Turn Server block red - when server not accessible

Hello, Squared Up Community.

We have just implemented squared up into our organization; the product is excellent, but we have a small dissatisfaction - perhaps it can be fixed!

When one of our production servers goes down - the squared up won’t turn the server block to red.

So sometimes we won’t notice that a critical server is down.

The current situation is that when a server goes down it only shows a shutdown button next to the server name on its display block.

Thanks for any assistance.

As with most things in SCOM/SquaredUp, it’s all about choosing the correct object, and the server itself is surprisingly not the one here.

You should be using the Health Service Watcher objects:

2020-06-01-08_06_13-New-Dashboard-SquaredUp.png

To understand why you should use the watcher objects, think of it like this: When an agent goes offline, how does it tell SCOM that it’s offline when it’s offline? The simple answer is that it doesn’t. There’s a check against all agents from the SCOM management server every 60 seconds (see: Health Service Heartbeat), and there are monitors that check this heartbeat to make sure it responds.

If you scope a tile to the class shown above, you will only see these objects go into a critical state when SCOM loses contact with an agent, and you can filter this further to only show offline servers using the Criteria:

2020-06-01-08_10_21-New-Dashboard-SquaredUp.png

The above example is for a status tile, though you can use the Alerts tile with criteria for the alert names:

  • Computer Not Responding
  • Health Service Heartbeat Failure
More info on heartbeats here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/system-center/scom/manage-agent-heartbeat-overview?view=sc-om-2019

I hope this helps!