Tuesday, June 3, 2014

SCOM 2007x Retro Style Dashboards In SCOM 2012x

Widgets or dead wood?
With SCOM 2012x new styled dashboards were released as well, based on widgets. Even though these widgets may have a sexy look & feel to them, they aren’t flawless.

Even in SCOM 2012 R2 UR#2 there are still issues like widgets which time out (the underlying SQL queries aren’t ‘spot on’ so the widget times out…), making those same widgets pretty useless in bigger environments.

Where as other widgets don’t allow scoping for a a particular set of data, like the Alert widgets making them far to generic for proper usage by scoped end user groups.

Back to basics?
IMHO the widgets don’t live up to their promises yet, resulting in a quest for SCOM dashboards in the old SCOM 2007x style. These kind of dashboards are actually nothing but an aggregation of other already existing Views in the Console, enabling one to combine different Views to be presented on one single BIG screen.

The SCOM 2012x dashboard wizard won’t allow it…
However, the biggest party crusher here is the wizard which enables you to build dashboards. In SCOM 2012x this wizard won’t allow you to build these old style SCOM 2007x dashboards. Instead you’re forced to use widgets…

The workaround
In order to enable you to build SCOM 2007x style dashboards, I’ve built in my SCOM 2007 R2 CU#7 environment at home a simple MP containing most of the dashboards in SCOM 2007x style. None of these dashboards contains any view, only the placeholder enabling you to add the required SCOM Views.

Simply import this MP into your SCOM 2012x environment. Now in the Monitoring pane you’ll get the folder _SCOM 2007 Dashboards with the most used SCOM 2007x dashboard lay-outs:
image

The names of the Views are self explanatory. Simply select the dashboard you want to use, right click it, select Copy and paste it into the Unsealed Management Pack / View where you want to use it.

When the dashboard is pasted you can edit it by clicking Click to add a view in order to add an existing View to it.
image

MP can be downloaded from my OneDrive..

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I have used a similar one from Cameron Fuller http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/cfuller/archive/2012/10/08/creating-opsmgr-2007-r2-style-dashboard-views-in-opsmgr-2012-scom-sysctr.aspx.

Your names are much better as they are more descriptive.

The views you can use in these dashboards have to come from views in sealed MPs. It won't allow you to use views created in unsealed MPs.

Marnix Wolf said...

Hi Unknown.

That's correct what you say about the Views coming from Sealed MPs.

I will do some tests next week and let you know the outcome.

Cheers,
Marnix

(M.) said...

is there any way to include a non-sealed MP in such dashboard view?