SCOM Dashboard for your whole infrastructure

Hello SCOM funs! 

Last months I was very busy with developing very nice visual dashboard which can in one big picture show overall status of your whole monitored environment. This goal was not so easy if you imagine how much of valuable data SCOM has and how difficult it can be to display them in one picture. 

Off course you can have more dashboards, but the best option is to have only one big dashboard permanently projecting on one big screen in your office, so everybody can see it in one quick glance and understand that everything is all right or if there is some issue, you will see where you need to start your remediation job.

For visualization layer I used Visio, where I can draw anything without any limitations. The problem was an amount of SCOM data that I needed to visualize. For that purpose, I developed thousand-line PowerShell script, which is reading SCOM health and performance data and making aggregations and storing those data in temporary SQL tables. Visio dashboard has its shapes linked to this SQL tables, and if there is any change in monitoring data, Visio dashboard immediately render this health status in graphical way.

Look at one of many possibilities you can get from this:

The lower part in dashboard is about VMware infrastructure. It is rendering health information about Datacenters, Clusters, Hosts, Datastores, Networks and individual VMs. All health data are gathered via free VMware MP which is described in my blog post http://wininframaster.blogspot.sk/2017/08/monitoring-vmware-with-scom.html

In the middle you can see Windows Servers layers. All servers are grouped in logical areas, such as AD, Exchange, DB and so on. You can even display your Unix servers here as well. It is totally up to SCOM admin. Only thing he needs to do is to create in SCOM console normal group, call it according to name convention (eg: Dashboard Service AD) and add servers he want to aggregate in one logical group. 

Then in SQL Table you will see new line for your logical group of servers with all aggregated health statuses. And in Visio diagram you can simply copy template for logical group and link it in one click to new SQL Table line and that’s it.

Visio Template linked to one SQL table line is looking like this:

You can simply remove not relevant tiles and rearrange the rest of them. 

If you have SharePoint, you can store your Visio picture directly inside it. But if you want, you can use bare IIS and render Dashboard picture in simple web page. For this purpose, I created second PowerShell script, which is creating invisible Visio COM object, refreshing linked data sources and exporting dashboard to jpeg file on IIS server. On IIS I have nice web page with intelligent javascript refresh function which is reloading actual picture without any blink. It works simply great!

If you are interested in this very elegant solution, do not hesitate to send me an email at wininframaster@gmail.com. I already made a few SCOM guys and their managers very happy with this overall picture of their monitored infrastructure :) Thanks.