Kurt Shintaku's Blog

The beta software for Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager can be found here:
https://connect.microsoft.com/programdetails.aspx?ProgramDetailsID=2198

———————–

The Solution Accelerator Communication and Collaboration group is pleased to announce the availability of the Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager for download on Connect.

IT departments need ever more sophisticated tools to monitor the performance of applications that make the organization run. These tools need to go beyond traditional server-based monitoring where server health equals service health.

The Service Level Dashboard for System Center Operations Manager 2007 is a new Solution Accelerator that addresses IT Service Managers’ need to measure and report SLA compliance for line-of-business (LOB) applications. This new accelerator measures LOB performance from end to end by collating performance metrics from both the server side and select client locations. The accelerator provides an easy to read dashboard with performance status for the service through which the service manager can perform a data drill down.

Solution Accelerator Components
This accelerator ships the following software components:

• An Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack (SLD DAT, SLD report)
• A sample unsealed Management Pack targeted at monitoring a Web site

The accelerator provides the following guidance and examples of how to set up a SLA reporting solution, configure the distributed application template and create synthetic transactions for a line of business application in an OpsMgr Pack:

• Executive Overview on TechNet
• User’s guide included in Beta
• Design guide – available at TRM

The Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager works with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 and SQL Server Reporting Services.

Overview of the Tool
The Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager 2007 is designed to work with an existing Operations Manager infrastructure (it is assumed that Operations Manager is already configured to monitor the business-critical applications). Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager 2007 uses the following components to gather and process additional data:

• The SLA agreement is identified and defined by the IT Manager for a given business-critical application or service.
• Web application monitors and synthetic transactions. The IT administrator configures and deploys watcher nodes to perform the actions of a synthetic transaction, such as connecting to the Web site or querying the database. A Web application monitor runs on the watcher node and uses these synthetic transactions to perform actions to check availability and to measure performance of a Web page, Web site, or Web application. The IT administrator configures the thresholds for identifying an error or warning state during a
  synthetic transaction.
• An Operations Manager Distributed Application (DA) model is used by the IT administrator uses to define the application or service. Using the DA model, the IT administrator groups Web application monitors and other monitors into applications and regions for the dashboard.
• One can use the dashboard interface to analyze the SLA compliance data as soon as the Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager 2007 components are configured and operating.
  The Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager 2007 evaluates each application over the defined reporting period, determines whether the application was in or out of compliance during that period (and for how long). The dashboard then lists the application as compliant or non-compliant, based on defined service level targets.

Help us make this a better Solution Accelerator by trying it out and providing feedback!

Regards
The Solution Accelerator Team