Postings in the same series:
Part I – The Next Generation of SCOM
Part II – Holistic View of Application Health
Part IV – Topology Simplification, Pooling and Timeline
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In the third posting of this series I will describe another new feature in OpsMgr vNext, Network Monitoring.
Until now network monitoring with SCOM (SP1 or R2) out of the box, is basic. When one requires better and deeper network monitoring additional (third party) MPs are needed. Some of them are commercial (Jalasoft or OpsLogix) another one is open source (xSNMP Suite). On top of it all, the SCOM component used for network monitoring isn’t very robust nor scalable either.
So Microsoft has rewritten this component completely for OpsMgr vNext. And they have done a good job! Let’s take a deeper look. 
This isn’t just a slide with some marketing slogans. The new Network Monitoring module of OpsMgr vNext is based on these three pillars. And it really rocks!
Microsoft has made huge investments in order to help the infrastructure owners and application owners by providing enough information about the network so they know whether the issue they are experiencing is network related or not.
So this means the monitored servers will show their dependencies of the network devices as well? Good question! And the answer is YES! Aka Server To Switch Fabric. 360 app view!!!! Take a look here: 
(Screen dump taken from video, so the quality isn’t that well.)
And here: 
(Screen dump taken from video, so the quality isn’t that well.)
Isn’t that sweet? Again the 360 View is present here. A network device centric View can be used or a server centric View. Both will show the dependencies!
A cool demo was given during the session. With the unreleased beta (!) version of OpsMgr vNext the network of Tech-Ed Berlin 2010 was being monitored, based on the Read-Only SNMP string. Within 10 to 15 minutes the devices were discovered. (Primary C-device was used, interrogated the primary C-device and crawled the vicinity view, in order to pick up all the network devices connected to it).
Big change compared to today, where the community strings is a property of that object. In OpsMgr vNext it will store the community string as a RunAs Account. One may use multiple community strings in order to discover the network devices. Per network devices the available community strings will be used and store the one for the network device that work.
The Discovery Wizard for the network devices allows multiple filters and schedules as well. So it is very flexible aid. Some screen dumps:
(Screen dump taken from video, so the quality isn’t that well.)
C Devices: 
(Screen dump taken from video, so the quality isn’t that well.)
Besides that, the Look & Feel are the same as for computers monitored by OpsMgr as we know it today. So for the network devices Health Explorer, Alert View, State View and the lot will be found in OpsMgr vNext: 
And on top of it all, some good Dashboards are there as well: 
(Screen dump taken from video, so the quality isn’t that well.)
And: 
(Screen dump taken from video, so the quality isn’t that well.)
And: 
(Screen dump taken from video, so the quality isn’t that well.)
Also Summary Views are available: 
(Screen dump taken from video, so the quality isn’t that well.)
The same View as shown above, but now in the Web Console (based on Sliverlight):
(Screen dump taken from video, so the quality isn’t that well.)
So this means it can be used in SharePoint as well.
This is one of new features of OpsMgr vNext that’s really awesome! Much has been said about how SCOM monitors network devices today. And Microsoft has listened to it, as demonstrated at Tech-Ed EMEA 2010. This new way of network monitoring, in conjunction with the dependencies and the cool dashboards, will make OpsMgr vNext ready for the next era of Monitoring. Can’t wait until OpsMgr vNext goes RTM!
The next and last posting in this series will be about the timeline and a total wrap up of the whole session presented at Tech-Ed.
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