Pete Zerger (Mr. SystemCenterCentral) and Alex Fedotyev (Contributor on the upcoming System Center Operations Manager 2012 Unleashed book and alpha-geek on AVIcode) presented on how to take .NET functionality in OpsMgr to the next level.

Key Notes:

  • The .NET monitoring functionality can gather performance, application failure, connectivity or security information from the application.
  • Primary teams that benefit from .NET monitoring: Operations Team, Support & Development Team, QA/Testing Team and DevOps role.
  • Use the reports available in APM to run weekly and schedule it to send to the person responsible for LOB applications.
  • Rules in .NET monitoring/how to make actionable alerts and filter events in the APM consoles:
    • “Rules are our key for tuning the non-actionable data out of our reports to keep a living, relevant focused document in front of our developers” (Pete).
    • Alex showed how to filter events (using the rules management wizard in the application diagnostics UI) and how to use the “show preview” to validate that you are filtering them correctly. Alex showed how to set these to be ignored until a specific expiration date. So if a fix doesn’t happen when the developers said it would these will appear again and the rule is not deleted after it is expired.
  • Enable performance namespaces and performance methods these for resources which are critical to troubleshoot in your environment (not for all of them due to additional overhead).
  • Aliases and sensitivity data filters are part of the APM core functionality.

    • Sensitivity data filters: Can we filter or mask fields for sensitive data? (PII data – social security, password, birthdate, income, etc)… Yes! Options below.

      • Role Based Access – turn on and off access to APM data.
      • Limit collection data – filter out sections where this data would be gathered.
      • Advanced data filtering – done via an override with the XML information
        • Can use sensitive data filters (regex based). Use this expression to match specific content and replace it with different content.
        • Can also match the full expression to replace the entire field.
    • Aliases: Alex discussed what, when, why and how to use an alias in APM (and then demonstrated it!) I would summarize an alias a a way to change longer names for sections of code to something shorter and more intuitive. This is useful both to see the section of code more easily and to make report information easier to read.

Pete/Alex, great interaction between you during this session. Great job guys!

Category: infrastructure