The other day I got a question from a customer that wanted to know if it was possible to use Live Maps with the new OpsMgr R2 Service Level Tracking feature. The answer was simple, yes you can.

In this article I will give a step-by-step instruction how to configure Service Level Tracking on a Live Maps view and show the results using the Service Level Tracking report in OpsMgr and the Service Level Dashboard in SharePoint.

Follow up:

Background

For every view you create with the Live Maps authoring console a Live Maps group is created in OpsMgr containing all the objects that are placed on that view. The health state of all objects is rolled up to group level for each individual category (availability, performance...) This group can be used as a Service Level Tracking target and allows you to create Service Level Objectives for the group object itself or the different objects in the group.

In this article I will use an application topology of a simple business application that contains the application components, perspectives measuring end-to-end availability and all extra contextual information that Live Maps allows you to add to a topology view. For more information about creating Application Topology views with Live Maps have a look at the training videos.

Creating a Service Level Tracking Object

• In the OpsMgr console go to the Authoring Pane and expand the Management Pack Objects in the Authoring Tree
• Right click the Service Level Target (SLT) object and click Create
• Enter a name for your SLT object (in this case ‘My Business App’) and click Next
• In the Objects to Track dialog set the Search result filter to Group and lookup the Live Maps view name that you want to target (in this case ‘My Business App’)
• Confirm your selection and click Next 

 

Creating Service Level Objectives

For this example we will create 2 Service Level Objects (SLO). One that monitors the availability of all application components on the Live Maps view (targeted to the group of the view) and one that monitors the End-to-End availability of the application (targeted to end user perspectives in the group).

• In the Service Level  Objectives dialog click Add – Monitoring state SLO
• Enter a SLO name (in this case ‘Application Availability’)
• The other fields are left default

• Click OK to continue
• In the Service Level  Objectives dialog click Add – Monitoring state SLO
• Enter a SLO name (in this case ‘End-To-End Availability’)
• Set the Target Class to Perspective
• The other fields are left default

• Click OK to continue
• Click Next and Finish to complete the wizard

The Service Level Tracking objects are now created. It can take a few minutes before all objects are created in the OpsMgr Data warehouse and are ready for use.

Note: if you have upgraded Live Maps from v3 to v4 the wizard might throw an error at this point. Please check out this KB article to fix this behavior.

Running the Service Level Report

Lets first have a look at the results of our work by running the Service Level Tracking summary report.

• In the OpsMgr console go to the Reporting Pane and open the Microsoft Service Level Report Library folder.
• Open the Service Level Tracking summary report
• In the report parameters we add the ‘My Business App’ to the Service levels section and set the from date to ‘Yesterday’
• Now we Run the report

If you drill down to the End-To-End Availability sub report you will get a detailed report specifying the availability per perspective. In our case we see the end user availability per region.

The Service Level Dashboard

An other way of looking at the Service Level Tracking objects is the OpsMgr R2 Service Level Dashboard 2.0 for SharePoint which can be downloaded here. After the installation you can edit the SLD site and specify the Service Level Tracking objects you want to see. In our case we add the ‘My Business App’

Conclusion

The Service Level Tracking feature of OpsMgr R2 opens a lot of new possibilities for Live Maps users. Especially the ability to target specific objects on a Live Map view can be very useful.

While the scenario in this article is relatively simple, think of the opportunities in situations where the Live Maps view nesting feature is used. Nested views roll up state to their parent in the same way as individual objects do. So you can have that simplified overview that Live Maps offers and still be able to report SLA on a very detailed level.

More information about Live Maps can be found here.