Community Round-Up: April 2021

Highlights from the community this month include the release of Update Rollup 3 (UR3) for SCOM 2019, a guide by Thomas Maurer on how to improve performance, security, and reliability of your Azure VMs with Azure Advisor and a handy Azure Bicep template from Billy York to help you deploy Log Analytics, Sentinel and Security Center.

In SquaredUp news, our first user conference, SquaredUp Live, took place on the 27th and 28th of April and it was a huge success! We also released SquaredUp 5.1 (new PowerShell, Splunk, Elasticsearch tiles) and announced the winning dashboards from our Dashboard Competition. Check out our new PowerShell tile in Dashboard Server and learn how to build insightful M365 Analytics Dashboards with SquaredUp and Microsoft Graph API from Ruben Zimmermann’s 2-part guest series.

SCOM

How to tune a group in SCOM
Check out this blog by Cookdown to find out how Easy Tune Enterprise allows you to copy and paste the overrides in your old management group and transfer them directly to your new deployment, all in a matter of minutes.

System Center Operations Manager Update Rollup 3
Microsoft has announced the release of Update Rollup 3 (UR3) for SCOM 2019! UR3 comes packed with extended auditing capabilities and improvements to performance, Linux monitoring enhancements and the web console.

Why the SCOM platform is hugely underestimated
Max Volkov, a SCOM Management Pack Developer at Revera, takes a good, hard look at the underpinning of SCOM and shares why he thinks it is underrated.

Microsoft Service Manager: The Key to Streamlining Operations Manager Administration (Part 1)
Adam Dzyacky, Product Manager at Cireson, and Dujon Walsham, Director at Walsham Solutions Ltd., team up to solve your SCOM administration woes with an excellent PowerShell solution. Check out all three parts of the series!

Close old SCOM alerts automatically using a PowerShell script
Ran Nahmany, a Microsoft System Engineer, shares a handy PowerShell script that you can use to close old SCOM alerts automatically.

Azure

Azure Bicep, Deployment Script and Role Definition code example
Microsoft Azure MVP, Tao Yang, discusses deploying custom Role Definitions in Bicep, now that Azure Bicep v0.3 is officially supported by Microsoft and has a stable language syntax.

Improve performance, security, and reliability of your Azure VMs with Azure Advisor
Thomas Maurer, Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, shows us how to use Azure Advisor to improve the cost-effectiveness, performance, reliability, and security of your Azure resources.

Using Bicep to deploy Azure Monitor, Security Center and Sentinel Infrastructure
Billy York, Microsoft MVP and Azure expert, shares a handy Azure Bicep template that he has created to help you deploy Log Analytics, Sentinel and Security Center.

Monitoring Azure storage account activity log with Azure Sentinel
In this article, Charbel Nemnom, Microsoft MVP and Cloud & Security Architect, shares how to monitor Azure storage account activity log with Azure Sentinel.

Introduction to Blockchain on Azure
Join Juarez Junior, Blockchain Advocate at Microsoft, for an introduction to Blockchain technology on May 18th. You’ll get an overview of how to implement Blockchain applications and deploy them to Azure!

SquaredUp

SquaredUp 5.1 is here
A new version of SquaredUp is now available! It comes with three exciting new integrations – PowerShell, Splunk, Elasticsearch – and many new visualizations.

Announcing winner of Dashboard Competition
Check out the awesome dashboards that won an $8,000 Star Wars LEGO Death Star!

Dashboard Server: Working with the WebAPI tile
As part of our Dashboard Server Learning Path, SquaredUp’s Technical Evangelist, Sameer Mhaisekar, shares how you can bring external data into Dashboard Server using the WebAPI tile.

Dashboard Server: Working with the PowerShell tile
Not many dashboarding tools give you the power to visualize PowerShell scripts – but we do! Part 4 of our Dashboard Server Learning Path shows you exactly how the PowerShell tile works in Dashboard Server.

How to build insightful M365 Analytics Dashboards with SquaredUp and Microsoft Graph API
In this two-part series, Infrastructure Architect, Ruben Zimmermann, provides a step-by-step guide to creating a dashboard that monitors key metrics for Microsoft 365 SharePoint, Exchange Online, and Teams.

Community Answers

Company Knowledge to target a specific Group in SCOM 2012R2
SaiyadRa is attempting to provide documentation via SCOM groups, which sounds like a great idea if he can get it to work. Can you help save the day?

SharePoint Crawl Search PS monitor in SCOM
SharePoint and PowerShell, two great tastes that go great together. Maybe Nabeel Ahmen is on to something? Check out his post!

How to use a SCOM RunAs account using the PowerShell Monitoring Management Pack
RunAs accounts are a pain to configure and use properly. This post by Monnens would be a great opportunity for the SCOM community to rally and share some documentation. Are you up for the challenge?

SCOM Power BI integration
Everybody loves a dashboard! Shekar wants to take his PowerBI to the next level and is asking for your help with that first step. Are you ready to help?