Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As a systems admin, chances are you’ve got a whole host of monitoring tools and data sources to keep track of: ServiceNow, SCOM, Splunk, Solarwinds, plus your APM and CI/CD tools too. With SquaredUp, you can get a single pane of glass, surfacing your ServiceNow ITSM data alongside data from these other techstacks too! For an introduction on how to get the full picture of your ServiceNow data, head over to Part 1 of our ServiceNow Tile blog series.

The energy last year at the Microsoft Management Summit was just incredible, and the new release of SCOM seemed to be really impressive…At first glance. SCOM is still the same. It’s powerful. It can manage many different capabilities and it’s a part of the System Center suite.

IT executives, operators, and administrators can quickly assess end-user availability and performance experience based on Microsoft 365 services’ critical data from end-to-end monitoring. This eases their day-to-day tasks by reliable reporting data, troubleshooting information, and end user experience for their Microsoft 365 services.

There’s a new Azure agent in town – Azure Monitor Agent (AMA). I hear you saying, “Wait, aren’t there already enough Azure agents? So why another new agent?” A very valid question! Indeed, there are already a few Azure monitoring agents: the Log Analytics Agent, the Diagnostic Extension agent, and the Telegraf agent (and also the Dependency agent if you want to count it separately).

A recurring theme of modern monitoring tools is that they focus on the user, not the systems. To put it another way, while monitoring your infrastructure is essential, it matters more when your customers can’t interact with your application. That would mean lost sales, lost time, unhappy people – and unfortunately for us, unhappy people like to share how grumpy they are. It’s bad for business! But that’s why we’ve made Availability Monitoring in SquaredUp.

For those on an ITIL journey, ServiceNow appears to be the service to beat. ServiceNow has tremendous flexibility and thousands of different workflows to support your business. And if you’re using SCOM to populate your CMDB, you’re leaps and bounds ahead of the average organization. Sadly, that flexibility comes with the cost of being stuck inside of the ServiceNow web interface.

This week I had the honour of speaking at Silect’s MP University and my hot topic was Cookdown’s free PowerShell Authoring MP. I was looking to make the session a little fun, in homage to the original “Fun SCOM Monitoring” video from CTGlobal on monitoring a coffee machine with SCOM 2007 R2. So, I thought what’s the next best thing after coffee? Beer!

As the year draws to a close, we’ve got exciting news. In the new year, we will be launching SquaredUp version 5.0! So, what exactly is in this big, bold update, you ask? Expect a gorgeous new look and feel plus major improvements to our two most popular features – Open Access and Dashboard Designer. We’re also bringing you even more visualizations for your Web API integrations, so you can display data in the best possible way in your single pane of glass. The best part?

As a SCOM admin, you’re probably heavily involved with alert analysis and performance monitoring. You probably also know then, that while SCOM is a great monitoring tool, it leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to reporting on performance monitoring. I’ve got good news for you. SquaredUp sits on top of SCOM and completely changes the game. How? Why? Read on for a comparison and break down of all the reasons you should do it with SquaredUp.