SCOM – Monitoring a Service – Part 1 intro

I regularly get questions about service monitoring for custom services or just for services of applications where they do not want to implement full management packs. In almost every case there are different prerequisites in the question. Most of the times customers want to able to do it themselves and in most cases they want to be able to do it through the normal SCOM Console.
As most SCOM admins know there is a template built-in in SCOM to do this and it gives possibilities to also monitor the CPU and memory consumption of this service and alert on state or performance thresholds. In most cases where you just want a simple service monitor this is the best way to go. In many cases I get asked however on simple service monitors (yes even more basic) or on the other side more complicated monitors (multiple services running state and sometimes also moving towards event log entries). This last concept is going towards creating a custom management pack for an application whereby the most important monitoring is the running state of the services, but still created through the console and not through the Authoring Console or XML manupilation. In some cases of course this is not enough and other prerequisites push you towards creating a custom management pack through the Authoring console and XML. The purpose of this series is not to go into creating custom management packs through Authoring console or XML, although we might touch upon xml at times.
So, I will try to put some options into a few blog posts covering:

Of course in all cases we will create a new management pack to hold the monitors, but part 4 is more in the direction of custom management pack creation for applications. Of course I am aware that multiple methods are possible in each scenario on the options to use and places where you target your custom monitors. Of course you can always send your comments by email to bob @ the domain listed above in the address bar 🙂
Use the links in the list above to move to the parts of this post.
Enjoy!
Bob Cornelissen