01 October 2015 blogs Guest Blogger 5 min read
Controlling Live Maps Service Rollup Behavior: Experiences from the field by CEO of Approved Consulting, Jonas Lenntun
Introduction
With Savision Live Maps, you gain great insight into the current status of the delivery of your IT-services in a simple and intuitive interface.
Using the Live Maps Authoring Console, you can control the behavior of which alerts are going to be fired off when a service goes into an undesired state. However, we cannot control the behavior of the rollups when the different perspectives change states.
In a real-world scenario, you might want to control this in more depth. These behaviors reflect the availability of the service that we use as the base for service-level-agreement reporting and communicate a relevant state of the service availability to your audience.
Services Dashboard.
Background
The default behavior for each perspective is to roll up the worst state of any member to change the status of the service. This means that if one component in the infrastructure perspective indicates a yellow or red state change, the whole service will roll up and reflect the same state.
This might not be the optimal solution for your organization, as you want to take care of service delivery reporting. Also, you want to consider the political aspect that monitoring is not showing a correct picture of the performance and availability of the business services.
When having this discussion with customers, most of them actually agree that application and infrastructure perspectives are good for troubleshooting and for connecting configuration-item relationships to services, but they don’t want the service availability to be reflected or to be creating incidents on these types of errors.
We don’t want to disable the alerts of the monitored objects inside the perspectives, but we want to control how the service is behaving in case of failure.
By focusing on the end-user perspective we can define that everything that is included in that perspective should reflect an actual service failure and influence the availability of the service.
In most cases, where it’s possible, this would be some type of synthetic transaction determining the availability and performance of the purpose of the service.
Default Service Behaviour
In this scenario, we are going to focus on the technical service “IT Monitoring” as an example. As we can see in the picture, we have a warning in the application layer of the service affecting the whole service.
IT Monitoring.
If we drill down into the service-detailed view, we can see that we have an issue with one of the SCOM management servers, causing the service to go into a warning state. If we open up the Health Explorer View, we can see that there is a monitor related to APM .Net Object Discovery causing this type of behavior.
In this scenario, we don’t want this to reflect the total availability of the service.
Service Map.
If we take a look at the options inside the Savision Live Maps Authoring tool, we can control the behaviour of “Notifications,” but we cannot take control of the rollup behavior.
Alert Settings.
Modifying the Service Behavior
If we go into authoring in the Operations Manager Console, and scoop down to the service under monitors, we see a lot of rollup monitors that we can configure.
Operations Manager Console.
So let’s configure them to only roll up the behavior of the end-user perspective to reflect the status of the service.
We are going to focus on the monitors under the service itself and not the different perspectives. As we see, there are quite a lot of them, but we are going to start by disabling the dependency rollup for the application perspective. Right click the “Application Service Perspective Health Rollup Monitor” and choose:
Overrides->Override the Monitor->For all objects of class:
Application Service Perspective Health Rollup Monitor.
Modify the Enabled property and set it to disabled.
Override-controlled parameteres.
Repeat this for the dependency rollup monitor for the “Infrastructure Service Perspective Health Rollup Monitor”
However, as we can see, the service health is still rolled up as warning to the service.
IT Monitoring.
If we take a look in the health explorer there are still some monitors we need to take care of.
Health explorer.
So, let’s go back to the authoring in Operations Manager Console, and then modify and disable a couple more monitors to get this to work.
Under each category, we need to do the same procedure to disable the application and infrastructure rollup monitors.
Operations Manager Console.
Override the monitor.
Disable the monitor.
Repeat this for application and infrastructure under Performance, Configuration and Security.
Result
If we now take a look at the service, we see that the health of the service is not being affected by the health of the application or infrastructure perspective.
IT Monitoring.
And, if we drill down to the service details, we see that the same behaviour is reflected.
Service details.
If you still want to have the category availability enabled to only rollup monitors related to availability, you can just choose to have them enabled.
Conclusion
With the possibility to control the behavior of the service health it is now easier to say that only alerts from specific perspectives affect the availability of a service. Alternatively it is also possible to create complete custom dashboards with Live Maps that allows you to show any service perspective of intertest. More about this in a follow up article.
About Savision Live Maps
Live Maps lets IT speak the language of the business by focusing on service delivery. It allows for pro-active management to prevent business-impacting outages and provides persona based views for C-level executives, helpdesk workers, IT professionals and service delivery managers. Live Maps is Savision’s business service management solution that gives an instant overview of your business-critical services from three perspectives: the end users, the infrastructure and the applications
One quick glance at the Service Overview Dashboard will give you enough information to determine the impact and priority of a disruption and assign it to the right team. The result: faster root cause analysis, maximized service availability, and more time to explore new, business-enabling technologies. And, the best part: Live Maps includes unlimited, fast, lightweight, HTML5 SCOM dashboards.
