The Service Level Dashboard (SLD) Solution Accelerator from Microsoft works with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2 to assist both technical and non-technical members of your organization in monitoring application and service availability and network and system performance. The primary benefit of the SLD is the ability to answer the frequent question "How are we doing?" at a glance.
The dashboard is presented via a Microsoft Office SharePoint site that can be exhibited on a large display unit in your environment or sent as a link to stakeholders in your organization. It also provides a rich set of data that allows for advanced reporting of issues and trends, helping implementers and architects to prove the effectiveness of initiatives or acting as a source of data to prove the need for new initiatives.
Design Concepts and Prerequisites
The design for my scenario (as Figure 1 shows) includes three servers and any number of monitored applications, clients, or servers. All monitored clients report directly to the SCOM server, which in turn works with SQL Server to manage and store the data. Once the SharePoint Server instance is configured with the SLD components, it will pull any relevant data (depending on the metrics you've selected to monitor) and display it in the dashboard site.
Figure 1: Example Scenario Layout
The SLD accelerator requires:
- SCOM 2007 R2 with Data Warehouse and Reporting components installed
- SharePoint Server 2007 SP1 or Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1
- Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP2 or SQL Server 2008 (SCOM and WSS can be installed on the same server, but it's recommended that you at least have a separate SQL instance—if not an entire server, depending on the network size—for the SCOM databases.)
- Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 (All Servers)
SLD Installation
Once you've verified you meet all the prerequisites, you can begin the SLD installation process by installing the SLD management pack. SCOM uses management packs to extend its ability to monitor applications, products, and services that weren't initially built into the application. This approach allows for a higher level of flexibility and customization of your environment. The SLD package contains one of these management packs, which contains the appropriate data to allow the SLD site to pull the necessary data from the SCOM server.
You need to download the file Service Level Dashboard 2.0.zip from bit.ly/bxrKMD and extract it to a location that the SCOM server can access. Once you've extracted the files from the zip, log on to the server running SCOM with an account that has SCOM administrator privileges and launch the SCOM Console. Click Administration in the left pane of the console then Import Management Packs in the right pane of the Administration area. In the Import Management Packs window in the Select Management Packs screen, click Add then Add From Disk in the drop-down menu. From the Select Management Packs to Import window, navigate to the location where you extracted the zip file, select Microsoft.EnterpriseServiceMonitoring.ServiceLevelDashboard.R2.mp, and click Import. This will take you to the Import Management Packs window; once you're there, click Install.
After you've imported the SLD management pack into your SCOM installation, you can install the SharePoint components. Again, log on to the server running SCOM with an account that has SCOM administrator privileges and navigate to the folder where you extracted the zip file. Execute the SLD installation file that matches your processor architecture—ServiceLevelDashboard_x64.msi if your system has a 64-bit OS or ServiceLevelDashboard_x86.msi if your system has a 32-bit OS.
On the Welcome to the Service Level Dashboard 2.0 Setup Wizard and End-User License Agreement screens, click Next. In the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Information window, which Figure 6 shows, enter the Application Pool Identity (the user under whose authority you want the SLD to run), the Operations Manager Data Warehouse Server Name (the name of the SQL Server where you installed the Operations Manager Data Warehouse components), and the name of the Operations Manager Data Warehouse Database (OperationsManagerDW by default).
Figure 2: The Setup Screen for Operations Manager