Hitachi Converged Adapter

Hitachi Converged Adapter for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is no-charge item and can be downloaded from portal.hds.com easily.

Once you install Management Pack, you need to configure basic overrides for UCP connection points. Then a new Run-As account should be created for each IP addresses (yes multiple PODs supported!) to authenticate it's connection.

And right after the configuration, navigate back to Monitoring pane and see the Hitachi Converged Adapter  folder. Data will start to flow into the SCOM from UCP Director in a few minutes.

These are some basic dashboards come with default installation. In these basic dashboards, you can see your general UCP environment status and health of all converged components including ethernet/fc switches, storage subsystem, compute and even volume level information.

Every single component has detailed availability objects discovered. For instance just for the Storage instance in your UCP infrastructure, below objects are discovered:

One of the things I like about SCOM is the extensibility. If you have a little experience on SCOM Authoring console, I'm sure you agree on that. Using Authoring console you can play with objects, classes or you can create your own monitors, discovery rules or instances.

Also SCOM allows you to create your own dashboards or tasks. The only thing you need is, a well designed Management Pack that discovers objects for you and you just need to use these objects in your dashboard.

So I decided to create a quick custom dashboard for our UCP environment. I always prefer to have more visual dashboards for my monitored components. So quickly created below dashboards:

As all of my important components are already discovered by UCP Management Pack, the only thing I did is to find some pictures (or create your own backgrounds with visio) and then pull the objects from MP and put them on to the pictures.

These green icons are dynamic SCOM availability icons and will be red or yellow if something goes wrong.

If you have multiple UCPs (for VMware or Hyper-V) which is spread across the continents, you can simply create a world map with UCP locations and get the availability details from UCP Director.

You can also view these dashboards from a web console or SharePoint website as a web part.

SCOM also allows you to create some custom console tasks. Console tasks are useful for running administration consoles or other tools that remotely access application components. For example if you have some alerts for your DNS Server, SCOM console can provide you some additional tasks like "restart DNS Server" or "clear cache". These tasks will take actions on target components (remote DNS Server) to troubleshoot basic problems.

Or you can use console tasks to get details for a specific component. If you have some issues for SQL Always on cluster resource, you can create a task to run Test-SQLAvailibilityGroup command to see what's going on your cluster resource. It's actually quite useful for quick analysis of the components.

Thanks to our UCP Director API, we can also take hundreds of different actions across our infrastructure components with a single Restful API call. You don't need to deal with separate APIs for storage, network and compute. One single API rules them all!

That makes also additional scenarios available for console tasks. For instance just for testing I created a quick console task for UCP Director. If there is something wrong with my Ethernet Switches, SCOM console will raise an alert. If I click this alert within the SCOM console, my custom console task also will be available on the right hand side.