Ready for a single monitoring console? How to unify Microsoft SCOM and vROps

By: Lora Johnson

Over the years, Microsoft shops have naturally moved towards Microsoft SCOM as their monitoring tool of choice. While Microsoft SCOM offers significant visibility and management capabilities, it is specific to your Microsoft resources — meaning that these often operate in a silo away from the rest of your IT stack, and can make troubleshooting more challenging than it needs to be.

Even so, it can feel like you have to throw your investment into Microsoft SCOM away in order to leverage any other platform. However, with the combination of the Microsoft SCOM Management Pack from Blue Medora and vRealize Operations (vROps), you can transform your vROps platform into your unified console to monitor everything across your IT stack — bringing in your SCOM resources right in vROps so you have visibility across your resources.

This week, Blue Medora announced the newest release to its Microsoft SCOM Management Pack for vROps. Within the management pack, you can experience improved usability and simplified configuration, as well as support for Microsoft SCOM 2016 and enhanced alerting functionality for sub-objects.

Figure 1: Overview Dashboard from the Microsoft SCOM Management Pack from Blue Medora

With these new updates and changes, it’s easier than ever to bring your Microsoft SCOM monitoring into vRealize Operations for optimal visibility across your entire IT stack. In this blog post, I’ll highlight the value of unifying Microsoft SCOM and vROps in a single console.

Monitoring beyond your Microsoft resources

Microsoft SCOM gained significant popularity because of how you can unify your monitoring for your Microsoft resources in a single console — helping you see whether you need to tackle issues within your SQL Server or if it’s being driven by problems with your Hyper-V clusters. However, with the complexity of today’s IT stack, you need your monitoring to go beyond what you use within your Microsoft environment.

Through Blue Medora’s management pack, you have the opportunity to bring what you monitor in Microsoft SCOM into vROps, giving you a single monitoring platform to see everything — and understand how the various layers are impacting each other.

Key functionality within the management pack includes:

• Out-of-the-box dashboards. Within the management pack from Blue Medora, access 13 dashboards that display key insight from your Microsoft SCOM monitoring right in vRealize Operations. Customer favorites include overview, computer performance and Hyper-V host virtualization.
• Analysis badges and capacity definitions. By integrating it into vROps, you can leverage the native predictive analytics within the platform and use it with Microsoft SCOM. Leverage analysis badges to define root-cause issues faster and pinpoint problems before they spread across the stack.
• Relationships mapping. See key Microsoft resources organized by category, such as appliances, applications, operating systems, servers, services and virtualization. In addition, dive deeper into your resources with a view of SCOM objects organized into custom groups. As a result, you can understand which Microsoft resource may be causing issues — simplifying troubleshooting.
• Detailed alerts and notifications. When one of your SCOM objects hits a warning or error state, receive a detailed alert right in vRealize Operations to understand what caused the issue so you can begin fixing it before it becomes more severe and impacts your entire performance. In addition, leverage the Microsoft SCOM Alerts dashboard to drill into an object to see which alerts have kicked off and related metrics.  

Learn more about the Microsoft SCOM Management Pack from Blue Medora on VMware’s Solution Exchange or on Blue Medora’s website.

This blog post first appeared on the VMware Cloud Management blog. Read the full post here.