Enterprise Applications

For SquaredUp DS v4 we have defined a new type of SCOM object called an Enterprise Application (EA).

An EAM edition license (or above) is required for this feature. To upgrade please contact [email protected].

To check the license edition you are using see How to check which license key is being used. To see what is included in different product edition licenses see the Licensing Overview.

What are Enterprise Applications?

Enterprise Applications are like regular SCOM Distributed Applications (DAs), but improved, to give you an easy way to model and monitor all of your applications from the point of view of users.

Benefits of Enterprise Applications (EAs)

• A range of out-of-the-box top-level dashboards automatically show the status of all EAs (see above)
• As soon as a new EA has been created, perspectives are available for it.
• You can manually set the health status of an application, and add a message to end users (How to manually set the health state of an application).
• The health of the EA is only dependent on the availability monitors, not the infrastructure health, so status and uptime is meaningful to the business (jump to The three-part application model).
• EAs can store the results of a Visual Application Discovery & Analysis (VADA) discovery as a map.
• EAs support link dependency monitoring and Windows service monitoring.

You may also like to watch the introduction to Enterprise Applications in the v4 release webinar: v4 Release Webinar - Enterprise Applications.

SquaredUp EAM Library Management Pack (MP)

SquaredUp DS v4 installs a new SCOM management pack that extends SCOM with all the base classes, monitors, and discoveries required to create EAs. When you create an EA in SquaredUp DS it is stored in a new management pack that depends on this base management pack.

The three-part application model

EAs use a three-part application model which separates the infrastructure health from rolling up to the overall health state of the application. While EAs can have three separate elements, they only need one of these elements, such as availability monitoring, for it to work.

1. Availability - Outside-in application availability monitoring
   • Simple URL or TCP monitoring
   • Custom PowerShell-based monitoring
   • Pre-existing availability monitoring in SCOM
2. Map - Infrastructure / component map
   • Dynamic application mapping with VADA
   • Discover specific application components (IIS App Pools, SQL DBs, Windows Services)
   • TCP link monitoring of key application inter-dependencies
3. Dependencies - External dependencies
   • Any other monitored objects that the application depends on - example: hosts, storage etc – including other EAs.

Creating an Enterprise Application

See How to create an Enterprise Application.

FAQs

Where are Enterprise Applications saved?

Enterprise applications are saved directly into SCOM (or you can export them as XML and import them manually), and because of this changes can take up to 10 minutes to propagate to SCOM.

How and when can I update Enterprise Applications?

You can update your EAs in SquaredUp DS at any time, or by editing the management pack XML and importing/re-importing. EAs are not editable in the SCOM Distributed Application (DA) Designer.

What if I don't create the full 3 part Enterprise Application?

Even if you just use availability tests you can still build accurate application availability dashboards and SLAs. You can even create an EA that simply displays the manually set health status of the application (How to manually set the health state of an application).