We are delighted to have a guest blog from Microsoft MVP Martin Ehrnst! Read on for Martin's expert advice on how best to use Azure Lighthouse. Afterwards, head over here to see how you can get a true single pane of glass for all your Azure tenants using SquaredUp's new Lighthouse features. Azure Lighthouse provides a unified management experience across all your customers (and internal) Azure resources. Depending on your background, you might not know why this is so big.

When troubleshooting a SQL Server issue, you don’t need all of those single-use dashboards in the SCOM console. You really only need one interactive diagram to help you identify the root cause in a few clicks – and SquaredUp’s Visual Application Discovery and Analysis (VADA) tool is just that. With this tool, you can also quickly and easily look at all of the servers that make up an application.

We are happy to announce that our new SCOM Management Pack for monitoring Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) instances has been released today! Citrix ADC was previously called 'Netscaler'. With more than 150 monitors and rules, organizations that use Citrix ADC to provide remote access to their employees are now able to insure Remote Work Availability and Performance at all times with SCOM. The MP has become part of our Citrix Ready MetrixInsight for CVAD subscription offering.

Sometimes an organization gets bogged down with the details. It happens. You have all of this fantastic data in SCOM, and you’re trying to share it, but your users don’t care. That’s not true. They care, but what they don’t care about is the server. To put it another way, they care if the service or application they depend on is working. But here’s the catch, you can’t do this in SCOM.

Too often companies make vague “saves you loads of time” sorts of claims about their products, without quantifying exactly how the product will save you time and how much time. I realized we have been guilty of this in the past, so I’m here to set the record straight! In this blog we will quantify exactly how much time (and effort) Easy Tune will save you.

Once your monitoring is operational for a while, it becomes evident that infrastructure monitoring alone is not enough. Sure, SCOM is excellent when focused on an infrastructure level problem. Do you have an alert that your Windows server is running out of space? Check. Can you check to see if your SQL Server has had a lot of deadlocking recently? Check. Do you know if your Linux server is out of swap space? Can you report on how fast it has been running out? Check.

As defined by ITIL an ‘Incident’ is an unplanned disruption or reduction in quality of service and a ‘Problem’ is the underlying thing that caused the Incident. They are obviously related and there are endless pages on the internet going into incident and problem management as part of ITSM, so we won’t delve into this topic in any detail. The key issue is resolving the incidents themselves isn’t always enough, you need to get to the route cause of the problem.

If you’re building applications and running services in Microsoft Azure, SquaredUp for Azure is a presentation layer that sits on top of the Azure APIs enabling you to produce effective, informative and engaging dashboards.