Monthly Archives: May 2019

SCOM: Updated Lenovo Hardware Management Pack v7.6.0.8

A new version of the Lenovo Hardware management pack is available get it here

What’s New

  • View and monitor XClarity Integrator Service in the Operations Manager console.
  • Disable BMC node auto-discovery and authentication by default.
  • Support to only manage the BMC of servers already managed by Operations Manager.
  • Monitor the BMC authentication state.
  • Support to remove BMC nodes in batch.
  • Support Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2019.

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The tale of the Bakery that helped me test Azure Application Insights

If you ever need to test Application insights or any of the other Azure features that need an application such as Front Door there is a simple way to create a test application baked into Azure.

In your Azure portal simple click on “New Resource” and search for Bakery and click Create

Now give the App a name, choose your subscription, resource group and an applicable App Service Plan. Remember the more robust the plan the higher the cost, there is a free limited Tier available called F1 Shared. Then click Create.

After a few minutes your application will be deployed and ready for use with Azure Features. select App Services in your Azure Portal and then click on your Bakery Application

You can find the URL for your new site at the top right of the Overview blade.

Browsing the URL you should see the below site.

For an extra tip if you need the site again you can turn it off instead of deleting it to save some costs. Just press stop in the application overview.

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Create interactive reports with Azure Monitor workbooks

A new feature in Azure, Workbooks combine text, Analytics queries, Azure Metrics, and parameters into rich interactive reports. 

For those of your familiar with SCOM, think of workbooks as a pre-bundled set of metrics similar to the dashboards you are already familiar with. It offers a simple method to share useful dashboards which can also be copied and exported.

Let’s dive right in.

So how do I find them?

Simply navigate to Monitor in the Azure portal and click on Workbooks, currently in preview at the time of this article.

Whats available currently?

There are several pre-build templates out of the box as well as a GIT available as a repository for additional templates.

VM Metrics Example

Below are several sample outputs of the various workbooks, not only do they look good but they also contain rich useful information on every object in your subscription that is metric enabled.

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Management Pack Recap – April 2019 Wave

This is a summary of the wave of Management Packs that were released in April 2019. Information and download location in the links provided:

Windows Server 2016 and 1709+ v10.1.0.0here

SQL management packs v7.0.15.0here

IBM Storage MP v2.7.0here

If you know of any other Management Packs that have been released recently that I may have missed leave me a note in the comments and I’ll add them

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