Intelligence Packs

This guide walks you through the various Intelligence Packs available and what they are used for.

SQL Assessment

SQL Assessment Intelligence Pack assesses the risk and health of your SQL Server environments on a regular interval. By default it will scan the SQL systems weekly, and information is presented as a monthly rollup. It provides a prioritized list of recommendations tailored to your deployments. These recommendations are categorized across six focus areas which allows you and your team to:

• quickly understand the risk and health of your environments
• easily take action to decrease risk and improve health
• prioritize your work and become more productive

SQL Assessment requires .NET 4 to run on each agent. It supports the Standard, Developer and Enterprise editions of SQL Server, all currently supported versions.

Configuration Assessment

Configuration assessment provides you with detailed information about the current state of your server infrastructure.

Unlike intelligence packs, configuration assessment is available when you first start using Operational Insights with System Center Operations Manager. It is not available if you only use Directly-connected agents.

Configuration data is gathered from monitored servers and then sent to the Operational Insights service in the cloud for processing. Logic is applied to the received data and the cloud service records the data. Processed data for the servers is shown for the following areas:

• Alerts: Shows the configuration-related, proactive alerts that have been raised for your monitored servers. These are produced by rules authored by Microsoft Customer and Support organization (CSS) with best practices from the field
• Knowledge Recommendations: Shows the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles that are recommended for workloads that are found in your infrastructure; these are automatically suggested based on your configuration thru the use of machine learning
• Servers and Workloads Analyzed: Shows the servers and workloads that are being monitored by Operational Insights
• Current Snapshot: Shows the most recent information about servers that reported data to the Operational Insights service
• Change History: Shows a list of configuration changes made to your monitored servers

Malware Assessment

If insufficient protection is found, servers with active threats and servers with insufficient protection are shown in the Malware page. By using the information on the Malware page, you can develop a plan to apply protection to the servers that need it.

Alert Management

With the Alert Management Intelligence Pack, you can view your Operations Manager Alerts across all your servers. This tool can help you to easily triage alerts, and identify root causes in your environment in a very fast and fluid way.

You can get insights into key scenarios, including:

• How many alerts have been raised within a specified time frame?
• Top sources with the most number of active alerts raised within a specified time frame.
• Top active critical and warning alerts that are raised within a specified time frame.
• Ability to search through all alerts and view every alert in detail

Capacity Planning

You can use the Capacity Management intelligence pack in Microsoft Azure Operational Insights to help you understand the capacity of your server infrastructure. The intelligence pack reads performance counters on the monitored server and sends usage data to the Operational Insights service in the cloud for processing. Logic is applied to the usage data, and the cloud service records the data. Over time, usage patterns are identified and capacity is projected, based on current consumption.

For example, a projection might identify when additional processor cores or additional memory will be needed for an individual server. In this example, the projection might indicate that in 30 days the server will need additional memory. This can help you plan for a memory upgrade during the server’s next maintenance window, which might occur once every two weeks.

IMPORTANT:

Capacity management can only be enabled when Operational Insights is used in conjunction with System Center Operations Manager, and you must also enable the Operations Manager connector with Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).

Change Tracking

You can use the Configuration Change Tracking intelligence pack to help you easily identify software and Windows Services changes that occur in your environment — identifying these configuration changes can help you pinpoint operational issues. By using the information on the Change Tracking page, you can easily see the changes that were made in your server infrastructure. You can view changes to your infrastructure and then drill-into details for the following categories:

• Changes by configuration type for software and windows services
• Software changes to applications and updates for individual servers
• Total number of software changes for each application
• Windows service changes for individual servers

System Update Assessment

You can use the System Updates intelligence pack in Microsoft Azure Operational Insights to help you apply missing updates to servers in your infrastructure. If missing updates are found, they are shown on the Updates page. You can use the Updates page to work with missing updates and develop a plan to apply them to the servers that need them.

The Updates page details the following categories:

• Servers that are missing security updates
• Servers that haven't been updated recently
• Updates that should be applied to specific servers
• Type of updates that are missing

You can click any tile or item to view its details in the Search page to get more information about the missing update. Search results include:

• Server
• Update title
• Knowledge Base ID
• Product the update is for
• Update severity
• Publication date

Server search results include:

• Server name
• Operating system version name
• Automatic update enabling method
• Days since last update
• Windows Update agent version