‘Why addendum packs’? What value can they bring to my customer? Kevin Holman started the Addendum thought process quite a while back. Added functionality to a core application/program/product. The first example of this pack naming convention is his SQL RunAs Addendum to simplify SQL monitoring. Let’s break down a number of examples how the SCOM community has built packs to better monitoring, and how I believe the addendum packs bring IT Ninja lessons from Microsoft experts monitoring to your environment.
Why Addendum packs
Better monitoring from the experts, including customer examples for other ‘blind spots’ in monitoring. Blind spots consist of ‘not monitored’ pieces of infrastructure, from simply an event, ping, service, tcp port check, process, web site, scripted workflow, with the purpose to identify a problem.
The goal of monitoring is to:
Identify, self-heal, automatically run recovery or diagnostic workflows alert when manual intervention is required. Doesn’t matter what tool you use, they all do some portion of these steps.
The addendum packs do these things, adding a few differentiators.
Auto closure daily scripts (close rules/monitors)
Auto reports of problems (M-F 0600-0700 local, reflecting last 24-72 hours of open/closed alerts)
Employ count logic (x in y time)
Self-heal monitors with no new events
Adjust alert severities to health model
where critical (red) = outage, warning (yellow) = issue, informational reports or FYI’s
Capable of updating alerts (status, owner, ticketID+)
Tasks to run workflows on-demand
Recovery tasks – (i.e. service restart automation or TopProcess, Logical disk cleanup, MECM Client cache clean )
Integrate additional monitoring (like DFS replication queue script/alerts)
Synthetic checks for DNS and web applications
Web Availability and Transactional monitoring, ADFS, CRL, PowerShell Invoke-WebRequest, and more
Security and Compliance checks
Imagine I forgot something capability wise.
Stay tuned, as this builds into an even better outcome, quality data into ‘a single pane of glass’ of multiple tools within PowerBI.