Cookdown

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Identification and Reconciliation

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90 seconds with ServiceNow’s Identification and Reconciliation engine, a key tool to your complete CMDB.

Configuration data is spread enterprise-wide, spanning multiple systems and sources, each with its strengths and weaknesses. To create a centralized database that can be used confidently by all teams this cornucopia of data needs to be pruned, consolidated, and maintained.

After you realize the benefits of the framework, there is no turning back.

Johnny Walker, https://www.acorio.com/servicenow-cmdb-transforms/

CMDB Challenges

  • Duplicate entries are distracting and unhelpful
  • Multiple sources contribute to a single configuration item
  • Data source quality can vary greatly
  • Relationships should have some structure

Cue the Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE). This out-of-the-box functionality can achieve all of the above with customizable settings to match your environment. To over-simplify configuration and functionality, we will pretend IRE is a new employee taking care of our CMDB, their instructions for SERVERS are below.

  1. To match information to the correct server:
    • The FQDN must be identical, or
    • The MAC address and Serial Number match, or
    • A ServiceNow CI SysId works great too
  2. We like as much information as possible, however when updating CIs:
    • Nothing should overwrite human-entered data
    • SCCM or SolarWinds have the same priority, keep whichever is recent
    • Active Directory data is more trusted than SCCM or SolarWinds
    • Data from our scripts is the least trusted
  3. Server host many other items, when connecting them remember:
    • Websites can’t exist without a server
    • A server can optionally contain SQL databases
    • The server network should match a subnet we already have

Don’t forget to tell IRE there are another 300 CI types after that…

Read more at the links below:

Succinct ServiceNow; condensing complex topics into an elevator pitch.

Can we talk about SCOM Overrides?

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If you’ve ever had a well-planned Operations Manager tuning session end in frustration, you are not alone. With everyone in IT seemingly always short on time, scheduling a meeting with multiple teams can kick-off things with some tension, and the process of walking through overrides hasn’t even started.

There are useful resources available, depending on what pack your installing and tuning. For packs with an MP Guide, it’s an excellent place to start, and a search of your favorite blogs can turn up some suggestions or guidance too. When I was tuning the environments I managed, these did come in handy. However, the lack of consistency in available documentation and its depth was always a hurdle.

We needed a more human-friendly way to work with overrides, something a simple as a list could increase efficiency.

The more time I spend meeting with the SME, (Subject Matter Expert) the more value the team would expect from monitoring, which I’ll admit is pretty fair. In a perfect world I’d like to sit down with the SME, open up my cookbook of IIS and Web monitoring, then ask which groups would benefit from each option, finishing with an option to customize any of the ‘recipes’ for a specific group.

A history lesson

After this initial vision, I set to work. Cookery based puns aside, a handful of script revisions later, that’s about what we had created. After running the script against one or more management packs you’d get an Excel file and the conversation would loosely follow the below:

  1. For monitoring IIS Web Server instances this is what we have available
  2. From the Excel file, I read the name and description of the Rule or Monitor
    • Is this useful to your team?
    • Which groups of servers should have it enabled?
  3. After answering questions, if any, I drop their answers into the Excel sheet as comma separated group names (in the enable category)
  4. For other parameters, most commonly interval and threshold, the following rows in Excel would let us repeat step 2
    • Does running this every 5 minutes work for you?
    • The default alert is where they are more than 100 units, does this work for our environment?
  5. Repeat for the remainder of the spreadsheet, and your done!

The process isn’t quick and easy, or just a few clicks and you are done, but that’s not what I was going for. With very minimal delay the SME and I could go through the available monitoring in a consistent format, at a reasonable pace. There wasn’t time wasted trying to move around the console, answer questions, or get things applied.

After a few dozen of these meeting, most of which went very well, we created a second PowerShell script. The second script didn’t do much for the SMEs, but I thought it was fantastic! PowerShell accepts the *.xls file as an input, runs for a while working hard, then spits out an override management pack, success!

This was the process that I’d worked out over a couple years, and I’d wager there are a couple other great methods out there. Tweet us @team_cookdown if you’d like to share yours, we’re always looking to follow others with new ideas and suggestions, and love a good SCOM story.

If your looking for a process of your own, or if the above sounds like something you’d find easier than what today’s process is, Great News! After many tweaks, adjustments, improvements, beers, and pizza, the scripts and process mentioned above now has a UI, and community integration. Check out the Easy Tune product, now you’ve even got a litte history on how it got to where it is today.

Introducing Easy Tune: the new way to tune SCOM

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If you’ve ever spent days explaining to teams what’s monitored on their servers and hours implementing overrides only to be told that SCOM is still too noisy, you’ll know why we created Easy Tune.

The easy way to tune SCOM

SCOM is known for management packs that provide in-depth monitoring for Microsoft and other enterprise technologies, but often the management packs offer too much detail. To be successful with SCOM, you have to tune SCOM and keep it tuned.

We wanted to create a tuning solution that:

  • Enables customers to apply best practices created by the community
  • Removes the need for creating overrides one at a time
  • Avoids the sprawl of overrides across multiple management packs
  • Makes it easy to explain what level of monitoring is applied to any workload

Here’s how easy it is to tune SCOM using Easy Tune:

  1. Download the Easy Tune MP, which introduces a new tuning UI in the SCOM console
  2. For each of your monitored technologies (such as SQL Server 2016) choose the desired level of monitoring: discovery only, essential, balanced or full. You can set a global monitoring level, and levels for different groups if needed
  3. Click to apply the tuning level
  4. Easy Tune does the rest! No need to manually create management packs or overrides

Tuning Packs and the Community

Easy Tune works by using Tuning Packs, where each pack contains all the information needed to fully tune a particular management pack (or multiple management packs) according to best practices.

The best bit about Tuning Packs is that they come from the community. Easy Tune allows the SCOM community to share their recommendations and best practices for tuning. Instead of each SCOM administrator working in isolation and spending hours with each internal team to tune every MP, we can now leverage the community.

Tuning Packs are stored on a Community Store on GitHub. They can be submitted, edited and downloaded by anyone.

We’ve already seen the community in action with contributions from customers and from our management pack partner, NiCE, who have released a Tuning Pack for their Oracle Management Pack. We expect the range to Tuning Packs to quickly expand to cover almost all Management Packs.

Tuning Levels

Once you have a Tuning Pack, all you need to do is select the desired level:

  • Discovery Only (no monitoring, just the discovery of the class instances)
  • Essential (basic monitoring, typically up-down)
  • Balanced (commonly used monitoring that offers important, actionable information without the noise)
  • Full (comprehensive monitoring)

The tuning level will depend on the workload: is this a critical piece of infrastructure with a dedicated support team that want to know about every single issue, or is it perhaps a regular, non-critical workload where basic up-down monitoring is all that is needed?

Using Discovery Only can be very useful when you first install an MP. You’ll know that the performance impact of the MP will be minimized and you’ll get a chance to see what objects the MP discovers before you start enabling monitoring.

Getting Easy Tune

Easy Tune is provided as a free download. We want every SCOM deployment to work this way.

For more advanced scenarios we have created Easy Tune Pro, that enables:

  • PowerShell automation
  • Migration tools
  • Time-of-day alerting (coming soon!)

In addition, Easy Tune Pro comes with full technical support.

Experts Live US 2019

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Experts Live is coming to the USA on 26 March 2019 in Austin, Texas, and we can’t wait to be there.

The event will offer some top Windows Server, SCOM and Azure Monitor content. Check out some of our highlights:

Windows Server 2019: The Foundation of the Hybrid Datacenter

20 Operations Manager Tips in 20 Minutes

Automation Roadmap – SysCtr Orchestrator & Azure

Office 365 Outage Report & End User Monitoring

End-to-end application dashboards with SCOM, Azure and ServiceNow

Step into Azure without leaving your datacenter investments behind

SCOM 2019 and Azure Monitor: The Road Ahead

If slides or videos become available, we’ll post them here!

Cookdown is live!

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Wait, what? A new vendor specializing in Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)?

Yes! Today at Experts Live US we’re annoucing the launch of Cookdown.

In an era when all the buzz is about the cloud, we’re unapologetically passionate about SCOM.

We recognize that today large enterprises continue to rely on SCOM for infrastructure monitoring. Sure, the future of new application development may be serverless, but in the meantime enterprises will continue to manage hundreds or thousands of servers, and SCOM is quite simply the best enterprise infrastructure monitoring tool available.

Of course, we also know that SCOM needs to be improved and extended to maintain its position as the infrastructure monitoring tool of choice. SCOM also needs to be integrated with other enterprise tools such as ServiceNow to offer your business the modern monitoring experience demanded by today’s enterprise IT.

Taking years of experience with SCOM and enterprise software development, we’ve created innovative solutions that enable you to make the most of your investments in SCOM. Many of these solutions are made available for free, and we’re proud to be part of the dedicated community that exists around SCOM.

Today doesn’t just mark the launch of Cookdown, it also marks the release of Easy Tune, a fantastic new way to manage your SCOM overrides and tune your monitoring. Read all about Easy Tune here.

Cookdown was created by those creative folk over at Squared Up. If you need some awesome dashboards for your applications (and we’re sure you do) we recommend that you check them out 😊