Solution– The AWS Management Pack for Operations Manager
Whether they are on-premises or in the AWS cloud, this SCOM Management Pack (MP) allows organizations running their Microsoft-based workloads at AWS to monitor their AWS resources directly in the Operations Manager console, essentially from a “single pane of glass”. This project was driven by demand from the Microsoft EPG sales field and most importantly joint AWS and Microsoft very large enterprise customers. These companies were also our key beta customers for the AWS Management Pack. We enlisted the fantastic development team at VIAcode, a key SI partner to develop the MP for AWS.
A couple of things make this Management Pack unique. First, it is the first MP of its kind to be able to separate the computer (Operating System) from the AWS Instance (Virtual Machine). Secondly, this creates a logical monitoring and reporting mechanism that can intelligently identify where a problem or error state exists, either in the AWS cloud or the server OS/application running within AWS.
What does the Management Pack do?
Microsoft customers who have existing Microsoft and Linux based workloads can view and monitor their on-premises and AWS resources together in a SCOM management console. The management pack can monitor EC2 instances (Windows and Linux), Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFormation stacks, Auto Scaling groups, and Elastic Beanstalk applications. Through a public .NET API at AWS and the SCOM “Watcher Node,” the MP can reach into the AWS infrastructure and capture AWS “CloudWatch” metrics to gain insight into the health of the managed AWS resource.
Why did Microsoft engage in this joint development project with AWS?
This Management Pack (MP) for AWS is not simply a product release for AWS. Rather, it also provides the proof that System Center can extend the rich monitoring, alerting and reporting foundation to manage any application, from any location in anycloud. This “proof point” can enable other opportunities for development and deployment scenarios (provisioning, orchestration, management) for System Center at other Service Provider clouds.
Check out Amazon’s blog post about this on their blog.