Automatic Distributed Application Maps in Microsoft System Center Operations Manager
Organizations are looking to Microsoft System Center to be the single platform for IT Operations management. The System Center Operations Manager component provides broad capabilities for managing systems, devices, and configuration. These organizations are looking to extend this single operational view to monitor how those components support business services and applications across the enterprise.
Microsoft partnered with BlueStripe to deliver a joint solution. BlueStripe's FactFinder automatically populates Distributed Application views within System Center Operations Manager 2012, giving IT infrastructure and operations teams an end-to-end monitoring view of how each server is contributing to the application service levels delivered to users. These Distributed Application maps go beyond what you can do manually—they are automatic, support cross-system components, and dynamically update if anything changes.
- View dynamic topology maps of Distributed Applications, including servers running on non-Microsoft platforms
- Monitor how each server supports business application service levels
- Use Distributed Application views across System Center, including in Service Manager and Orchestrator
Dynamic Application Maps in System Center Operations Manager
BlueStripe’s FactFinder automatically discovers and maps the topology of all servers and components supporting the distributed application, in the cloud and on-premises, without the user needing to define anything.
FactFinder uses this topology information to populate dynamic, live Distributed Application views in Operations Manager. These views go beyond just the Windows components of the distributed application—they include cross-system components like Linux, Solaris, AIX, and mainframe systems. Even better, the maps update dynamically if anything in the topology changes, like when a new server enters the application.
End-to-end Service Level Monitoring
FactFinder’s transaction response time alerts are available to System Center, providing IT support teams with health status roll-ups for Distributed Application servers that encompass both Operations Manager metrics and FactFinder response time alerts. For the cross-system components (Linux, AIX, and Solaris) that FactFinder discovers, System Center is also able to consume alerts about the resource levels of those systems and make them available to Operations Manager Distributed Applications, even though Operations Manager does not natively support them.
With FactFinder’s response time alerts, IT support teams can use System Center Operations Manager to track both the service levels and server resources of every system supporting a distributed application. And if anything goes wrong, users can launch from Operations Manager into a dedicated FactFinder problem solving view for the problematic distributed application.
Using Dynamic Distributed Application Maps in Orchestrator and Service Manager
Other System Center components can also make use of the live Distributed Application maps and FactFinder response time alerts. System Center Service Manager can access the Distributed Application maps and use them to build out Configuration Management Database (CMDB) views. Also, System Center Orchestrator can be used to establish an automated run-book response to FactFinder alerts.
