I am new user of squared up.
With multitude of technologies e.g.
- Nutanix AHV/ESX
- Citrix
- AD
- Exchange
- SharePoint
- F5/ NetScalers
- *NIX
- IP managed devices/security cameras etc.
I wonder how you folks are achieving this? Would love to hear from you.
1 Like
Hi!
Do you want one icon on the dashboard or one icon per service (nutanix, citrix, exchange)?
What you could do in this situation is to build distributed application.
https://blog.orneling.se/2017/02/creating-dynamic-distributed-applications-in-scom/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd4yUlpoHX4
We have that setup where we have one distapp per service. And the distapp is only containing the parts needed for the service to be functional. Here the VADA function in Squaredup is very useful.
1 Like
Hi
We have created a Visio dashboard - which has each of our applications defined - we have then configured this within Squared Up. Each of these is a drill down which will expose the health state of the individual components of the application e.g. databases \ websites as well as performance metrics.
Cheers
Graham 
1 Like
We created an initial dashboard by using some groups and dependency monitors to ensure that the health state of the contained objects rolled up correctly.
It’s not perfect but it allowed us to get something put together relatively quickly. We have a lot of systems that are built in-house so we can’t do proper application-level monitoring until we’ve created our custom MP’s to monitor the specific components of the applications but the groups we made meant we could at least keep an eye on the overall state of the environment.
if you need any help with how you go about defining the groups and the necessary roll-up monitors then please let me know and i’d be happy to give some guidance.
1 Like
We don’t really use any of the inbuilt SCOM dashboards now. We’re just using Squared Up as a means to present the data we require.
For the time being we’re focussed on getting the alert count under control so we’ve built a tile-based dashboard in Squared Up which uses the SQL Query Tile to return scalar values for alert counts in specific areas. So, for example, we can see how many Critical or Warning alerts we have for a specific technology such as SQL Server.
We are starting to build some application level dashboards too but they lack the dependency model for now; we have a number of complex environments so right now we’re using VADA to map out the various elements before monitoring them individually. Once done we can go and harass the developers to link the elements into the correct model which ultimately should allow us to have ‘proper’ application monitoring.
1 Like
Just for reference in case there’s any confusion - The Squared Up side of that video is very old! Using version 1. You can find more up to date tutorials on their YouTube channel. Visio is the best way to go though: https://youtu.be/a4-msE5nUCA
Still experimenting various approaches. Distributed App seems to be our desired end state. Thanks for suggesting.
Hi Peter,
We did similar in our organization, I love the parent/child aspect of the group structure as it’s so easy to apply to all custom apps. Do you use the datacenter dashboard in SCOM to present the health of the top level tiles?
I’m not a fan of using the datacenter dashboard in SCOM. It is very poor from a performance viewpoint, especially compared to Squared Up - a Visio or the status tile in Squared Up provides the same functionality with significantly improved performance.
Should add that all of the above is done via groups. We also make sure that we have a health service watchers group to ensure that it is flagged if a server is down. If you just have groups of computer objects \ database objects then you won’t see the dashboard go red if the server shuts down. I’ve jotted down some details here - https://www.f1point2.com/application-server/