Microsoft Management Summit 2012 was a major success for Savision! With dozens of our customers present, our team had the opportunity to learn first hand how our customers are using our products and how they intend to use them in SCOM 2012. Major Announcements from the Summit Included: Live Maps – Dashboards and Maps for System Center • Full support for System Center 2012 • Integration with System Center Service Manager o Automatically populate and maintain CMDB o Business services automatically correlated to incidents • Integration with Bing® Maps o View the health of your IT organization on interactive maps …

Hyper-V Management: Addressing the Top Nine Challenges A Hyper-V dependent fabric is complex and takes specialized teams working together in order for it to keep running at its best. Manually diagnosing, troubleshooting and resolving Hyper-V Server performance problems is not only  time-consuming, but also requires storage, server, and network IT teams to work flawlessly together. Without a common, real-time view into Hyper-V host’s health, storage sub-systems and underlying networks, IT Pros are left frustrated when trying to resolve Hyper-V problems. Virtualized infrastructure outages are costly because of complexity. Consider these facts: It takes two (2) hours per incident to recover …

The upcoming release of Live Maps will contain a great new feature. This feature will make it possible to display your IT infrastructure, not only in a Diagram or List but also on an interactive Bing Map. I would like to use this blog article to explain the main components of this feature. How to get objects on a Bing Map. There are three ways to get an object from Operations Manager on a Bing Map. The first one is just like in our other views by dragging the objects from a tree view on the Map. We also created …

One of the best parts of my job is visiting with customers and hearing about their experiences with our products. Often times, the first thing I do when arriving onsite is ask, “Do you have Live Maps up on a video wall within the NOC?” Sure enough, when we walked into Gamestop’s NOC – bam – Live Maps was displayed on a projector. This past week, I got the chance to chat with Larry Brown, SR Monitoring Engineer at Gamestop, regarding their NOC setup and how they use Live Maps in general. Nick Hebert, Account Manager, Savision: How has Live …

We have a two-fold motivation for today’s blog post. First, it lets us close a small gap we have noticed in the monitoring of clusters and cluster shared volumes. Second, it lets us demonstrate some interesting tricks in creating relationships within Operations Manager. First, a bit of context. Microsoft provides the “Server Failover Cluster Management Pack” to monitor most aspects of clusters. However, the support for cluster shared volumes (CSVs) within the cluster is a little weak. You can find some monitoring of CSVs under the nodes in the cluster where they seem to be treated identically to local storage, …

Quite frequently we receive questions on how the Health Rollup on a Live Maps view is performed and whether it is possible to make any changes to this Health Rollup to support specific customer scenarios. In this article I will explain the default Health Rollup that is performed on any Live Maps view and different options that are available to change this default behavior. Monitoring Unavailable By default, the Health Rollup on a Live Maps view treats objects that are in a ‘Monitoring Unavailable’ state as ‘Critical’. So, when there are one or more objects in a ‘Monitoring Unavailable’ state …

IT Infrastructures are always subject to change. Which means it is a hell of a job to keep your application models in sync with the reality of the day. With Live Maps for Operations Manager we allow you to make your application model dynamic.  This article will detail the simple steps on how to accomplish that. Let’s take a simple business application that has a web farm front end. The goal is that every time a web farm instance is added to or removed from the farm, the application map gets updated automatically. After starting the Live Maps Authoring Console we create a dynamic …

Where Did My Disk Space Go? – Troubleshooting Virtual Machine Storage Issues in Hyper-V With Hyper-V, it is very easy to over commit your storage space by creating dynamic VHD files. It is also easy to consume all of your available storage by creating multiple, parallel snapshots, creating large fixed VHD files, and letting your dynamic VHD files expand as the guest operating systems demand more space. What happens when you hit the limit on your storage devices? Your virtual machines are placed into the dreaded “Paused Critical” or “Major Failure” states. According to Virtual PC Guy : If we …

Savision works with IT environments that are looking for faster ways to solve their problems. And while we are not bound by one industry or vertical, Savision is collaborating with more and more Hospital and Healthcare customers. It makes sense. Hospitals are becoming increasingly more reliant on technology, and if their machines or applications are down — the results could be devastating. I recently got the chance to chat with Errol Small, Technical Services Manager at Healthcare Partners and Rogee Fe de Leon, Technical Services Manager at Maimonides Medical Center about the unique challenges they face, and how Live Maps …

Sometimes, when trying to remove a Management Pack from your Operations Manager through the Administration pane of the Operations Console, the following error dialog is presented: This situation only occurs when one or more object have (previously) been added to a Live Maps view that are defined in the Management Pack that you want to delete. When you follow the suggestion as presented in the dialog above, all Live Maps views that have been created will be deleted. Obviously, in most situations this is not what we want as this would enforce us to recreate all our Live Maps views from …