SCOM 2012 Simple Dashboard

I had a very surreal chat with a friend of mine who is a small business owner last week. He had a problem that he could have solved ages ago, he just fell into the trap of stereotyping one of my favorite pieces of technology, SCOM.

The situation was simple, he as 3 guys that make up his I.T infrastructure, Mike, Luke and  Shane. Mike and Luke are the hardware/software/1st, 2nd and 3rd line support technical bods that keep his systems running. Shane, has some server experience and is the "Gatekeeper" as they like to call him, he looks after Exchange, AD etc ...

Shane installed SCOM 2012 to play around with and test, and he found it "noisy" naturally this traveled up the ladder and SCOM was left in a dark room and was forgotten about. Until last week that is. You see, Shane has a problematic SQL box, the SQL server needed to die and fall over entirely before the problem was noticed.

So its then when I got the call from my buddy asking for help. The requirement was simple and these are his exact words, he said "H, I need a thing or software or something to help Shane with that SQL thing. Please."

I took up the challenge and gave Shane what he needed in 20 mins over the phone. A Dashboard suited him best due to the way he likes to work. So here is a simple way to view valuable performance data via a very simple Dashboard.

1. Create a New Dashboard




2. Select a Grid Layout


3. Give the Dashboard a name


4. Choose a layout


5. After you have chosen your layout, click next, you will get a summary screen, click create. Once done you should have something that looks like this.


6. Click on add widget, and select state widget


7.  Click Next, give it a name, Click Next, and then click Add to show the Objects.

8. Click Add, and Click Next, choose Criteria

9. Choose Display Parameters

10. Click Next and Fish, and you have part one of your Dashboard in what seems 5 mins.

Play around with some of the basics, the one below was made choosing the Detial, and Performace widgets to show CPU utilization and the I.P's and DNS name etc for quick reference.

 
So in the space of a coffee break you can now have a very simple platform to view information about your servers, and share on a monitor in the office, or even just a second screen if you please.

It worked for my buddy. Start small with SCOM.