Application Monitoring Using SCOM

Well !! Time to Move on to SCOM . This is my first Post on SCOM and it is primarily Taken up from ADAm Hall's Post :

Manager 2012 – the complete application monitoring solution

For many years Operations Manager has delivered infrastructure monitoring, providing a strong foundation on which we can build to deliver application performance monitoring. It is important to understand that in order to provide the application level performance monitoring, we must first have a solid infrastructure monitoring solution in place. After all, if an application is having a performance issue, we must first establish if the issue is due to an underlying platform problem, or within the application itself.

A key value that Operations Manager 2012 delivers is a solution that uses the same tools to monitor with visibility across infrastructure AND applications.

To deliver application performance monitoring, we provide 4 key capabilities in Operations Manager 2012:

• Infrastructure monitoring – network, hardware and operating system


• Server-side application monitoring – monitoring the actual code that is executed and delivered by the application


• Client-side application monitoring – end-user experiences related to page load times, server and network latency, and client-side scripting exceptions


• Synthetic transaction – pre-recorded testing paths through the application that highlight availability, response times, and unexpected responses

Configuring application performance monitoring

So it must be hard to configure all this right? Lots of things to know, application domain knowledge, settings, configurations? Rest assured, this is not the case! We make it incredibly easy to enable application performance monitoring!

It’s as easy as 1 – 2 – 3 …

1. Define the application to monitor.



2. Configure server-side monitoring to be enabled and set your performance thresholds



3.  Configure client-side monitoring to be enabled and set your performance thresholds



And that’s it, you’re now set to go. Of course setting the threshold levels is the most important part of this, and that is the one thing we can’t do for you… you know your application and what the acceptable performance level is.

Configuring an application performance dashboard in 4 steps

It’s great that we make the configuration of application performance monitoring so easy, but making that information available in a concise, impactful manner is just as important.

We have worked hard to make the creation of dashboards incredibly easy, with a wizard driven experience. You can create an application level dashboard in just 4 steps:

1. Choose where to store the dashboard



2. Choose your layout structure. There are many different layouts available.



3. Specify which information you want to be part of your dashboard.



4. Choose who has access to the dashboard. As you will see a little later in this article, publishing information through web and SharePoint portals is very easy.



And just like that, you’ve created and published an application performance monitoring dashboard!

Open up the conversation

Anyone who has either worked in IT, or been the owner of an application knows the conversations and finger pointing that can go on when users complain about poor performance. Is it the hardware, the platform, a code issue or a network problem?

This is where the complete solution from Operations Manager 2012 really provides an incredible solution. It’s great that an application and associated resources are highly available, but availability does not equal performance. Indeed, an application can be highly available (the ‘5 nines’) but performing below required performance thresholds.

The diagram below shows an application dashboard that I created using the 4 steps above for a sample application. You can see that the application is available and ‘green’ across the board. But the end users are having performance issues. This is highlighted by the client side alerts about performance.

Deep Insight into application performance

Once you know that there is an issue, Operations Manager 2012 provides the ability to drill into the alert down to the code level to see exactly what is going on and where the issue is.

Reporting and trending analysis

An important aspect of application performance monitoring is to be able to see how your applications are performing over time, and to be able to quickly gain visibility into common issues and problematic components of the application.

In the report shown below, you can see that we can quickly see areas of the application we need to focus on, and also understand how these components are related to other parts of the application, and may be causing flow-on effects.

Easily make information available

With Operations Manager 2012, we have made it very easy to delegate and publish information across multiple content access solutions. Operations staff have access to the Operations Manager console, and we can now easily publish delegated information to the Silverlight based Operations web console and also to SharePoint webparts.

And best of all, the information looks exactly the same!

 

By: Unknown On 02:55

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SCCM Distribution Point Design - A Designer's Delight

Ask any SCCM Designer / Architect !! How Many Distribution Points you need in this Environment and he would bend his head and do zillion odd Calculations :-)

 

With this Post I intend to share a Table which shows how much time is required over a specific WAN link for a  set of PC's :

The Below Table Shows the Approximate results for 1  Single Machine over WAN and LAN . From the results it is very clear that for Distribution Point  the results are better 

 

* Note : The figures mentioned above are approximate . Actual s may vary a little .

Now , Let us see the results for 50 Machines at a Local Branch with Different Bandwidth Options . Clearly you would see that if we are not going to use a Local Distribution Point then deployments like Operating system would choke the network and would a lot of time . 

As you can see from the above Image , if we have a 2 MBPS line between the Primary server and the Local branch and there is No distribution Point ( Local ) , them for a set of 50 machines at such a location would take 200 hours for getting the OSD files . However , if we have a  Local Distribution Point at the Branch Location , Machines would pick the Image over a LAN and it would just take 3 Hours of time . That's the power of a Local Distribution Point .

** The Calculations above are based on the assumption that all the bandwidth is available to SCCM .

 

It is also important to understand that the Traffic between Primary and Distribution Point can be scheduled and Throttled .

By: Unknown On 22:46

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SCCM Training - Delhi , NCR and North India

Those Interested for SCCM Training can send in the details at sccmtrainings@gmail.com

By: Unknown On 22:28

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SCCM 2007 to SCCM 2012 Migration - Step by Step Guide - Part 1

In this Post , You will learn on how to Migrate SCCM 2007 to SCCM 2012 . Although the Actual Environment would be a more Complex Scenario but the Underlying steps remain the same .

Before we Migrate , I will give you a brief about the Environment in which this Migration has been Performed ( It is Based on MS Virtual Lab ) with One SCCM 2007 Primary Site Being Migrated to SCCM 2012 Central , There is One Primary Site and One Client which is Finally Upgraded to SCCM 2012 From SCCM 2007 .

It Should be Noted that there is no Direct Method of Migration but the only way to perform Migration is a Side by Side Migration , Which Involves Specifying Source Hierarchy , Migrating Collections , Packages , OS Images , Etc .

Very First step is to Specify the Source Hierarchy on the SCCM 2012 Central Site . For this  you Need Access to Account which has read Access to Objects in SCCM 2007 Environment and Server .

After the Account has been Specified , Check the test Connection .

Keep Checking IF SCCM Set up is running on Client Machine . After some time you will see Configuration Manager and find that all information is gone  and New information is Populated .

By: Unknown On 03:05

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Application Catalog Web Service Point Installation - Step by Step

This Guide Helps you to Install Application Catalog Web Service Point  on SCCM Server . Before we start with it let us take a look at the Log Files that are present on the server :

Clearly You can see that there is no File related to Application Catalog Web Service Point  or Application Catalog Website . awebsctl.log , awebsvcMSI.log are two of them .

let us now go through the Installation . We are only considering Intranet Based clients in this example .

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the Roles have been Installed let us have a look at the awwebsvcMSI.log .

By: Unknown On 03:03

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