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 …

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 …

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 …

When System Center Operations Manager alerts you to issues in your IT environment, Vital Signs is the perfect tool to quickly pinpoint and resolve the root cause of the problem. Vital Signs will automatically pull in the most current alerts from Operations Manager and display them in the context of the ever-evolving, real-time monitoring data. Further, historical data retrieved from Operations Manager will show you how your applications and servers should be performing. In this post, we will show a tiny feature that will enable you to get quickly from alert to cause to resolution. Once you have received an …

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.  

At Savision we are constantly working with our customers to help them be pro-active when it comes to IT problem management. Today Savision Live Maps and Vital Signs already help our customers to proactively control their IT infrastructures. With the new wave of System Center products around the corner, Savision is investing heavily to make it even easier to integrate our products in your day-to-day Service Management processes. Savision customers that (are planning to) work with System Center Service Manager (SCSM) 2010/2012 will see even more benefits from their Live Maps investment with the ability to model and visualize their …

Previously, we blogged about the Hyper-V management pack we have written for Operations Manager. While the goal was to collect more historical performance data to feed our Vital Signs real-time monitoring product, we also included a number of performance-oriented dashboards. However, not satisfied to release a management pack consisting solely of dashboards, our development team then proceeded to bulk it up with a variety of new monitors. While Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMM Management packs do a great job of monitoring availability, they don’t include much monitoring around performance. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could receive alerts from Operations Manager …

Although you can run it in standalone mode, our new Vital Signs product line is a great addition to an existing System Center monitoring environment. One of the ways in which we leverage System Center is by pulling historical performance metrics from the Operations Manager data warehouse and displaying them alongside our real-time data. That way, you can instantly see where and when your applications and servers deviated from their normal operating envelope. Imagine our dismay then, when we went looking for historical performance metrics for Hyper-V. Our Vital Signs dashboard displays 18 different KPIs for the Hyper-V host alone, …