Community Round-Up: November 2020

Holiday season may be fast approaching, but things in the community have still been busy as ever! SCOMathon announced their Workshop Week – 5 days of community-led SCOM workshops from 7 to 11 December. Silect’s MP University returned to the fold, with Cookdown presenting ‘PowerShell + REST APIs = The Easy Way to Integrate Data into SCOM’ and SquaredUp’s Shawn Williams hosting ‘Author your own SCOM reports using the SCOM Data Warehouse and SSRS Report Builder’.

In other news, SCOM pro Ruben Zimmerman released a multi-part series on monitoring O365 with SCOM, Cameron Fuller shared a handy step-by-step guide to color-coding within an Azure Monitor workbook, and Azure experts announced the return of the festive tech calendar.

Oh, and take a sneak peek at our biggest product update, SquaredUp version 5.0, coming soon!

Azure Monitor

Windows Admin Center is Coming to the Azure Portal
Microsoft recently announced that WAC is coming to the Azure Portal! Read this post by Russel Smith to learn the details.

Azure Monitor Workbook: Windows Virtual Desktop
Microsoft MVP Billy York shares this helpful Azure Monitor Workbook for WVD, broken out into Server Perf and User Perf, using metrics that give an idea of user experience while using WVD.

Azure Monitor Connections: What’s new in Azure Monitor
See what’s new in Azure Monitor for October 2020, and learn about exporting data from Azure Monitor Logs, Insights Hub and best practices for monitoring Azure resources.

Configure workbook color codes based on values in a text field
Cloud & Datacenter MVP Cameron Fuller shares these step-by-step directions for color-coding based on values in a text field within a workbook.

Log Analytics integration with Power BI
Check out these ways to feed data from Log Analytics to Microsoft Power BI to create more visually appealing reports and dashboards.

The latest in Azure Monitor Documentation
From Agents to VMs, see a comprehensive list of the latest updates to Azure Monitor articles.

2020 Festive Tech Calendar
Throughout the whole of December, world-class speakers from across the globe will be bringing you awesome tech content made by the community, for the community!

Importing workbooks into Azure
MVP and Azure expert Billy York shares his top 2 ways of importing Azure Monitor workbooks into Azure: via the Azure Portal, or PowerShell.

One agent to rule them all: Azure Monitor Agent
There’s a new Azure agent in town – Azure Monitor Agent (AMA). Read this blog by SquaredUp Tech Evangelist Sameer Mhaisekar to learn what it does and how it fits in with the existing agents.

See what's new in the Azure Monitor community repo
Check out some new content highlights added to the Azure Monitor community repo including the Azure Inventory and AntiMalware Assessment workbooks!

ServiceNow Event Management and Azure Monitor Integration
The new ServiceNow Event Management Connector integrates with Azure Monitor! Check out the key enhancements here.

SCOM

SCOMathon Workshop Week
Join SCOMathon for a week of community-led SCOM workshops and networking. Suitable for SCOM users of all levels, these hands-on workshops will take a deep dive into a series of topics handpicked by the SCOM community itself! Sign up here!

PowerShell + REST APIs = The Easy Way to Integrate Data into SCOM
Join Cookdown Director of Products, Bruce Cullen at Silect’s MP University and find out how their free PowerShell MP lets you author custom monitoring in PowerShell, by pulling data from REST endpoints.

Elevate your Oracle Monitoring with Cookdown & NiCE IT Management!
Level-up your Oracle Monitoring and Service Management today! Save 20% if you purchase AlertSync & Discovery by Cookdown in conjunction with the NiCE Oracle Management Pack for SCOM.

Alert Sync 2.0 release webinar by Cookdown
In this webinar by Cookdown, learn all about Alert Sync 2.0, their biggest release since Alert Sync was created! To find out more about how you can use Alert Sync to turn SCOM alerts into actionable ServiceNow incidents - Sign up today!

Why is it important to reduce the size of my SCOM Data Warehouse?
Read this blog by Cookdown to learn why managing the size of your Data Warehouse is important, and some simple steps you can take to reduce costs to manage and maintain it.

Author your own SCOM reports using the SCOM Data Warehouse and SSRS Report Builder
Join SquaredUp’s Technical Evangelist Shawn Williams at Silect’s MP University to learn how to Author your own SCOM reports using the Data Warehouse and SSRS Report Builder.

Monitoring O365 with SCOM Part 1: SCOM Monitoring
In Part 1 of this O365 monitoring series, SCOM pro Ruben Zimmermann demonstrates why SCOM is the perfect tool for monitoring O365, plus the requirements for doing so.

Monitoring O365 with SCOM Part 2: Active 365 MP by NiCE
Part 2 of this multi-part series by Ruben Zimmermann focuses on the Active 365 MP by NiCE, and how it can track and monitor various aspects of the M365 suite.

Monitoring O365 with SCOM Part 3: A dashboarding solution
Part 3 of Ruben’s series covers data visualization, and how SquaredUp for SCOM can be used in partnership with NiCE to provide great visualizations and interactive drill-downs for deeper insights.

Monitoring O365 with SCOM Part 4: SCOM + NiCE + SquaredUp
In the final instalment of this O365 monitoring series, Ruben combines SCOM, NiCE’s Active 365 MP and SquaredUp to help shine a light into your M365 tenant.

Tuning SCOM to save resources
When tuning SCOM we typically talk about saving time and reducing alert noise, but in this post by Cookdown, look at how you can use tuning to save on database space.

Microsoft announces ‘Aquila’: SCOM in the cloud!
You heard that right, Microsoft is getting ready a private preview release of 'Aquila’ – a fully Microsoft-managed instance of SCOM that can run in Azure, Windows Server Datacenter and edge-computing systems.

Optimize your System Center toolsets for a unified, centralized approach
Part 1 of this multi-part series by Dujon Walsham investigates how we can scale our System Centre toolsets and integrate them to build and develop a powerhouse with the perfect CMDB!

SCOM 2016 Update Rollup 10 released!
After a short delay, the UR10 is now available. In this post by SCOM hero Bob Cornelissen, see what fixes are included and get some quick-fire tips to ensure a successful upgrade.

SquaredUp

SquaredUp 5.0 is coming!
Bigger and better than ever before, this new release will include major updates to your favourite features – Open Access, Dashboard Designer and Web API/SQL integrations. All with a gorgeous new visual experience!

Monitoring with SCOM? Do it with SquaredUp.
Whether you're a first time SCOM user or a certified expert, you haven't truly experienced the power of SCOM until you've tried it with SquaredUp. Read these blogs to see why!

Get the full picture with SquaredUp’s ServiceNow Tile (Part 1)
In this blog, we show how to display ServiceNow data alongside all your other monitoring tools in an interactive dashboard. Correlating data and finding the root cause can be so much easier!

Why SCOM needs SquaredUp: Performance monitoring reporting
See how you can level-up your reporting on performance monitoring, with SCOM and SquaredUp!

Reduce monitoring silos with SquaredUp WebAPI and SQL tiles
Get data from Pingdom, New Relic, SQL, SCOM and more – all on the same dashboard.

Set up Availability Monitoring from the end user’s perspective
Learn how you can keep on top of your end-user’s experience by monitoring your apps with this useful tool.

Get the full picture with SquaredUp's ServiceNow tile (Part 2)
Learn all about how the ServiceNow tile works, plus some handy tips and tricks.

Community Answers

MonitoringHost.exe crashing loop
Can you help figure out why a “System Center Management Health Service Unloaded System Rule(s)” alert is popping up, and has now lead to a MonitoringHost crash?

SQL backup reporting
Do you know if it’s possible to report daily on the last successful SQL backup on all servers running SQL? Drop your answer here!

SQL Cluster missing Memory, Network & Disk stats
John is having trouble surfacing Memory, Network & Disk stats when pulling SQL Server information – can you help?

Self-Maintenance MP
Since switching from version 2.5 to 3.1 of this MP, the Obsolete Aliases Found rule has not been showing any aliases. Comment if you have a fix!