During a recently client engagement, I was asked three questions related to Savision Live Maps and OpsMgr 2012 which I thought were worth sharing:
1) What is the difference between the Web Application Availability Monitoring and Web Application Transaction Monitoring in OpsMgr 2012?
2) Can I add entities from different sealed management packs to a single Savision Live Map?
3) How can I add the new Availability Monitoring synthetic transactions to a Savision Live Map?
What is the difference between the Web Application Availability Monitoring and Web Application Transaction Monitoring in OpsMgr 2012?
Web Application Availability Monitoring: This template was added in Operations Manager 2012 to monitor availability of websites. Individual websites can be added or you can paste in a large number of URL’s from a comma-separated values (CSV) file. One of the benefits of this template over the Web Application Transaction Monitoring template is you can specify either agents or a resource pool as a watcher node.
Web Application Transaction Monitoring: Known in OpsMgr 2007 as the Web Application Template, this template provides monitoring for web applications, which can be recorded using the web application recorder. These synthetic transactions are executed from watcher nodes you specify.
Can I add entities from different sealed management packs to a single Savision Live Map?
To test this question, I created three different management packs: Bing, Google, and Yahoo (each as an unsealed management pack). In each management pack I created both an an availability (new in OpsMgr 2012) and a transaction synthetic for each website. So an example, for the Bing one I created a Bing Synthetic Transaction and a Bing Synthetic Availability and stored them in the Bing MP. I performed the same actions for the Google and Yahoo management packs. Next I created a single Live Map which included all of the synthetic transactions that I had created in the three different management packs. The figure below shows the single Live Maps with synthetic transactions that span the three non-sealed management packs.
Answer: Yes.
How can I add the new Availability Monitoring synthetic transactions to a Savision Live Map?
These can be added to a Live Map, the key is to know what class they are under. These are part of the new Multi-URL Template classes (shown below). By selecting these classes (shown below) they can be added into a Savision Live Map.
And once they are available to be added they can be added to a map just like any other entity, the example shown below shows the entities in the Live Maps authoring console and the properties of the Bing Synthetic Availability monitor.
