SCOM Insight – How to use

Back to SCOM Insight

Tile view

The tile view provides a live heat-map-style dashboard for the objects you've chosen to display.

In the above example, there are three sections, Services, Sites and Databases, each containing monitored objects. The status of the objects is represented by four colours:

• Green — healthy;
• Yellow — warning;
• Red — critical;
• Grey — maintenance mode.

The background colour for each section is the worst health state of all of the objects it contains. For example, Services is red (critical), because CRM, SCVMM and TFS are critical. The Sites section is yellow (warning) because there are no critical alerts in this section; only a warning alert on SharePoint.

Highlighted (flashing) tiles

By default, when the state of a tile changes (for example, from green to yellow), the border of the tile will flash for 10 minutes (as shown above with Orchestrator). After 10 minutes, the border will become solid white for another 10 minutes (as shown above with SharePoint), after which the border will disappear. This is to highlight a recent state change and to give some indication of how recently the change occurred. The time thresholds can be configured in the Web.config file.

Positioning tiles

The tiles may be moved (dragged) to any position within the section, to wherever the user prefers. The positioning of tiles is stored on a per-user basis, so your configuration won't affect other users. The configuration for which tiles are displayed, however, is configured system-wide for all users.

✓	The filter parameter (see below) can be used to filter the objects that are shown in the browser. This only affects the current user's browser session.

Tooltips

Hovering over a tile with the mouse will display additional information on the object and any associated alerts.

Clicking

Click on any of the tiles to open the alert view for that tile. This shows the active alerts for the object that the tile represents, and if no alerts are active, the status is shown.

See the alerts view section for information on the full alerts view, which shows all active alerts.

To cause the dashboard to always show show the full alerts view when a tile is clicked-on, change the TileSpecificAlertView parameter in the Web.config file to false.

Alerts view

The alerts view displays the active alerts associated with the objects on the tile view. It can be accessed by clicking on a tile in the tile view, or by entering /alerts after the URL for SCOM Insight in your browser. For example:

https://scominsight.demo/alerts

In this view, the alerts are displayed in a priority order, with recent and critical alerts displayed first, for each section on the tile view.

What is displayed?

✓	In summary: only those alerts that you need to see, that affect the health status, are shown by SCOM Insight.

Only alerts that contribute to the status of the objects are displayed. This means that alerts are only displayed if:

1. the alert was generated by a monitor (rule-generated alerts don't affect status);
2. the generating-monitor's state rolls-up to the root of the object.

For example, if a monitored object contains rules that are generating alerts, these won't be displayed. And if a monitored object contains a monitor that is alerting, but the roll-up algorithm doesn't allow the monitor's state to affect the root object, this alert won't be shown. This is to ensure that a logically-consistent view of state and alerts is presented.

Carousel

If you need to automatically cycle between the tile and alert views, use the Carousel function. This can be useful where SCOM Insight is used, for example, on a wall-mounted display. The interval is defined in the Web.Config file. To access this function, enter /carousel after the URL for SCOM Insight in your browser. For example:

https://scominsight.demo/carousel

Parameters

The following parameters may be set in the URL.

Filter

The ?filter parameter can be used to filter, by a comma-separated list of names, the objects displayed. For example, to display only those objects containing the text demo and prod in their names:

https://scominsight.demo/?filter=demo,prod

Mode

The ?mode parameter can set to kiosk, which puts SCOM Insight into a mode designed for use on large displays, such as a wall-mounted screen. It hides the scrollbars, tooltips and the mouse pointer.

https://scominsight.demo/?mode=kiosk

Notifications

The ?notifications parameter can be used to notify the user of new critical alerts, and can be set to:

1. audio, which generates audio notifications;
2. visual, which generates browser notifications (if supported in the browser); or
3. on, which generates both audio and browser notifications.

https://scominsight.demo/?notifications=on

⚠	Having more than one page open with notifications enabled will result in duplicate alerts being generated in the browser.

Combining parameters

Parameters may be combined, using the ampersand (&) symbol. For example, to filter to only display objects containing production or UAT in their name, in kiosk mode (for a wall-mounted display), use:

https://scominsight.demo/?filter=production,UAT&mode=kiosk

Access additional pages

Pages, containing a different array of objects, can be added to SCOM Insight (see Configuration). To access these pages, you just need to know the name. For example, if a page by the name of Environments has been added, the URL would be something like:

https://scominsight.demo/?group=Environments

Ticket references

Ticket references may be assigned to SCOM alerts, which are automatically displayed in the alerts view. This feature is useful for visibility of helpdesk cases/trouble tickets that relate to problems identified by SCOM. References can be manually added to alerts in the SCOM console, or may be programmatically assigned, and may be any numerical or text value.

When assigned, ticket refernces are automatically shown under a new column on the right, Case: