This post is a continuation of part 1, which you can find HERE. In this post, I’ll be covering deploying the agent to machines in your environment and will touch on the Management Packs. I hope to have some future posts that cover specific Monitoring scenarios e.g. Monitoring your App-V 5.0 Management Server.
Launch Operations Console
Click on Administration and then browse to Settings–>Security–>Properties
Click ‘Review new manual agent installations is pending management view’ and then Click OK
Browse to Device Management, right click and click on Discovery Wizard
Click on ‘Windows Computers’ and Click Next>
Click Advanced Discovery and Click Next>
You can browse and enter the Computers you’d like to deploy to and Click Next>
Click Other User Account and enter in an Administrators account in your environment. Click Discover.
Click Next>
Click Other and enter the detail for the Action account. My (MSA) Account appears at the top of part 1. Click Finish
You should get a success message. The Agent has now been deployed.
If you want any specific alerts other than the standard OS related errors, you can download these. Just search online and you’ll find a Microsoft download page for it. There’s a very comprehensive list of them online. You can then import the Management Packs via the Console.
Browse to Administration–>Management Packs and then Import Management Packs and select the MP that you downloaded.
You should now start to receive alerts which you can view under Monitoring
Active Alerts should show new alerts. You can drill down through folders for specific reports pertaining to any extra Management Packs you imported.
Conclusion
This really is the bare bones on getting started with SCOM. It’s quite a powerful but complex piece of kit! There’s an impressive array of SCOM Management Packs to choose from, Microsoft have done a good job of including MP’s for pretty much everyone of their server products that I can think of. After reviewing this series of posts, I’d suggest you look at setting up Network Subscriptions and also fine tuning your alerts as you get them…it can be quite noisy at first so you’ll likely want to tune some of that out. Getting familiar with SCOM was lengthy for me and to be honest, I’m still not 100% there yet. I think it’s a product you keep learning more about as you go.
