from a range of tools and applications, as well as cloud platforms. It can be difficult to sift through all this data, let alone distill it down into a useful format.
SCOM is a great resource for making this happen, and if it’s done well can be a superb monitoring hub for your other applications.
But how do you get SCOM to consume data from other sources?
There are a range of options from building custom monitoring to buying an off-the-shelf management pack, which we’ll investigate below.
1) Use SCOM to build a Management Pack (MP)
If your requirements are simple, you’ve time on your hands, or are lucky enough to have an in-house team who can develop a sophisticated MP, then this could be an option. However, this means you’ll be responsible for maintaining this MP, which often becomes oydated after a few years, and any glitches, bugs, or upgrades will be down to you.
It is also worth checking out if someone has already created an MP for your task. There are a lot of free resources and tools created by the SCOM community, the best place to find these are in our FREE COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT PACK, which hosts and manages a plethora of community MPs.
2) Ready-made solutions
You are undoubtedly not the only admin looking for solutions to common problems. So, it’s likely there will be a plug-and-play option commercially available to you. These are great, as they are tried and tested solutions, which you can literally get started with straight away. However, customization may be limited or at least come at a cost.A few of the vendors you might like to explore are:
SquaredUp - great for dashboards
GripMatix - best for Citrix monitoring
OpsLogix - a whole host of MPs supporting SCOM
NiCE - a wide range of MPs for business applications
3) PowerShell Scripting
PowerShell is free, easy to use, and ideal for more simplistic tasks. So, if you’re familiar with PowerShell then you could give this method a go. PowerShell is great for pushing and pulling data to and from SCOM using APIs. SCOM has SDKs and APIs, as do most other Enterprise IT systems.
However, it is very MS Windows centric, and is quite a fragile model for more complicated requirements.
If you are new to PowerShell, then don’t worry we have a handy free MP you can simply download to translate everything in the SCOM Consoles Authoring pane into PowerShell, so you can avoid using any VBScript!
To get started, download our FREE POWERSHELL AUTHORING MP HERE.
4) Cookdown Connection Center with Webhooks
Our Webhooks solution can connect SCOM with almost anything! And there is more good news! It is totally code-free and super simple to set up using a UI-driven wizard. Plus, you can connect SCOM to as many external systems as you need, to maximize the performance of your monitoring estate. Using Connection Center you can also raise alerts and events in SCOM, and push these alerts to anywhere.
To find out more about both our Webhooks Inbound and Webhooks outbound SCOM connections, click here.
Want to give it a test run?
Try our FREE 30-DAY TRIAL, for unlimited alert integrations.