ISV

Savision Maps just announced version 2.0 of their popular add-on for Operations  Manager 2007. I spent some time with these guys at MMS learning about their product. The product and it’s architects are brilliant for. I wish MS would just write these guys a big check and integrate this functionality into SP2!

Announcement: 

After a successful launch of Live Maps 1.0 for Operations Manager 2007 we are proud to announce Live Maps version 2.0. Live Maps 2.0 comes with a number of new features that enable you to get even more out of your System Center Operations Manager investment.

So what’s new in Live Maps 2.0?

• Web console - share your maps over the web
• Audible alarms - never miss a critical alert anymore
• Improved performance - solve your problems faster
• New editions and prices - more value for money

Live Maps 2.0 is available for download today and will be on display at the Teched IT Pro in Orlando (booth 1530). The new features can also be watched in this webcast.

Kind Regards,

Douwe van de Voort & Dennis Rietvink, Founders

Occassionally, a resource comes along that changes my operational processes (for the better) with regard to Operations Manager 2007. I think this is one of them.

Silect started with the release of MP Studio Lite for free MP reporting and browsing. I’m already using this to explore my unsealed MPs where I store overrides.

Now, the Silect Software team has done it again! The group created a Wiki with MP reports on the various MP versions. Additionally, they have zip file downloads illustrating the differences between MP versions. Very convenient to be sure.

Check it out at the URL below:

http://www.silect.com/wiki/doku.php?id=mps:latestreleasedmps

It’s process that raises questions in any software platform, and controlling your management pack deployment and tuning processes is one of th most important.

The Management Pack Lifecycle Whitepaper provides great insight and process guidance around effective tuning, deployment and release management of your Operations Manager and Essentials 2007 MPs. Although written by Silect Software (a 3rd party ISV for Opsgmr and SCE), this paper is full of excellent guidance (and I am not paid to say that).

 Download the Managment Pack Lifecycle Whitepaper from Silect HERE.

In case you missed one or more of the articles in the series, here is a list of all 8 articles from our Jalasoft Network Monitoring and Integration series, as well as a link to all 8 articles in a single pdf download.

Article links

• Part 1: Monitoring Network Device Interfaces and Port Status
• Part 2: Monitoring Device Availability and Response Time
• Part 3: Asynchronous Monitoring with Xian Io
• Part 4:Monitoring of Processes in non-Windows systems
• Part 5: Distributed Applications and Xian Network Manager Io
• Part 6: Xian Policy Templates
• Part 7: Operations Manager 2007 and Jalasoft’s Xian Network Manager Io UI integration
• Part 8: Receiving E-mail Notification with Xian Network Manager Io

PDF download (contains all 8 in the series)

http://systemcenterforum.org/wp-content/uploads/Jalasoft_Series_rollup.pdf

 Thanks to the Jalasoft team for their time and effort in sharing this information!

Update your MOM skills to Operations Manager 2007 at the Operations Manager 2007 Bootcamp! Check the 2008 Bootcamp Schedule and request pricing and availability HERE.

 by Arnold Hagens

For System Center Forum readers that might have missed our first blog posts, this is Jalasoft’s fifth article about Xian Io’s functionality in a series of eight. Prior posts discussed the monitoring of network device interfaces and port status, a device’s response time and asynchronous monitoring and monitoring of processes.

In this installment, we’ll discuss a very nice feature that Operations Manager 2007 offers, which is the use of Distributed Applications (DAs). Although the term might suggest differently, it is not at all limited to applications. So its applicability can easily go beyond them.

Xian Network Manager Io is fully compatible with DAs, since it performs a full device discovery and gives the opportunity to add related interfaces to a DA where you can already have; for example, your Windows machine, SQL server or other applications. Below as an example, we are going to create a DA that will combine the following:

• A windows server.
• A CRM windows server, monitored through SNMP.
• Some processes on a Linux machine.
• Two interfaces on a switch.

Creating a DA is very simple. In the authoring section of Operations Manager 2007 go to ‘distributed applications’ and chose ‘create new distributed applications’ (blank) from the actions pane. Then add different components with the help of the ‘add component’ button in the toolbar.

Once you have the different components ready, you need to search for the specific objects that you want to add in them. In screenshot 1, you can see how to search for objects. After finding your objects, drag and drop them to the desired component.

Screenshot 1: Searching for objects to add in different components.

Once you have added your preferred objects you can enhance them by creating relationships with the ‘Create Relationship’ button in the toolbar; finally, click ‘save’ and your customized Distributed Application will be ready.

Screenshot 2: Distributed Application (Design View)

In screenshot 2 you can see how it all looks like once you have added all the different components and objects. Since this is the Design view you will not be able to see any alerts. For this you need to save and go back to the monitoring section. If you then go to the distributed applications section, you’ll be able to see your newly created DA and with a right click you will have several options. Select the ‘Diagram view‘ option to see a diagram with alerts rolling up similar to our example below (screenshot 3).

Other views available are the Health explorer view, which is very useful if you want to have a quick idea on the DA’s health, the Alert view where you can see all current alerts or the Performance view where you see only those performance counters related to the objects in the defined DA.

Screenshot 3: Diagram View with alerts

A very fast root cause analysis is possible with Xian Io, thanks to the distributed applications feature in Ops Mgr 07. Let’s assume that one Ethernet interface has a problem and is affecting your CRM application. As you can see in the diagram above there is a critical health status, but if we look at the real CRM Server, it shows that all is healthy; however, the DA clearly alerts that there is a problem with one interface and even shows that something is not properly functioning on a windows server. With the information provided by the DA and Xian Io, there is no need to guess anymore where the problem lies; instead, you are able to take action immediately.

If you have any questions or comments please reply to this post, and we’ll make sure to send you an answer as soon as possible, alternatively you could send us an e-mail to techsupport[at]jalasoft.com.

To access prior blog posts on the monitoring of network device interfaces, port status, a device’s response time, asynchronous monitoring and monitoring of processes, please review the “Articles” section of the System Center Forum site.

For further information on Xian Io for Ops Mgr 07 please visit our website http://www.jalasoft.com/.

By Roberto Alcocer

For System Center Forum readers that might have missed our first blog post of February 4th, this is Jalasoft’s second article about Xian Io’s functionality in a series of eight. We tried to come up with solutions to problems that most Network Administrators encounter on a daily basis, so our topic selected for this occasion is the monitoring of a device’s availability and response time.

Unfortunately, most network problems are caused by a device or computer that is down or due to delays on the response time of network devices; therefore, knowing immediately if any of your machines is not available or is becoming bottlenecked in terms of response time, is one of the most important and basic network administration tasks.

Xian Network Manager Io offers a simple but powerful mechanism to monitor these aspects for all your network devices and computers. This mechanism lets you know immediately if any of your devices went down and also allows you to monitor their response time to prevent any future problems. Let’s take a look at the Xian Io for Ops Mgr 07 Device Availability smart management pack (SMP):

Discovering a device:

The Xian Io device availability SMP will let you discover virtually any computer, device, machine or even a website that has its own IP address, just follow these simple steps:

1. Open the Xian console.
2. Go to the ‘Device > Add’ menu.
3. Select the ‘availability’ plug-in and then click on the ‘OK’ button. A discovery rule wizard will be displayed.
4. Click on the ‘Parameters’ tab.
5. Select if you want to discover just one device or several ones under a subnet or within a network range.
6. Provide the IP address(es) of the device(s) you want to discover.
7. Provide the proper timeout and number of retries parameters.
8. You can leave the ‘active rules options’ and ‘Network Manager Server’ tabs with the default values and then click on the ‘Finish’ button.

To see all your discovered ‘availability’ devices, simply click on the ‘Views’ button and then double click on the ‘Network > Standard views >Availability’ folder.

Configuring the ‘ICMP Availability’ rule:

Once you have discovered a device, you should add an ‘ICMP availability’ rule to it. This rule will monitor both the ICMP availability and response time, granting you the possibility of generating independent alerts and counters. This rule may be configured to consider the device “not available” after a number of failed connection retries and consequently generate an alert on Ops Mgr 07. In a similar way, the ICMP availability rule can send an alert to Ops Mgr 07 if the device’s response time is greater than a predefined threshold. Finally, this rule can constantly gather performance counters so you may later generate the proper reports on Ops Mgr 07.

To add and configure this rule simply follow the procedure below:

1. Open the Xian console.
2. Right click on any desired ‘availability’ device and then click on the ‘add rule to execute’ context menu option.
3. Select the ‘Available rules > General > ICM availability’ rule and then click ‘OK’. The rule configuration wizard will be displayed.
4. Click on the ‘Active rule options’ tab and set the maximum number of times Xian will try to contact the device before considering it is down and also provide a specific name for the rule.
5. Click on the ‘ICMP availability parameters’ tab and:
   1. Check the ‘Verify ICMP availability’ checkbox and provide the proper max. retries and timeout parameters.
   2. Check the ‘Alerts’ checkbox and select the severity level of the alert that will be sent to Ops Mgr 07 if the device is not available.
   3. If you also want to collect performance counters to be available on the Ops Mgr 07 console and for reports, you can check the ‘Collect ICMP availability counters’ checkbox.
   4. Check the ‘Consider device not available when it is not accessible through ICMP and disable it’ checkbox.
6. Click on the ‘ICMP response time parameters’ tab and:
   1. Check the ‘generate alerts when value is above threshold’ checkbox and define the response time threshold and the severity of the alert that will be displayed on the Ops Mgr 07 console if the response time of the device is greater than the defined threshold.
   2. Check the ‘Collect response time counters’ checkbox if you want to be able to generate the proper response time performance graphs and reports on Ops Mgr 07.
7. Click on the ‘Schedule’ tab and configure the following:
   1. Normal schedule: You can define the interval of the rule execution (for example 5 minutes)
   2. Not available schedule: If Xian encounters that the device is not available, this rule can run with a different schedule so it will be more accurate determining the moment the device is available again.
8. Click on the ‘Finish’ button.

After performing these configurations, Xian will monitor the availability and response time of your devices and computers and you will be able to generate reports like the following ones:

Sample Reports

• Report for Device Availability: (click for image)
• Report for ICMP Response time: (click for image)

We hope that you find this article helpful. If you have any questions or comments please reply to this post, and we’ll make sure to send you an answer as soon as possible. For further information on Xian Io for Ops Mgr 07 please visit our website http://www.jalasoft.com/.

Here’s a short tutorial on a neat add-on product from a relatively new System Center partner you may not yet be familiar with.

Do you know the feeling of looking at an alert for SCFSVR05X4 and not being able to recall where that server is located? Wouldn’t it be nice to see the state of all your locations at a glance? Now you can with Savision’s Live Maps for Operations Manager 2007.

Step 1: Installing Live Maps for Operations Manager 2007
Download the 60 days evaluation version of Live Maps from www.savision.com/download. Copy the ISO image file to your Operations Manager 2007 test server.  Mount the ISO file with a tool like daemon tools, which you can download at http://www.daemon-tools.cc/.

The setup should start automatically, if it doesn’t double-click the Setup.LiveMaps.exe in the root of the ISO image. Install the Authoring console and the OpsMgr console extension (make sure the OpsMgr console is not running).

Step 2: Create a list per location.
Start the Live Maps Authoring console.  Make sure you logon with an account that has the OpsMgr administrator role.  The authoring console will automatically import two management packs during its first start.

Once started, right click the Live Maps folder in the Maps pane and select New -> List. Give the list the name of one of your locations, e.g. London.  Find the managed objects located in London using the Objects pane and drop them on the list in the Designer pane. Repeat this process for all your location.

Step 3: Create an overview map.
Right click the Live Maps folder in the Maps pane and select New -> Map. Live Maps comes with over 300 maps, including all countries, US states and regions like the world. Determine which map makes most sense for your organization and name your map accordingly. Select the appropriate map image from the ‘Select background image’ dialog.

Drop the location lists that you created in the previous step from the Map pane onto the correct position on your map. Save all maps and lists.

Step 4: Viewing your maps in the OpsMgr console
Start the OpsMgr console. Find and select your overview map in the Live Maps folder in the monitoring tree. The alert list below the map will show all alerts for the objects on and under your overview map. Double click a location icon to drill down onto a location. It’s that simple!

With a free evaluation version available and an installation that takes no more than a few minutes you could be looking at your organization in OpsMgr within 15 minutes from now. Visit Savision’s website at http://www.savision.com/ to download an evaluation copy of their software.

By Roberto Alcocer

The Jalasoft team is pleased to be on the System Center Forum! This is our first blog post about Xian Io’s functionality in a series of eight. We tried to come up with solutions to problems that most Network Administrators encounter on a daily basis. Therefore, we are starting this series with a basic, yet interesting topic on monitoring your network device’s interfaces and ports.

As many Network Administrators would tell you, it is very critical to know whether the most important interfaces and ports of any network device such as a switch or router are up and available or if they suddenly change to another state such as down, disabled, unknown, etc. and thus be able to know if the connectivity to a particular server, sub- network, or Internet is interrupted or affected, so that this problem can be solved quickly.

Xian Io for Ops Mgr 2007 will precisely monitor any desired interface(s) in your devices and immediately generate an alert if the state of any port or interface has changed or is not healthy. The two basic rules on Xian that accomplish this task and are available for most of our supported network devices are:

• Interface operational status, which monitors the operational status of an interface, helping to detect if it reaches any critical status such as “down”.
• Port status, which monitors whether a port reached a particular state such as disabled, blocking, broken, etc. or if it simply changed its status.

Applying and configuring these rules in Xian Io is a simple task that consists in following these steps:

1. Open the Xian console or, if you installed the Xian UI integration component for Ops Mgr, the Ops Mgr console.
2. Select the device and open its properties dialog, double click on it if you opened the Xian console. On the other hand, if you opened the OpsMgr console, right click on the device, select “device type name”, then “tasks” and then “view device properties”.
3. Once the device properties dialog is opened, click on the “active rules” tab.
4. Click on the “Add” button, select “interface > interface operational status” and then click on the “OK” button.
5. On the rule configuration wizard, click on the “parameters” tab, you will see that all of your device’s interfaces are listed, simply select the ones you consider important and want to monitor or unselect the nodes you do not want to monitor. Finally, select the states that will force the rule to send an event to Ops Mgr 07 (dormant, down, testing, unknown, up or if the state is changed) as on the screenshot below:

6. Click on the “active rule options” tab and set the alert severity (for example to “error”), also set if the rule will collect performance counters and optionally, change or customize the name of the rule.
7. Click on the “schedule” tab and set the interval of the rule execution (for example to “every 5 minutes”).
8. Click on the “device update” tab and configure if a new discovered interface will be monitored and the criteria for this monitoring.
9. Click on the “Finish” button and verify that the rule is now running on the “active rules” tab of your device.

You can perform similar steps to apply and configure the “port status” rule. Please note that you can have one or several of these rules monitoring a single device; for example, you can configure a port status rule to monitor certain ports with a defined schedule and alert severity and then create another port status rule with different parameters in order to monitor the remaining ports using different criteria.

Should you have any questions, comments please feel free to reply to this post, and we’ll make sure to send you an answer as soon as possible. For further information on Xian Io for Ops Mgr 07 please visit our website http://www.jalasoft.com/.

Jalasoft joins eXc and nWorks among ISVs offering supported non-Windows monitoring options for SC Essentials 2007.

The trial download is available at http://www.jalasoft.com/Web/Product/Product.aspx?id=47

After Stefan mentioned this product recently, I thought I would check on licensing and availability. Licensing details are available below. If you want to create visual representations of your environment, this looks to be a promising option.

You can view an online demo at www.savision.com/demo

You can download a 30-day full functional evaluation version at (www.savision.com/download). The package includes an evaluation guide that walks you through the basic configuration step

Live Maps is priced per management group and has a number of editions that are limited by the amount of maps you can create:

There are several monitors with the Dell MP for SCOM 2007 that Dell has pointed out are problematic, and are on their radar to be reworked. Here are the main offenders that were confirmed by Dell.

ISSUE: The issues appear to be related to number of available slots for both processors and power supplies vs the actual installed i.e. 2 processor capable with only one processor installed.

 Workaround: The interim workaround (in the event they raise false alerts) is to create disable overrides on the responsible monitors for affected monitored nodes only.

Processor unit instance:

Event Monitor for Server Processor Unit: Indicates the health of the Server Processor Unit. This Monitor is triggered by the event that the Dell instrumentation logs in the Windows event log.

Unit Monitor for Processor Unit: Indicates the health of the Server Processor Unit. This Monitor is triggered by a periodic poll configured as IntervalSeconds whose default value is 600 seconds.

Power Supplies unit instance:

Event Monitor for Server Power Supply Unit: Indicates the health of the Server Power Supply Unit. This Monitor is triggered by the event that the Dell instrumentation logs in the Windows event log.

Event Monitor for Server Power Supply Unit: Indicates the health of the Server Power Supply Unit. This Monitor is triggered by the event that the Dell instrumentation logs in the Windows event log.

Unit Monitor for Server Power Supply: Indicates the health of the Server Power Supply Unit.

Server Power Supply Unit: This Monitor is triggered by a periodic poll configured as IntervalSeconds whose default value is 600 seconds.

Bernardo announced that Jalasoft has made Xian Network Manager Io SP1 available for download at its website.

The stability of the Xian Io product has been improved, several enhancements have been made and the following management packs are now in a RTM state.

- IBM AIX

- VMware VirtualCenter

The download is directly available at the Jalasoft website: www.jalasoft.com

We have it from a reliable source that Jalasoft, a leader in network and non-Windows monitoring for Operations Manager 2007, will soon release a beta of Xian IO for System Center Essentials 2007!

This is very welcome news, filling a big gap in the mid-market space in the area of heterogeneous monitoring. Given that the product is pre-beta, we have not seen pricing info yet. More on that as it comes available.

Below is a screenshot from the forthcoming beta.

Xian announced the RC2 release of their offering designed to enhance Ops Mgr non-Windows and network monitoring capabilities (RTM expected next week). With the recent purchase of Engyro by Microsoft (and subsequent removal of their products from the market), Xian now stands virtually alone in this sector of the ISV space (with eXc as the only mainstream competitor with widespread traction in this arena). While Xian does offer VMware ESX monitoring in this suite as well, I want to differentiate that category, as that category has it’s own, interesting story….more on that another time.

With Microsoft making a clear move in their intended direction for heterogeneous monitoring and product connectors, it would now seem only the strong will survive in an ISV space where additional acquisition by MS would now seem much less likely, but one with fewer players than one may have initially envisioned given the attention. Xian makes a strong case here in that they have a broad product offering which should ultimately strengthen their position in the large enterprise space targeted by Operations Manager.

Overall, this is a nice product. While there are a couple of areas where I hope to see improvement in future releases (built-in knowledge and de-coupling their architecture from the mgmt server), they’ve added some very useful functionality that should reduce administrative effort, allowing administrators to create ‘templates’ of a fashion containing base rulesets for a given object type. I also find their console fairly intuitive and performant (as well as virtualization friendly). I havn’t seen the final retail prices yet, so I cannot speak to price at this time. We’ll definitely complete a full product review with some comparative analysis at some point in the future.

In any event, the Xian team are a group of good folks working very hard to deliver a good product strengthening the heterogeous story for Operations Manager. I encourage you check into for yourself. You can learn more about Xian IO for Ops Mgr 2007 at the URL below.

http://www.jalasoft.com/jalasoftweb/jsp/products/xianio/

see http://www.securevantage.com/Products/SCMP/Docs/SVT_SCMP_UserGuide_v1.2.pdf