Introducing Easy Tune: the new way to tune SCOM

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 EasyTune:

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 containsall the information needed to fully tune a particular management pack (or multiplemanagement packs) according to best practices.

The best bit about Tuning Packs is thatthey come from the community. Easy Tune allows the SCOM community to share theirrecommendations and best practices for tuning. Instead of each SCOM administratorworking in isolation and spending hours with each internal team to tune everyMP, we can now leverage the community.

Tuning Packs are stored on a Community Storeon 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 needto 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 usedmonitoring 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 thatwant to know about every single issue, or is it perhaps a regular, non-criticalworkload where basic up-down monitoring is all that is needed?

Using Discovery Only can be very useful whenyou first install an MP. You’ll know that the performance impact of the MP willbe 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 (comingsoon!)

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