What's New in SquaredUp DS for SCOM v5

What's New in v5.9

SquaredUp DS for SCOM v5.9 includes the following new features:

  • New visualization: Date heatmap
  • New visualization mode: Vertical bars
  • Tile copy/paste functionality
  • Dashboard favorites
  • Home dashboard
  • Personal dashboards for all users
  • SCOM Managed Instance support (beta)
  • Many more enhancements

New visualization: Date Heatmap

The date heatmap lets you see SCOM alerts or other events in a calendar view, so you can easily spot patterns in when alertsevents are being raised or resolved. The visualization is available for SCOM alerts, SQL, PowerShell and Web API tiles.

New visualization mode: Vertical bars

The “top n” bar chart available for SCOM performance data in previous versions now has an additional feature to enable it to display its data vertically (rather than horizontally as with previous versions). It is also possible to modify the width of the bars in both horizontal and vertical modes.

Tile copy/paste functionality

It is now possible to copy and paste a tile both within the same dashboard or between dashboards using new tile copy/paste buttons and your browser clipboard functionality. This will help speed up dashboard authoring and allow users to create their own dashboards by reusing components from existing ones.

Dashboard favorites

Any dashboard can now be added to a personal favorites menu to make it easier for an end user to access their most used dashboards. This will be vital in busy SquaredUp DS deployments. This functionality is available for all SquaredUp DS users, regardless of permissions levels.

Home dashboard

Users now have the ability to set their own “home” dashboard, making it easier to access, and so their chosen dashboard is the first thing shown when the user logs in. This functionality is available for all SquaredUp DS users, regardless of permissions levels.

Personal dashboards for all users

Historically only users with the “author” permission over a folder had the ability to create dashboards of any sort. Users of all other permissions levels could only view dashboards created by others. In this release we have added the ability for all users to create personal dashboards, that is dashboards a user creates which are stored for their personal use only (so cannot be published). This is great for enabling read-only users to be able to troubleshoot technical issues using SCOM data without needing elevated SCOM permissions.

SCOM Managed Instance support (beta)

Beta support for SCOM Managed Instance is included in this release. Note that as SCOM Managed Instance is itself in beta, we cannot guarantee future versions past the release date of SquaredUp DS v5.9 will work (11th May 2023).

Many more enhancements

  • Cleaner list of tiles with better categorization of tiles
  • “The X Tile” provides help in connecting SquaredUp DS to SquaredUp Cloud for quicker setup
  • Added “last modified” to available Alert tile sorting options
  • Donut tile labeling improvements – new inline legend and sizing options

See Release Notes for SquaredUp DS for SCOM

What's New in v5.8

SquaredUp DS for SCOM v5.8 includes the following new features:

  • New visualization: Hosting Stack tile
  • Conditional custom colors on more tiles
  • Monitor tile: grouping improvements
  • Many more enhancements

New visualization: Hosting Stack tile

The Hosting Stack tile lets you glance at the parents and health status of any object in SCOM. Quickly and visually understand the upstream impact of an outage on a low-level object. Also works for SquaredUp Enterprise Applications and SquaredUp EAM-X objects. The new Hosting Stack tile can be added to any dashboard and perspective.

See How to use the Status tile

Conditional custom colors on more tiles

Highlight the most important objects on a dashboard visualization based on its value (e.g. show C: drives with less than 20% free space in red on bar graphs). Works across many tiles and visualizations including lines, sparklines, bars and donuts. Use the new mustache control to set one or more thresholds and choose a specific color per threshold to highlight what’s more important to you and your audience on a dashboard.

Monitors tile: Grouping improvements

Never miss a monitor that’s in an error state! The Monitors tile lets you group and sort monitor health without needing to group by its related object. Additional options let you more precisely adjust how the monitor tile is presented on a dashboard so that you never miss anything critical whilst optimizing the space on a dashboard.

See How to use the Monitors tile

Many more enhancements

  • More sorting options on Status tiles
  • Option to show data points on line graph
  • Management of perspectives in the Admin System settings
  • Ability to hide group links in VADA
  • Performance improvements for large, high load environments

See Release Notes for SquaredUp DS for SCOM

What's New in v5.7

SquaredUp DS for SCOM v5.7 includes the following new features:

  • Timeframes – major enhancements
  • Line Graph tile – major enhancements
  • Recycle Bin
  • Many more enhancements

Timeframes – Major Enhancements

A much-requested set of improvements bring new control over the dashboard and tile timeframes. Publish an SLA dashboard to show last month vs current month, choose a very specific date/time range on a Performance tile, or perform some analysis on your alerts by looking at various time ranges. These are some of the use cases that the timeframe improvements now enable. Specifically:

- A greater range of dashboard timeframes with the ability to specify ISO 8601 timeframes e.g. last x minutes/hours/days/months

- A calendar picker on Performance, Alerts, and SLA tiles

- User-friendly date/time picker in Connect tiles to inherit dashboard timeframes e.g. to insert in a Web API header, or within a PowerShell or SQL script.

See Timeframes for tiles

Line Graph tile – Major Enhancements

Several improvements aim to strengthen the capabilities of Line Graphs and the Performance drilldown. Display a threshold line and a red area of concern to quickly spot out-of-bound metrics. Use the new hovering panel to glance across a given datetime point and see all objects' values at once. The x-axis now draws future dates as well as up to the last datetime point. When you need to perform further analysis, the existing one-click drilldown now brings all objects and the threshold line to the analytics pane, making it a breeze to analyze your performance data.

See How to use the Performance tile

Recycle Bin

Any deleted dashboards and perspectives now end up in the new Recycle Bin. An administrator can see who deleted dashboards and perspectives and when, then take action: restore or permanently delete.

See Recycle Bin

Many more enhancements

  • Sparkline color matching
  • Each user's last login time on the Named User list
  • Improvements to Alert tile date columns
  • Donut legend is optionally scrollable to fix tile height
  • and more...

See Release Notes for SquaredUp DS for SCOM

What's New in v5.6

SquaredUp DS for SCOM v5.6 includes the following new features:

  • New visualization: Status Tree view
  • New visualization: Status Sun Burst
  • Export to Excel improvements
  • New display options in Status and Monitor tiles
  • And more enhancements

New visualization: Status Tree view

The Tree view tile lets you glance at the hierarchy and health status of your SCOM objects. You can take quick actions like drilling down with one click directly to the component that’s causing a problem. Useful when you need clarity during root cause analysis. The tile can be scoped to any SCOM object and will display all its children. Additional display options let you filter on health states and set the tree depth.

See How to use the Status tile - Settings for Tree

New visualization: Status Sun Burst

The new Sun Burst tile lets you visualize your SCOM objects in a unique way. Quickly glance at the inner circle of the Sun Burst and work your way out to the outer circle that represents the lowest level component that’s causing a problem. When paired with EAM-X objects, you can now explore all your single pane of glass objects from SquaredUp Cloud plugins in a way that’s easy to navigate and quick to drilldown. Spinning the Sun Burst with your mouse lets you see any labels regardless of their orientation, and additional display options lets you customize the look & feel of the tile.

See How to use the Status tile - Settings for Sun Burst

Many more enhancements

  • Export to Excel now works with the Matrix tile
  • Option to limit the number of objects returned (Top n) in the Status and Monitor tile
  • Option to wrap sub-label in the Status tile
  • Option to sort objects by health in the Monitor tile
  • Allow API query parameters to be set at provider level
  • Updates to out-of-the-box dashboard packs

See Release Notes for SquaredUp DS for SCOM

What's New in v5.5

SquaredUp DS for SCOM v5.5 includes the following new features:

  • Alert tile – Major Enhancements
  • Adjustable dashboard refresh interval
  • Many more enhancements

Alert tile – Major Enhancements

A new expand panel allows you to reveal more information about an alert within the tile, without needing to drilldown or open every alert in a new tab. Breeze through your alerts quickly to see at-a-glance description, context and event data. Take quick actions to triage your alerts with the Select All option to assign to other, reset monitor and change resolution state. In summary, these enhancements are all about helping you be more efficient and reduce your MTTR during an outage or alert storm.

See How to use the Alerts tile

Adjustable dashboard refresh interval

A new dashboard setting lets you set the refresh interval for a given dashboard and its Open Access version. Whether you need to reduce the load on your external data, or an API comes with an access cost, you can increase the refresh interval in increments, up to 6 hours. You can also decrease the interval down to 30 seconds on any given dashboard if you need to see the data more often.

See How to create a dashboard - Dashboard Settings

Many more enhancements

What's New in v5.4

SquaredUp DS for SCOM v5.4 includes the following new features:

  • New visualization: Surface tile
  • New data source: ODBC
  • Updated Grid tile: major enhancements

New visualization: Surface tile

Overlay your most important SCOM metrics over any image background (e.g. a world map, an architecture diagram, a picture from your diagramming tool like Visio). Unleash your creativity and share stunning dashboards with your operation centers and stakeholders or display them on wall screens across your organization. Check out the 5.4 release webinar for inspiration!

See How to use the Surface tile.

New data source: ODBC

The new ODBC data source lets you instantly visualize any data from virtually any database. From Oracle, PostGre, MySQL to many more, you can now dashboard your most important metrics directly from your ODBC databases using a dynamic SQL query.

See How to use the SQL tile

Updated Grid tile: major enhancements

Unlock your grid tiles! Breeze through your logs and alerts with the ability to sort, search and filter. Optimise the look of your dashboard tables for any screens by setting the zoom/font size, column width and improved text wrap. Available for any Grid tiles including SCOM Alerts.

For example see How to use the Web API tile

What's New in v5.3

SquaredUp DS for SCOM v5.3 includes the following new features:

  • Community Dashboards: Sharing and Importing
  • New visualization: Status Image
  • Default dashboard timeframe
  • Scalar: conditional colors
  • Donut: display improvements

Community Dashboards: Sharing and Importing

The Community Dashboards website has been completely redesigned to include any dashboard submitted by our community as well as existing SCOM dashboard packs from our partners and external vendors. Check out some of our most popular dashboards (VMWare, Solarwinds, and more) and import them directly in your own instance of SquaredUp DS for SCOM.

Be a community hero! Export your own dashboards to our community using the new one-click export.

See Dashboard Packs

New visualization: Status Image

Visualize the status of what’s important to you, pinpoint a problem more quickly and accurately, and share your complex metrics into simple and compelling dashboards for your stakeholders. Thanks to the new Status Image visualization, you can overlay status icons from any external data sources on top of any images of your choice (e.g. a world map, a data center layout, a picture from your diagramming tool like Visio). Statuses can be retrieved and calculated from any data sources (Web API, PowerShell script, Splunk, Elasticsearch, etc) thanks to our intuitive tile designer.

Default dashboard timeframe

Set the default timeframe of your dashboard so that you and anyone you have shared the dashboard with Open Access can always see the dashboard in its most relevant light depending on its purpose and target audience. Set it to 30 days or longer for an application SLA dashboard shared with your stakeholders, or 1 hour for your root cause analysis dashboard. Timeframes range from 1 hour to 12 months.

See Timeframes for tiles

Scalar: conditional colors

Add impact to your key metrics with conditional colors for scalar visualizations. Available for any SCOM metrics or data point from your external data sources. Use the intuitive logic builder to create custom conditions that will trigger your scalar visualization to change color. Choose from a range of colors with the option to highlight the background or the text. Also added support for web links so you can drill out to the corresponding tool to see more details about your metric.

Donut: display improvements

Include the ability to map a specific color to a specific segment/legend of the donut, show as percentage and sorting by value or legend. Note: Status tiles only support sorting, Alert and ServiceNow tiles only support percentage.

What's New in v5.2

SquaredUp DS for SCOM v5.2 includes the following new features:

  • PowerShell tile enhancements
  • New visualizations for Splunk
  • Public GitHub Samples repository
  • Various security improvements

PowerShell enhancements

The hugely popular PowerShell visualization tiles have been enhanced in this release to provide script execution controls and security configuration:

• Create your own Run As accounts for improved security.

• Configure script execution interval to independently control the load on your external data sources.

• All visualization scripts now run inside their own child process for increased robustness, with the ability to choose the execution environment (.NET Framework or .NET Core) for each script independently depending on the version of PowerShell your script is written.

See How to use the PowerShell tile

New Splunk visualizations

The Splunk tile now includes a full range of visualizations: Bar Graph, Donut, Line Graph, Scalar, Sparklines, Grid, Status Icons and Blocks.

See How to use the Splunk tile

GitHub Samples

A new public GitHub repository has been published, that contains sample dashboards and scripts, is now available and accessible from within the SquaredUp DS application. The GitHub repository is opened to contributions from the community. Browse the repository for dashboard ideas and various scripts to help you make the most of SquaredUp DS. From SolarWinds and Log Analytics dashboards to purpose-built SQL and PowerShell scripts, be sure to take a look at the growing list of samples and contribute your own creations!

See GitHub Samples repository

Security Improvements

A number of security improvements have been made in this release, following our regular independent security review and penetration test. Best practices for secure deployment of SquaredUp DS have been updated.

See Best Practices for Security.

What's New in v5.1

SquaredUp DS for SCOM v5.1 includes the following new features:

  • Two new data integrations: Splunk and Elasticsearch
  • PowerShell tile: visualize any metrics
  • Status visualizations for external data sources
  • New visualizations for the SQL tile

New data integrations: Splunk and Elasticsearch

The new Splunk and Elasticsearch data integrations provide a consistent dashboarding experience to pro-actively visualize your log data. An intuitive point-and-click configuration wizard lets you import and visualize your saved queries from Splunk or Elasticsearch. Paste any query or write your own query in the Query DSL or SPL language. Queries support contextual variables so you can visualize your Splunk or Elasticsearch data dynamically on SCOM perspectives.

See How to use the Elasticsearch tile and How to use the Splunk tile

New PowerShell tile to visualize any metrics

Available sample, with no separate configuration required, PowerShell visualizations let you connect to any data sources, display any metrics or build custom metrics on the fly. PowerShell scripting is incredibly powerful, and the possibilities in SquaredUp DS are endless (e.g. correlate and aggregate results from multiple APIs, visualize local log files, and more!).

Leverage PowerShell modules to visualize performance metrics that are not easily available via an API (e.g. VMWare). Create your own profiles to store any PowerShell script that you want to execute across different tiles as the first part of your script, such as connection scripts to 3rd party tools, or to load a PowerShell module.

See How to use the PowerShell tile

New status visualizations for external data sources

Beautiful status visualizations provide an at-a-glance view of your most essential metrics to help turn complex metrics into easy to consume dashboards for stakeholders. The new status visualizations are available for most data sources (e.g. Web API, PowerShell, SQL, Log Analytics, Splunk, Elasticsearch). They are configurable both in terms of look and feel (e.g. blocks/list, dynamic labels, etc) and logic. Use the status logic to easily map a status field from your data source, combine multiple values from your data sources, and add custom calculations to generate your own statuses. Click to drill out to the corresponding object in your external tool.

New visualizations for the SQL tile

The SQL tile now includes the full suite of visualizations: Bar Graph, Donut, Line Graph, Scalar, Sparklines, Grid, Status Icons and Blocks.

How to use the SQL tile

What's New in v5.0

SquaredUp DS for SCOM v5.0 includes the following new features:

  • Major overhaul of the dashboard designer experience
  • New Open Access
  • Improved Web API visualizations and configuration
  • Refreshed visual experience

Major overhaul of the dashboard designer experience

Take real control of your layouts, creating rich dashboards easily. Use the new pre-built templates to quickly add a layout, which you can adjust as required. New controls to easily add rows and tiles anywhere on the dashboard. Add new columns to the right or left which will scale the width of the tiles evenly. Split a tile in two to create a nested layout. Other improvements include the ability to drag & drop tiles more easily and better vertical resizing.

How to use the dashboard designer (v5)

New Open Access

Open Access shared dashboards now include simplified interactivity. You can now drill down to access more information with a named user license. Open Access dashboards work seamlessly on all devices, including mobile. Major improvements to the reliability of Open Access including self-healing capabilities and improved scaling and performance.

Sharing Dashboards with anyone - Open Access

Improved Web API visualizations and configuration

Add more context to SCOM dashboards with our new Web API visualizations for your external data sources. New visualizations include the bar chart, donut, line graphs and sparklines. New configuration options include the ability to see the response data, mustache picker options and data mapping capabilities for the new visualizations.

How to use the Web API tile

Refreshed visual experience

Better color contrasts in your visualizations, a new range of vibrant heatmap colors, a darker dark mode, and a more modern feel all round.

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