SCOM R2 Highlights. Posting 1, the WebConsole

SCOM R2 is certainly different compared to SCOM SP1. Eventhough the RTM is still some months away from now (planned for Q2 2009), there are certainly many things worthwhile to be mentioned on my blog.

With this posting - and others which will come later - I will talk about the most noticable changes to be seen and found in R2.

This posting is about the WebConsole of R2. Certainly this component is worth being posted about.

In SCOM SP1 one of the most heard questions about the WebConsole was: where is the Health Explorer to be found? Well, nowhere actually. It just isn't there...

This component though is very important for the daily operations of SCOM.

Let me first explain some things:
When an alert is raised within SCOM and this issue has been resolved, just closing the Alert in the Monitoringpane doesn't - in many cases - alter the HealthState of the related server. One needs to open the Health Explorer and to recalculate the HealthState or, a bit more rough, to reset it.

This way the related server will show up healthy again in the Monitoringpane of SCOM. When one doesn't do this, and the related component goes into errorstate again, a new Alert won't be triggered since this component was already before in errorstate.

So a WebConsole without HealthExplorer has very limited functionality and one finds himself in distributing the SCOM console to the Servicedesk colleagues since the WebConsole doesn't help them with their job at a sufficient enough level.

However, too many SCOM Consoles opened at the same time can be a bit of a drain on the RMS since every SCOM Console connects directly to the RMS. And the RMS is busy enough already. So just giving everyone involved the SCOM Console isn't a good choice as well.

That being said, let's go on about the WebConsole.

But now with R2, Microsoft has learned from its clients and payed attention to their remarks about SCOM SP1. So, the WebConsole in R2 does have a good working HealthExplorer.

Before one can use this WebConsole, the (IIS) server hosting the WebConsole needs an extra component to be installed. This component is solely needed for the HealthExplorer of the WebConsole. This is ASP.NET AJAX 1.0. No worries here, since the Prerequisite Viewer, included with the installationset for SCOM R2, will report on it.

Here are some screendumps of the WebConsole with the HealthExplorer:

1. HealthExplorer in the ActionsPane:
   
   


2. HealthExplorer in the Contextmenu's:
   
   
   
3. HealthExlporer itself:
   

Conclusion:

Now the HealthExplorer being an integrated part of the WebConsole, it leverages this component to a higher level of usage. Now one can give the url of the WebConsole to many IT-departments without being afraid giving a tool without enough options for the users to perform their daily duties. Microsoft has done a good job here.