I had a colleague of mine recently ask me a question that we have gotten for years now in Operations Manager. Specifically: "What’s the best way to get all the rules and monitors out of an MP so someone can view what’s being monitored by Operations Manager?"
There are two approaches that I can recommend to answer this question. The first is to check out the Viacode wiki which has a great breakdown of various management packs and what rules and monitors are contained with them. The MPWiki is available at: http://mpwiki.viacode.com/.
At TechEd 2014 during my Operations Manager Evolution session the same question was asked after the session and one of the other attendees (Thom Davis) stated that he could develop a dashboard using the new widgets to make this happen. Needless to say I was more that intrigued! Thom has now finished the first version of the dashboard which I was glad to give him some insights into how to make this idea even better. I’m quite excited to have been able to work with him on this management pack and I think that the results speak for themselves! Thom has made this new dashboard publicly available and has blogged in the following two blog posts:
- http://scombythom.com/2014/06/04/rules-and-monitors-on-your-dashboard-part-1/
- http://scombythom.com/2014/06/04/rules-and-monitors-on-your-dashboard-part-2/
And a sample of the results of this dashboard in my environment are shown below.
The Rules and Monitors dashboard can be downloaded from System Center Central at: http://www.systemcentercentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/What.Rules_.and_.Monitors.Dashboard2.zip
Summary: These new dashboards are a very cool usage of the new dashboard widgets to Operations Manager which provide a solution to a commonly asked question around Operations Manager so I highly recommend checking these out!