I wrote this as a reference for the Out of the box (OOB) Widgets in Operations Manager 2012 SP1. This is intended to help in putting together custom dashboards using the OOB functionality. A great example of putting this all together can be downloaded here http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2012/06/12/free-windows-server-2008-dashboards-for-opsmgr-2012-and-tool-to-help-create-your-own-customized-dashboards.aspx (Download and import the Xml management packs – Windows.Server.Summary.Dashboard.xml and Windows.Server.Task.Pane.Dashboard.MP.xml):
Also a great recording from MMS 2013 on customizing your dashboards more above and beyond what is OOB can be found here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/IM-B401
My good buddy Mr.Holman has a nice blog on publishing your all-signing, all-dancing dashboards to SharePoint too: http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2013/04/03/publishing-scom-2012-dashboards-to-sharepoint.aspx
Two of the widgets are based upon SLAs, so there is a section that talks briefly about SLA Configuration at the end of this post.
DASHBOARD LAYOUTS:
There are 4 types of dashboard that can be created through the UI:
- Column Layout
- Grid Layout
- Service Level Dashboard
- Summary Dashboard
Here are some examples each of these layouts:
Column Layout:
The Column layout enables up to 5 vertical columns to displayed in a row in the dashboard.
Example 2-column:
Example 4-Column:
Grid Layout:
The Grid layout allows layouts of 1,2,3,4,5,6 or 9 cells in the following configurations:
Example: 5-cell Dashboard:
Service Level Dashboard:
The Service Level dashboard takes a pre-configured SLO and shows the data for it. The bottom pane updates as you click on a specific instance in the top-left widget:
Summary Dashboard:
A summary dashboard adds an 'Object by Performance’, ‘Performance’ and ‘State’ widget in a 3-cell configuration:
Once created, you set the scope for each widget, depending on what you want to display:
So once you’ve decided on your dashboard layout from the 4 options shown above, your next consideration is what widgets you’d like to include on the dashboard, and what you would like each widget to display.
WIDGETS
Objects by Performance Widget:
This is also known as the ‘Top 10’ dashboard, but it can actually do from a top 1 to top 20, and can also do bottom results. ‘Top results’ can be useful in scenarios such as highest CPU usage. ‘Bottom Results’ can be useful in scenarios such as % Free Disk Space.
Note the (all) instance cannot be used in this view. Therefore you can choose an instance like ‘C:’ and then all the ‘C’ drives will be shown.
Configuration:
Example:
Note, if you don’t see the path, be sure to have System Center 2012 SP1 UR2 deployed. Rather than just looking at the KB for the download and installation instructions, it is always fun to see what ‘feline’ representation our good friend Mr.Holman has allocated to a given CU / update rollup (and he has some pretty nice guidance on deploying it too!)
Object SLA Widget
With this one, pick an appropriate Object (instance of a class) or a group that has an SLA applied to it.
Configuration:
Example:
Performance Widget
This widget creates a performance graph for the selected group / object. In this widget, it is possible to use the (ALL) instance.
Configuration:
Example:
State Widget:
This widget can be based on one of three configurations:
- All instances of a specific class (you can skip the group selection)
- a specific group and all of it’s member instances, regardless of class type
- a Specific group narrowed down to a specific class type contained in the group
Configuration:
Example – SQL DB Engine State:
SLA Widget:
This widget just requires selection of one of your pre-configured SLAs, and will use the group / class that the SLA is scoped on.
Configuration:
Example:
SLA Configuration:
The above is based on the following example SLA configuration (Authoring>Management Pack Objects>Service Level tracking):
Alert Widget:
Allows the display of alerts, narrowed down to a specific group of object, and it is also possible to narrow down on Severity, priority, and Alert Resolution State.
Configuration:
Example:
The alert widget on the far right has the ‘Enable Alert Details inline’ checkbox checked.
Details Widget:
This widget is context-sensitive based on what is selected in a state or alert widget in the same dashboard view.
Configuration:
Example – Alert Details:
Shows the Detail of the Selected Alert:
Example – State Details:
Shows the Detail of the object selected in a state view:
Instance Details Widget:
Unlike the ‘Details’ Widget, this is not context-sensitive and will show the details of a selected group or instance, as selected during configuration of the widget.
Example – SQL DB Engine on ComputerX:
SLA Configuration Note
More detail on configuring SLOs can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh212753.aspx
Below is a very brief ‘quick-start’ style summary though! They are configured in the Authoring pane under Management Pack Objects> Service Level Tracking.
Two types:
- Monitor
- Performance Collection Rule
For a Monitor, it is important to know the class that the Monitor is targeted too (which you can find by looking at the monitor properties).
For a performance collection rule, it is important to know the class that the Performance collection rule is targeted to (which you can find by looking at the rule’s properties).
Example of a performance one:
(The example of a monitor-based Service Level Objective can be found above in the SLA Widget section)
You can test your SLA data by running the “Service Level Tracking Summary report’ which can be found in the Microsoft Service Level Report library Folder in the reporting pane.
Here is the example output report:
Happy Dashboarding!!!!