Consolidation of Morning Healthchecks into one global view.

One of the challenges of monitoring environments are the diverse methods in which health-check reports are generated and gathered via emails in outlook.

This is an Excel/Outlook combined Application developed to consolidate all the different emails which are received every morning from the various clients/environments in different formats.

Having it all summarized in one place, and with one screen to view, one can quickly pick up inconsistencies and exceptions across all methods.

Here are the different sources that covers the last 24 hours:
1.    a Microsoft SCOM health-check script (see here)
2.    Service Desk Call logging System summaries
3.    Top 5 alerts (from SCOM)
4.    An in-house Application which generates a summary of issues across all servers.

In outlook, it consists of:

1.    A VBA script which saves the emails and extracts the attachments.
2.    A rule that triggers the script on the relevant emails.

There is no manual intervention. The spreadsheet updates itself when opened.

So instead of reading through many emails. the Spreadsheet provides a single screen summary of all the information spread out in emails.

SCOM Dashboard created with PowerPivot

System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a cross-platform data center management system that provides health and performance monitoring of systems and services.

PowerPivot and Power View, included in Microsoft Excel 2013, is a first-class business intelligence (BI) tool that's capable of storing, processing, and visualizing vast amounts of data.

I developed a dashboard using these tools to collect data from the SCOM Data Warehouse, giving a birds eye view of client environments.  SQL queries underly all the information and it updates every few minutes.

This is the view displayed simultaneously overhead for every managed client and corresponds to alerts and scheduled reports which are sent to engineers and management from SCOM and SQL Server Reporting Services(SSRS).

Daily Health Check Created with VBA

A Health Check was developed using Microsoft Excel VBA collecting data from amongst others the SCOM Data Warehouse.

It generates a report on a daily basis and distributes it to management to reflect the status of the environment across platforms.

With Excel VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) you can automate tasks in Excel by writing macros.

Information is gathered from different platforms in depending on the format in which the environment supplies it.  Most data is collected from the SCOM Data Warehouse by importing reports generated by SCOM in .csv format and then analyzing it in Excel.

A snapshot of the report.  A scrolling matrix shows the status of the last 10 days.  Drill down is possible when more information is required about specific environments.

The process is fully automated except for comments that engineers need to add in order to explain the failures/issues and action plans.  This ensures that problems are highlighted and dealt with and management stays informed.

The backup results is achieved via monitoring event logs with SCOM