Phidiax Tech Blog

When incidents arise in the data center, the last thing that is needed is to have to look in more than one place to identify the cause of the issue.

System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 is very efficient at discovery of incidents as they arise and it is also highly configurable to be able to display content that is useful to each team as they would like to see it. 

In the following sections, I am going to discuss a potential approach...

Configuring The Monitoring View

Out of the box this view shows a standard layout for events

First we need to customize the default View and add some options. Right click on the top column and select Personalize view:

In the Columns to display check Last Modified and Repeat Count:

Here's how the new columns appear:

Notice that the repeat count on one alert is very high. This is an indicator of a repeating failure that is an indicator of health:

This event has occurred 52 times in the past 3 weeks.

Enhance The Monitoring View With An Alert View

Another helpful change to the Monitoring View is to add an additional Alert View beneath the Active Alerts view that is the default. The benefit of this is for auditing events that may be potential health indicators of a service or application running. This is also helpful to see any events that may have occurred in-between the alert polling interval.

To add this right click on the Monitoring icon above the Active Alerts view, New and Alert View:

Name it Closed Alerts and check with specific resolution state:

Click the link specific, select the Closed resolution state:

Click on the Display tab, choose Last Modified and Repeat Count. Also Sort columns by Last Modified / Descending and Group items by Severity / Descending:

Here is the new View:

I hope that you find this useful to respond quicker to events that arise within your environments.