At SCOMathon 2020, SquaredUp Founder & CEO Richard Benwell shared his top 5 tips for SCOM success in the APAC Keynote: A Manifesto for SCOM Success. We’ve put it together in this article in case you missed the talk.

This is part two of our journey towards monitoring Azure resources with SCOM, using the Azure Management pack. In Part 1: Installation, we finished installing the Management Pack and managed to connect one of our subscriptions where the resources we want to monitor are. Now, let’s move on to configuring the monitoring for actual resources or services.

SCOM isn’t only powerful when it comes to monitoring on-prem infrastructure, but it has also come a long way when it comes to monitoring your Azure resources. Microsoft offers a great Management Pack for monitoring Azure resources which has been through a few iterations and has only become better with each one.

Being able to visualize the logs from your infrastructure is crucial - both for identifying potential issues and identifying opportunities for improving performance and utilization. However, when it comes to SCOM and Azure, monitoring can be a bit confusing. That is why, we at SquaredUp, have made it our mission to help you make sense of all the data being collected with beautiful visualizations and dashboards that can be shared with the rest of your organization and displayed on wallboard monitors.

One of the big problems we hear about with Azure is managing costs and understanding where the money is being spent. In fact, when we launched SquaredUp for Azure back in 2019, the ability to visualize costs quickly became one of the most popular features. It helped our customers (and ourselves, too) get a grip on Azure costs – by making it easy to identify under-utilized resources and take the appropriate action to reduce costs.

One of the most common complaints about SCOM is the noisiness of alerts from Management Packs. Getting on top of these alerts can be a huge challenge and often the thing that most gets in the way of an organization getting value out of SCOM. In SquaredUp for SCOM 4.7, our recent feature-packed update, we bring you three new alert-handling super-powers to help you get on top of alerts.

Wait, what? An activity log in SCOM? Did I read that right? You sure did! If you haven’t heard it yet, Microsoft recently published some auditing reports as part of SCOM 2019 UR2 that enable you to track management pack actions, override tracking, management pack objects, etc. The official Microsoft release notes are here.