Monitors tile

About the Monitors tile

The Monitors tile displays the health state of monitors that use the object in the scope as their target.

The Monitors tile can be used on a dashboard or a perspective

What are monitors?

Monitors are used in SCOM to determine health information and make sure items are working within predefined thresholds. When a threshold is hit the monitor can raise an alert, and the monitor can change the health state of an object. Rules can also raise alerts, but cannot change the health state of an object.

There are a three types of monitors in SCOM:

  • Unit monitors - measure something, such as how much free disk space there is on drive C:
  • Dependency rollup monitors - used for rolling up the health state of members to the group health state (see Groups show no health information).
  • Aggregate rollup monitors are not displayed by the Monitors tile.

Monitors states



Green
Healthy


Yellow
Warning
For example, a monitor might be configured so that when a disk goes below 10% free space the monitor goes yellow and an alert is raised.


Red
Critical
If the free space goes below 5% the monitor may be configured to go red, and a critical alert be raised.

Gray
Unknown/uninitialized
A gray circle shows that this monitor does not currently have a health state.

How to configure a Monitors tile

  1. Add a new tile to a dashboard or perspective and choose the Monitors tile.
  2. Choose the visualization for your Monitors tile:
  3. Scope:
    The Monitors tile will display monitors that target the class of object you use in the scope. You will need to specify the correct object in the scope in order to see the monitors you want. If the monitor you want is not shown, check the configuration of the monitor in SCOM, and look at the monitor target.
    The Monitors tile will only display Unit monitors and Dependency rollup monitors.
    If you want to display only one particular monitor, use the scope > list option and enter the name of one object, such as a server or database, then in monitors > filter type the name of the monitor to display.

  4. Monitors:
    Here you can filter the monitors if you only want to display specific monitors. Start typing the name of the monitor you want to display in the choose monitors field to get suggestions for matching monitors.
  5. Filters:
    Here you can filter the monitors to specific health states. By default, all health states will be shown. Click on one of the health states to hide monitors with this state.
  6. Group
    Here you can change the default grouping, so instead of the monitors being grouped by object you may like to group them by monitor state. Or if grouping by object you may like to sort groups bymonitor state.
  7. Sort:

    Sort allows you to change the order of the results displayed. You can sort by label (ascending or descending) or health state (ascending from healthy to critical or descending from critical to healthy).

    Limit:

    Allows you to define a maximum number of objects that will be shown. When 'group by' is used the limit applies to each group individually, for example to show 10 objects in each health state.

  8. Only for Monitor Icons: You can change the way the icons are displayed by using the toggle zoom
    button at the top right of the tile. You can toggle between list, column and tile view.
  9. Only for Monitor Blocks: You can change the way blocks are displayed in the following panels:
    Blocks
    Here you can change how many columns are used to display the blocks, their height, and the font size of the labels on the blocks.
    Label

    Allows you to change the label of the results.

    none
    Use no label.
    name
    Use the monitor's name as the label.
    description
    Use the monitor's description as the label.
    custom

    Here you can change the label to a custom label. You can use static text and dynamic properties. Use the mustache picker

    to select dynamic properties from the response data to use them as labels.

    For more information see How to use Custom Labels

    Sublabel

    Allows you to add a sublabel of the results.

    custom

    Here you can change the label to a custom label. You can use static text and dynamic properties. Use the mustache picker

    to select dynamic properties from the response data to use them as labels.

    For more information see How to use Custom Labels

    none
    By default, no sublabels are shown.

Walkthrough: Adding Monitors tiles to a dashboard

  1. In SquaredUp DS browse to an object whose monitor(s) you would like to add to a tile. For this walkthrough, search or browse for a database.
  2. Click on the Monitored Entity perspective to view the list of monitors available.
  3. In another tab (perhaps duplicate the tab) browse in SquaredUp DS to where you'd like the new dashboard to be created. Hover over the + button and click dashboard.
  4. Give the dashboard a title, by replacing the text that says New Dashboard.
    The dashboard is saved as you go along so there's no need to save your changes. You can find your dashboard by clicking on the right-hand menu ☰ > system > unpublished.
  5. A new tile has already been added to the dashboard. Edit the title by overwriting the placeholder value New tile with your own tile title, such as the name of the database.
  6. First, we will add a single Monitors tile, using the Icons visualization. The tile selector will already be open. Click Monitors.
  7. Click on the Icons button.
  8. Next, we need to scope the tile. In the scope section select list then type the name of the object for which you wish to see the monitors, and then click on object from the results. For this walkthrough add the database that you browsed to in step 1.
    Monitors will only be shown that use the object in the scope as their target. SquaredUp supports Unit and Dependency rollup monitor types only. Aggregate rollup monitors, such as the entity health monitor, will not display.
    Monitor icons should appear after a moment. You could stop here, but we'll continue to configure the tile.
  9. In the monitors section click on filter.
  10. In the choose monitors box type any word from the name of the monitor that you want to display. Click on the monitor in the list displayed. If you wish you can type a new search word and select more than one monitor to display.
  11. Click next and leave the filters section as it is.
  12. Click done and your Monitors Icons tile will look something like this:
    Next, we will add a Monitor Blocks tile to the dashboard to show several monitors.
  13. Click on the orange plus button to add another tile to the dashboard.
  14. Click on the Blocks button to create a Monitors Blocks tile.
  15. In the scope section type the database name into the list box.
    Blocks should appear after a moment. You could stop here, but we'll continue to configure the tile.
  16. In the monitors section leave it set to all.
  17. In the filters section click on uninitialized to remove gray uninitialized monitors.
  18. In the blocks section you can change the number of columns, the block height, as well as the font size. This can be useful when creating a dashboard for a wall monitor.
  19. The label and sublabel sections allow you to change the block labeling or even create a custom label (How to use Custom Labels). We're going to leave these as they are for this walkthrough.
  20. Click done and your Monitors Blocks tile will look something like this:

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