Coffee break: Free SCOM essentials you should be using

SCOM is a true powerhouse of a platform – that much is clear to anyone who’s used it. But it needs some extra love in the form of SCOM Management Packs and integrations to unlock its true potential.

On our latest Coffee Break webinar, SquaredUp’s Matthew Long, Cookdown’s Director of Products Bruce Cullen and Microsoft MVP Tao Yang come together to discuss a bunch of free SCOM essential management packs that will take your SCOM usage to the next level.

Play Webinar: Free SCOM essentials you should be using

SCOM Self Maintenance MP

First on the list is a new and improved version of Tao Yang’s phenomenally popular “SCOM Self Maintenance” MP – which automates many of the routine tasks carried out by SCOM administrators. It has now been updated to work on SCOM 2019!

With Tao Yang’s focus having shifted to Azure over the last couple years, he no longer has time to maintain the MP, and so he’s “placing it in good hands”, with Cookdown, who has acquired it.

Cookdown is excited to have this MP in their catalog and will continue to develop, support and maintain it. Find the new version on cookdown.com, for free!

Easy Tune MP

Next, we look at Easy Tune, which is a fantastic way to tackle what is arguably SCOM's biggest challenge: Alert tuning.

Ever spent days explaining to teams what’s monitored on their servers or hours implementing overrides, only to be told that SCOM is still too noisy? Easy Tune removes the need for creating overrides one at a time, avoids the sprawl of overrides across multiple MPs, and makes it easy to explain what level of monitoring was applied to any workload.

Check out Cookdown’s webinar for a helpful Easy Tune demo.

PowerShell Authoring MP

While SCOM doesn’t support PowerShell natively, everyone knows that PowerShell is the language that modern IT pros are familiar with.

This MP adds support for PowerShell everywhere you’d expect to see it in the SCOM console’s authoring panel. It supports custom PowerShell monitors, remediation tasks and data collection, and best of all, it is completely free and open source.

Hop on over to our dedicated webinar to learn more about this MP.

Community MP Catalog

Affectionately christened the “one management pack to rule them all”, this free MP functions as an AppStore for management packs.

An open, transparent community project, the Community MP Catalog extends the SCOM console to facilitate the discovery and life-cycle management of community MPs. It features searchability by type, tech, author and more, a view of all the SCOM community MPs you have installed, and configurable notifications, meaning you can get alerts on the availability of new versions of your MPs.

Skip the endless digging around the internet and cumbersome update checks with this little gem! Check out our dedicated webinar to see this helpful tool in action.

SCOM + ServiceNow integrations

At the end of the webinar, Bruce takes us through some other Cookdown offerings for ServiceNow (Alert Sync, Discovery, Mapping) that, whilst paid, offer incredibly powerful integrations between SCOM and ServiceNow. These are a must if you are using SNOW for your ITSM platform.

Alert Sync for ServiceNow raises ServiceNow incidents from SCOM alerts automatically, to give your operations teams the complete picture of your enterprise IT health.

ServiceNow Discovery automatically populates your ServiceNow CMDB using your existing SCOM agents, with everything from servers and devices to databases, clusters and services.

ServiceNow Service Mapping maps your complex business services using the SCOM agents already deployed across your infrastructure.

What did think of these recommendations? Hit us up at community.squaredup.com with any questions or feedback.

If you found this helpful in any way, sign up for future Coffee Breaks at squaredup.com/coffee-break-series. Let us show you how to take your centralised monitoring efforts to the next level!