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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Performance problems are always difficult to address. Especially in case of a multi-tiered application that gets its data from another system. Multiple customers have contacted our support team with the question why their Live Maps Web Console is slow. In almost all cases it is because the Operations Manager RMS is too busy to handle all the requests generated by the SDK calls in time. But it is not a good thing to automatically blame another product if your product is not performing as expected. This is why we added a little feature to Live Maps v5.1.1 that will do …

The number one question we get asked about Live Maps is, “How are other companies using your product?” Last week, we got the chance to chat with both Ryan Durbin, Network Admin at Woodforest National Bank, and Seth Steward, System Center Deployment Engineer at Tribune Company, and asked how their companies use Savision’s solutions. Here’s what they had to say: Nick Hebert (Savision, head of Americas sales): What is the greatest value you see in the Live Maps product? Seth Steward: “Bringing a visual component to a very data-driven side of technology.” Ryan Durbin: “The largest value I see in …

By default, the Live Maps Web Console only supports Windows Authentication when it is installed on the Root Management Server (RMS). When it is installed on a non-RMS server, Forms Authentication is to be used: To be able to also use Windows Authentication on a non-RMS server, we need to setup Kerberos constrained delegation. In this article the steps required to allow for Windows Authentication while having the Live Maps Web Console installed on a standalone Web Server are described.