EAM-X
What is EAM-X?
EAM-X is a license tier of SquaredUp DS for SCOM that is powered by SquaredUp Cloud – our generalized dashboarding platform independent of SCOM. SquaredUp Cloud includes 50+ native plugins, enabling out-of-box dashboarding on top of a variety of tools and data sources. With SquaredUp Cloud, your data center, cloud, and application teams can dashboard data from their tools independent of SCOM, and roll up status from those dashboards directly to SCOM, via a dedicated Extension Management Pack that connects SCOM to SquaredUp Cloud.
The Extension Management Pack for SCOM allows high-level health rollups from SquaredUp Cloud to be brought into SCOM, significantly extending SCOM visibility. Everything will flow through into SCOM and your SquaredUp DS for SCOM dashboards, so you’ll continue to get drilldowns, Open Access dashboards, and reporting on top of the unified object model in SCOM.
Discovery in SCOM, to locate objects and relationships in SquaredUp Cloud, takes place every 4 hours. Health State data from SquaredUp Cloud is refreshed every 15 minutes in SCOM.
How do I get EAM-X?
Follow the steps detailed in this article to sign up for SquaredUp Cloud with an Enterprise license, create a Cloud API key and deploy the Extension Management pack.
Prerequisites
- SquaredUp DS for SCOM v5.1 or above
- SquaredUp DS for SCOM license key. Please contact Sales for more information.
1. Sign up to SquaredUp Cloud with an Enterprise license
- Go to the EAM-X sign-up page, enter your email address at the bottom of the page and click Sign Up. You will be redirected to SquaredUp Cloud.
- Create an account in SquaredUp Cloud. Your SquaredUp Cloud account includes 3 users and 1000 entities for free.
- Contact Sales to upgrade to a full EAM-X license. The Extension Management Pack for SCOM needs an API Key which can be created in SquaredUp Cloud using the steps below.
2. Create a Cloud API key
- Click on Settings > API Keys > Create new API Key.
- Enter a name and description so you can identify this key at a later point, for example, this could be the name of your SCOM Management Group.
- Save the generated key in a safe place as you will not be able to access it again from this page.
3. Download and deploy the Extension Management pack for SCOM
With the latest EAM-X MP (available here), it is possible to sync Cloud collections and objects, Workspaces, Dashboards and Tiles to SCOM.
Only objects that are part of a user-created collections will be synced to SCOM. This means that built-in collections (such as those found in built-in dashboards shipped with the data source) will not have their objects synced to SCOM, and you will need to create their own collection.
Object sync is enabled by default. You can check the enabled state by looking for the Discover Scope Contents discovery in the SCOM console and checking its overrides.
- Download the Extension Management pack for SCOM
- In SCOM import the SquaredUpCloud.Connector.mp via the Administration pane. See Microsoft: Import a management pack from disk
- Create a Simple Authentication Run As Account. On the Credentials tab the Account Name can be set to something descriptive, and the password must be set to the Programmatic API Key you configured in SquaredUp Cloud. See Microsoft: How to create a Run As account and associate with a Run As profile
- Associate your new Run As Account with the SquaredUp Cloud API Key Run As Profile.
- Optional: If you would like to control which servers make the API calls, modify the membership of the SquaredUp Cloud Connector Pool.
4. Install the Dashboard pack on your SquaredUp server (Optional)
The SquaredUp Cloud dashboard pack lets you see the health state and data from almost any data source that is in SquaredUp Cloud in dashboards in DS for SCOM. You can use the dashboards in the pack as a template from which you can expand your SCOM single pane-of-glass with monitored objects from SquaredUp Cloud plugins.
- Download the SquaredUp Cloud dashboard pack.
- Import the dashboard pack.
You can import additional dashboard packs at any time from the top right hand menu ☰ > Import Dashboard Packs or System > Community Packs
Dashboard Packs will be recommended to you on the Community Packs page if you have the related SCOM Management Pack installed. You can select a dashboard pack and click Install.
You can also search or browse the dashboard packs available, on dashboards.squaredup.com and then drag the downloaded dashboard pack zip file into the manual import box, as described below.
There may be additional steps following the import to get the dashboard working in your environment. For example, creating an API provider or PowerShell profile. Some dashboard packs require particular SCOM Management Packs to be installed, because they rely on particular metrics being gathered.
- Download the dashboard pack zip file for the dashboard pack you wish to import.
There may be additional steps before or after the import to get the dashboard working in your environment.
- In DS for SCOM go to the top right hand menu ☰ > Import Dashboard Packs and drag the zip file into the Manual Import box.
- The dashboard pack is imported and if the pack contains top-level dashboards, these will automatically appear in the navigation bar, usually in a folder called 'Community Dashboards' for dashboard packs from the SquaredUp Community. If the dashboard pack also contains perspectives (see Working with perspectives), then you'll see these when you drilldown to the relevant object.
- Carry out any additional steps required to make the dashboard work in your environment. These steps will be described on the download page for each dashboard. For example, you may need to create the correctly named Web API provider, create a PowerShell profile, or edit tile collections.
- Edit the imported dashboard as required.
5. Start using SquaredUp Cloud
Add some plugins to SquaredUp Cloud, create some tiles on dashboards, and configure monitoring.
Take a look at our SquaredUp Cloud Knowledge Base for more information, see SquaredUp Cloud: Getting Started
Be aware that some API access incurs a cost, for example AWS cost API calls, so increasing the frequency can increase the monetary cost.
These steps are required when deleting a management pack which contains a Run As profile, due to the Microsoft.SystemCenter.SecureReferenceOverride management pack having dependency upon it.
- Open a PowerShell session with the Operations Manager module/snapin loaded.
- Type:
$MP = Get-SCOMManagementpack -Name Microsoft.SystemCenter.SecureReferenceOverride - View the referenced management packs by typing:
$MP.References - From the list of items in the Key column, note down the alias of the Extension Management pack for SCOM. If you are having trouble finding it, the Value column will list the full ID of the management packs.
- Remove the Extension Management pack for SCOM alias from the Secure Reference MP by typing:
$MP.References.Remove("yourMPAliasGoesHere") - Check that the management pack is valid by typing:
$MP.Verify()
This checks that there aren't any orphaned overrides, etc. - Save your changes by typing:
$MP.AcceptChanges() - Wait a minute or so and then refresh your console. Check the Dependencies tab of the Extension Management pack for SCOM, and you will see that the SecureReferenceOverride management pack is no longer listed.
- Remove the Extension Management pack from SCOM, as you would normally, see Microsoft: How to Remove an Operations Manager Management Pack