At Microsoft Ignite there was lots of great stuff related to Microsoft technologies and some good stuff specific around Operations Manager. For Operations Manager related updates I would recommend the following sessions:
- Microsoft System Center Operations Manager: Monitoring is a modern world: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2467
- Platform Vision & Strategy: What’s new in System Center for Management: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2459
- And of course the keynote: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/KEY01
The most exciting announcement at Ignite from a monitoring perspective was the GA release of the Microsoft Operations Manager Suite (OMS for short if you haven’t seen this TLA yet).
For OMS sessions I recommend the following from Ignite:
- Log Analytics and Visualization Using Microsoft Azure Operational Insights: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK3500
- Security Threat Analysis Using Microsoft Azure Operational Insights: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK3464
In this blog post we will review a few concepts around OMS:
- What’s the name and the history?
- What else changed with this release?
- New solutions and how to configure them in OMS.
What’s the name?
If you are asking “What is OMS?” you may know what this by another name. Originally this functionality was “System Center Advisor” then it became “Azure Operational Insights”, now “Microsoft Operations Management Suite” or OMS for short. The new naming helps to describe the vision for the product which has expanded from advising and providing insights into doing that and more.
What else changed with this release?
What had previously been called “Intelligence Packs” are now called “Solutions”. A screenshot the previous version with Intelligence Packs is shown below, followed by a screenshot for the Solutions Gallery.
It’s also easier to get to now! I will admit, I ended up having to go and search for the website on the previous name, now Microsoft made this much easier to get to. To try out OMS go to http://www.microsoft.com/OMS
What are the new solutions and how to configure them in OMS?
There were three solutions which were added with the GA for OMS. These are Automation, Azure Site Recovery and Backup (show below).
Once you add these solutions they will now need to be configured (screenshots from OMS without configuration are shown below:
The remainder of this blog post will provide samples for how to configure these solutions in OMS/Azure. We’ll start with Azure Site Recovery and then move to Backup and then we’ll go through Automation.
Configuring the Azure Site Recovery solution:
If you open the tile for the Azure Site Recovery solution you will see the following (no account information on the select account, and the refresh button changes nothing). This does however tell you information about what Azure subscription you are using (in my case a Windows Azure MSDN – Visual Studio Professional version). If you click on the link to create a new Azure Site Recovery Vault it puts you in the right general area in Azure.
In Azure choose New, Recovery Services, Site REcovery Vault, Quick Create as shown below to create the backup vault:
Once this has been created you will now see the Backup Vault you created as part of Recovery Services in Azure.
Refresh to see the new site recovery option in OMS and then save the configuration.
After configuration we can now see how many registered servers and failed jobs in the last 24 hours from the tile as shown below.
If we open this tile we get additional details on the site recovery vault as shown below.
Configuring the Backup solution:
If you open the tile for the Backup solution you will see the following (no account information on the select account, and the refresh button changes nothing). This does however tell you information about what Azure subscription you are using (in my case a Windows Azure MSDN – Visual Studio Professional version). If you click on the link to create a Backup vault it puts you in the right general area in Azure.
In Azure choose New, Recovery Services, Backup Vault, Quick Create as shown below to create the backup vault:
Once this has been created you will now see the Backup Vault you created as part of Recovery Services just like we did for the Azure Site Recovery vault.
Refresh and add the new backup vault and then save the change.
After configuration we can now see how servers are backed up and how much backup data from the tile as shown below.
If we open this tile we get additional details on the recovery vault as shown below.
Configuring the Automation solution:
If you open the tile for the Automation solution you will see the following (no account information on the select account, and the refresh button changes nothing). This does however tell you information about what Azure subscription you are using (in my case a Windows Azure MSDN – Visual Studio Professional version). If you click on the link to create a new Automation account it puts you in the right general area in Azure to start the process to create a runbook in the subscription and to choose an automation account.
The name, runbook type, subscription, resource group, automation account and region all must be filled out and using the option to Pin it to the Start makes it easier to find once it’s been created.
Refresh and add the account and then save the change.
After configuration we can now see the runbooks and jobs which have occurred in the past 7 days.
Opening the details links over to Azure automation for the runbooks so you can work with the runbooks directly.
Lessons learned:
I ran into real issues with configuring the Azure Automation account when I had multiple Azure subscriptions. For some reason I always seemed to be creating the Azure automation account in the wrong subscription. So take away from this is to keep a close eye on the subscription number to make sure that it matches both in OMS and in Azure Automation.
Reference links:
This blog post provided an excellent amount of information about how to integrate Azure Automation into OMS if you were already in Azure Automation but were not in OMS yet: https://automys.com/blog/post/azure-automation-hybrid-runbook-workers-look (my blog post is focused on people who already are using OMS but haven’t used Azure Automation yet).