Status tile

About the Status tile

The Status tile displays the rolled up health state of objects in the chosen scope, for example servers, disks, groups, or distributed applications (DAs). It also shows the health state summary, showing why an object is in a critical or warning state.

Tip: Too add more context to the health states your displaying, you can also show them on an image background. For example, you can use a map as a background and show your servers and their health on the map based on their location.
You have two options for that: You can either use the Surface tile which even lets you display additional information to the health state (How to use the Surface tile) or, if you just need the health state, you can use the Image tile (see How to use the Image tile).

Tip: If you want to show the health state of objects by changing the color of part of an image use an SVG file with the Visio tile (see How to use the Visio tile). For example, you could use a building floorplan and turn each room into a shape in Visio. Then you can connect those shapes to a health indicator, maybe the room's wifi connectivity, and display the image on a dashboard where you can monitor if one of the rooms turns red.

How to configure a Status tile

  1. Add a new tile to a dashboard or perspective and choose the Status tile.

  2. Choose the visualization for your tile:

  3. Scope:
    The scope section allows you to define what is shown.
    Note:

    Which status is displayed depends on what you choose as a scope:

    • If you want to see the status of individual objects (for example, two individual servers), select multiple objects in the list section.
    • If you want to see the status of a group itself rather than the individual objects within the group, select a group in the list section.
    • If you want to see the status of each individual group member of a group, select a group in the group section.
    • If you want to see the health state of all groups, select the class "group" in the advanced section.


  4. Configure the settings for the visualization you chose:
  5. Click done to save the tile.

    The tile now shows data according to your settings.

Meaning of the Status Icons

Healthy
Warning
Critical
Maintenance Mode
(see Putting a SCOM object into maintenance mode). The last known health state is shown as a faded color behind the spanner.
Offline/Unmonitored
The power symbol signifies an object that SCOM has been monitored, but at present the agent is unresponsive. Typically this is because the device is powered off or the agent is broken. The last known health state is shown as a faded color behind the power button. This can often be resolved by restarting the Microsoft Monitoring Agent service on the server itself, or restarting the System Center Data Access service on the SCOM server. To show only objects that are currently offline/unmonitored you can specify IsAvailable = 0 in the Scope > Advanced > Criteria (see How to use criteria when scoping objects)
Unknown/Uninitialized
The gray icon with a question mark signifies an object that has never had a health state, for example a device that has been badly or incompletely discovered. SCOM is aware of the object, but has never recorded any data from it. This covers both objects where SCOM records a health state of 0 (no health state) and those where SCOM has no record for the health state, i.e. the health state is blank or unspecified (NULL).
Tips for scoping tiles to objects with unknown health state (in Scope > Advanced > Criteria, see How to use criteria when scoping objects):
  • To show only objects where SCOM specifies a health state of 0 use HealthState = 0
  • To show objects where there SCOM has no current or last known health state specified use HealthState IS NULL
  • To show all gray objects, both those with unknown health state and those with no known last health state specify HealthState = 0 OR HealthState IS NULL
To resolve groups which show a gray health state see Groups show no health information
Offline, with no last known health state.

About the Health State Summary

Objects and their health state

At the heart of SCOM monitoring is its object model and the health state monitoring of those objects; if a disk is low on space, the disk is marked as critical and this rolls up to the server, which is also marked as critical.

What is a health state summary?

In SquaredUp DS health state summaries are shown for unhealthy (yellow or red) objects. Health state summaries show why an object is yellow or red and show you a summary in-line with the status icon itself. This means that, at a glance, you can see the cause of the critical health state and spot common issues across multiple objects.

If you find several servers are showing red, then the health state summaries can help answer some of your questions:

  • Why is it red?
  • Is it the same reason that the others are red?
  • Is it related to the application issue I'm seeing?
  • Which red server is the priority?
  • Do I have to click on each server to see what the problem is?

Where are Health state summaries available?

Health state summaries are shown wherever an objects health state is shown, for example the Matrix tile, VADA in view and analyze mode, the Alerts tile, and in the Status tile.

Health state summaries are not available for container objects such as groups and distributed applications (DAs), however they work excellently for objects that host things (not contain things) such as servers, devices, software, and their sub-components.

In some cases, you might find that a critical server does not have a health state summary.

How do health state summaries work?

Health state summaries work by performing a lookup for monitor alerts (alerts that are affecting the health state) for each object.

For any object that is not healthy, SquaredUp DSshows the alert that is:

  • Created by a monitor (not a rule – they don’t affect health)
  • Most severe (if it’s critical, it will look for a critical alert)
  • Most recent

What if no health state summary is shown?

  • Some monitors do not create an alert
  • Perhaps the system has closed the alert and it has been groomed out of the Operations Manager database due to a retention setting. In SCOM, under Administration > Settings > Alerts the Automatic Alert Resolution tab shows you how many days after the last modified time (repeat count) from which all active alerts will be resolved, and how many days after the object is healthy that the alert will be resolved.
  • Maybe a user closed the alert? The walkthrough below shows how you can show 'recently closed alerts to help troubleshoot this.

Walkthroughs

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