Wednesday, June 13, 2012

SCOM 2012 - Free Dashboard Authoring Tool from the OpsMgr Product Team

The OpsMgr (SCOM) product team have yesterday just released a really cool tool and some management packs that allow you to customise and author SCOM 2012 dashboard widgets and then save them into an unsealed Management Pack for export to a different Management Group.

This is a huge benefit in that normally, if you have created your customized dashboard widgets and have them deployed in your Management Group (such as Pre-Production), then you want to move these dashboards to another Management Group (Production for example), it won't work because the original dashboard widget has dependencies on the GUID reference for your first management group.

You can also create a console task that launches your pre-configured dashboard from the Navigation view every time you select a computer - another handy feature.

There are two dashboard templates that this solution offers:

Summary Dashboard

  • Ability to create a custom template layout
  • Use any widgets available in the product
  • Can be hosted under any MP folder view

Task Pane Dashboard

  • Ability to create a custom template layout
  • Use any widgets available in the product
  • Shows up in the task pane when you select a particular target

Have a look at the link below to get a full overview of what's on offer and how to download and configure it:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2012/06/12/free-windows-server-2008-dashboards-for-opsmgr-2012-and-tool-to-help-create-your-own-customized-dashboards.aspx

3 comments:

  1. So I've been looking around and I can't find anything, but do you know if there is anyway to create widgets of your own? Not the ones that are already present in SCOM 2012?

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    Replies
    1. Hi Connor,

      Have you checked out the Visio and SharePoint integration options for SCOM? If not, then check out this link:

      http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2011/09/27/setting-up-the-operations-manager-web-part.aspx


      I wrote up some blogs post a good while back on SCOM dashboards (non-widgets of course and for SCOM 2007 R2 but they still work fine with 2012). Here's a link to the series:

      http://kevingreeneitblog.blogspot.ie/2011/07/scom-dashboards-conclusion-and.html


      If you're looking for some other really different types of dashboards, then Savision LiveMaps (www.savision.com) is the way to go although they're not free.

      Other than that, try posting a query on the OpsMgr Authoring forum on Technet and I'm sure you'll get an answer quick enough.

      Hope that helps!

      Kevin.

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    2. Thanks Kevin,
      Yeah, I've looked at the the Visio and that's been interesting, SharePoint I haven't looked much into, so thanks for the link! I'll have to look at the other stuff aswell

      I did post on the OpsMgr Forum and have been pointed to Silverlight/WPF creation of widgets, so that's been an interesting process as well.

      Thanks for the help though!

      Connor.

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