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Network Operations Center Dashboard

The Charlotte County dashboard is a superb example of a fully realized operations center dashboard! A Visio tile showing the current health state of hundreds of objects, Performance tiles showing existing connections and throughput for several external vendors, temperature and humidity sensors, an embedded graph from an external application, and finally, a web content tile showing weather patterns.

Brian, Charlotte County FL

Challenge

The overarching goal of the dashboard is to provide something that the Network Services team at Charlotte County can look at to understand the overall state of the network at a glance.

Solution

Since it doesn’t make sense to diagram the physical network, the real challenge was designing the Visio diagram representing the network. Using Visio, Charlotte County represented each SCOM health state into something the Operations Staff would inherently recognize and understand. Beneath the Visio diagram, performance metrics provide extra supplemental context.

Dashboard walk-through

This dashboard is primarily composed of the Visio diagram (tile 1), several SCOM performance metrics, and content from two external sites. The Visio diagram is the most significant item and is broken into several discrete sub-sections.

Each sub-section of the Visio diagram represents a discrete area with the organization. The largest sub-section, 1f, documents the network backbone, core, distribution, and access layer switches. SCOM determines the health status of the network switches via SNMP. Of particular importance is the little yellow raincloud in the diagram. This image represents the overall environmental health of the data centers; since it’s yellow, the humidity for the data center is a little high. To provide additional context for any alerts, a Web Content tile (13) pulls in a National Weather Service radar map. To round out the dashboard servers that SCOM does not monitor are represented by an external report with a Web Content tile (12).

Scripts and data sets to steal

This dashboard relies heavily upon an organization-specific Visio diagram. To get started with the Visio tile, you need a copy of Microsoft Visio Professional and the SCOM ID of your objects. Once you have these two items, please visit the following website to create your dashboard:
How to use the Visio tile

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