For me, the presentation layer is always the most important in any monitoring solution. Besides digesting alerts, I’d look for something that gives a ‘big picture’ view (or at least, as big a picture as is relevant for the operations team). If I can’t glance at a screen and quickly identify hotspots, performance issues then it makes the job a lot harder. Building good dashboards also allows me to display meaningful information at the back of the NOC or even just on the IT department’s wall.

SCOM natively gives us the ability to create delegated dashboards that provide limited views into specific resources. From there I can create or customize dashboards to meet the operations teams needs.

My goal here was to create views that draw me to hotspots in my environment at a glance, or give me that ‘all is well’ feeling on the wall of the NOC. If I am displaying these dashboards on a NOC screen there are some considerations:

you might want to consider a ‘NOC Viewer’ role in SCOM so that you can scope the dashboards and displayed appropriately. This will also discourage people from wanting to poke around any other MPs you may have deployed.

you might want to consider using a dashboard rotation tool like http://www.dashboardrotator.com. I found this tool doesn’t log me off while it’s rotating dashboards, which is nice (and it’s only $25, which is nicer). If that is an issue then SCOM supports single sign-on too (thanks to @IanNoble for the find.

Below are some sample custom dashboards displayed in web views. These dashboards were built in part with widgets from the Veeam Management Pack for System Center. Bear in mind that natively SCOM requires Internet Explorer and Silverlight to work successfully. See my previous post for some tips on delegated web consoles with SCOM and IE.

Here are the sample dashboards with notes…