9 October 2014 blogs 5 min read
This blog post continues our preview of features that will arrive in the next version of Live Maps, which will be officially launched during TechEd 2014, at the end of October.
Live Maps provides a wonderful visualization layer on top of your System Center implementation to help you understand the availability of your business-critical services. Using the Live Maps platform, you are able to build Live Maps services to model those key business services and immediately see the value of this information. While our customers have many custom and unique applications and services that they model, many of them also need to model the same key Microsoft applications, namely Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft SharePoint. Rather than asking them to create their own maps and dashboards, we’re now providing out-of-the-box support for these business-critical applications with quick and simple to import management packs. These easily deployable service models leverage the knowledge of our IT and application experts to visualize the health of your applications in an intuitive and yet detailed manner.
Using the Live Maps Authoring console, you will find the ‘Discover Service’ button on the main Start Page. This will allow you to select one of the provided out-of-box services, as well as import any additional management packs into your Operations Manager environment. Here is the ‘Discover Service’ wizard with the out-of-box services that are now available to be selected:
Discover Service Wizard. (click on image to enlarge)
Out-of-box Services – Exchange 2013
If you import the Exchange 2013 out-of-box service, you will be provided with a Live Maps service that highlights the Exchange 2013 architecture and more importantly the health of each part of that architecture. The new Exchange 2013 service leverages the large number of health checks that are part of the Microsoft Exchange 2013 Management Pack, which is required for this out-of-box service and can be found here.
The main view of Exchange 2013 can be found in the ‘Application Perspective’ of the Exchange 2013 service which is the following Live Maps view:
Out-of-box Services – Exchange 2013 (click on image to enlarge)
This view shows the high-level architecture of Exchange 2013. It provides a focussed view of the main client protocols that Exchange users will access, as well as the main Exchange roles that are used to provide business critical electronic mail services to your organization. And for each of the main Exchange components provided, you can drill into that component and see exactly what problems are being experienced. When there are problems, you are only a few mouse clicks away from immediately seeing the root cause and being able to quickly correct it to ensure no down time from a system that users expect to be available all of the time.
Out-of-box Services – SharePoint 2013
Like Exchange 2013 presented previously, the out-of-box service for SharePoint 2013 can be used to see a very focused view of your SharePoint 2013 implementation to see the overall health, and then to drill down quickly to components that are not healthy and require attention. This out-of-box service is also dependent on the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 management pack that can be found at the following link.
In the ‘Application Perspective’ of the SharePoint 2013 service you are provided a simplified high-level architecture that presents the main components of SharePoint and allows you to focus on addressing unhealthy issues that will directly affect your users. Here is the main application perspective diagram provided by the SharePoint 2013 out-of-box Live Maps service:
2013. (click on image to enlarge)
Out-of-box Services – Active Directory
The final out-of-box service provided in the new Live Maps 7.2 release is Active Directory. This service is no different than the last two services presented in that it requires and leverages the Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services management pack that can be found at the following link.
The goal of this out-of-box service is to summarize your Active Directory application to allow you to see the main components of it and be able to drill down quickly to address any unhealthy parts. The Application perspective of this service provides the main view of the application:
Out-of-box Services – Active Directory 2013. (click on image to enlarge)
In future releases of Live Maps we will continue to expand the out-of-box services that are provided and include applications like Lync, Biztalk, Office 365, and previous versions of Exchange and SharePoint. For further information on Savision and about Live Maps, click here.
Out-of-box Services is just one of the features that will be introduced in Live Maps 7.2 that will be officially launched at TechEd Europe 2014. Do you want to know first-hand what else we got prepared for Live Maps 7.2? In case you missed it, last week, we introduced another of the upcoming features: Performance Data in Live Maps. Read last week’s blog now if you want to learn more about new release.
