This Distributed Application cannot be displayed (VADA)

Overview

When browsing to the Topology perspective of a distributed application in SquaredUp DS, you may see a message indicating that the distributed application (DA) cannot be displayed.

This Distributed Application cannot be displayed. Only Distributed Applications that contain Component Groups can be displayed

Distributed Applications

In SCOM, a DA is any object which is based upon the Service class. In most cases these will be applications that are user created (and editable), however management pack authors are free to create their own DAs, which are usually dynamically populated and sealed.

Component Groups are used in user-defined DAs to group related resources (such as servers performing a certain role, or all databases) and show dependencies between resources using relationships. VADA uses these component groups to display dependencies between components and display them in a sensible layout.

Some management packs may include DAs that use custom structures. This may include custom classes for aggregating health rollup, or simply adding all resources as child objects of the DA directly. At this time VADA cannot automatically construct a topology view for these DAs, because the information necessary to construct tiers and relationships for the components is not present.

Supported Applications

VADA is capable of displaying the topology of any DA that contains only component groups as its top level items. This will include:

• Applications created using the SCOM console's DA Designer.
• Applications created using VADA.

Examples of common unsupported DAs include:

• Active Directory Topology Root
• Exchange 2013 Active Directory Site
• Exchange 2013 Client Access Array
• Exchange 2013 Database Availability group
• Exchange 2013 Organization
• Operations Manager Management group

If you want to display the topology of these applications using VADA you can always manually create your own DA using either of the above tools, and populate it with the appropriate servers.

If you have created your own custom DA outside of the DA Designer, you must ensure that every top level item under the DA is based (directly or indirectly) on the Microsoft.SystemCenter.ServiceDesigner.ServiceComponentGroup class, which can be found in the Microsoft.SystemCenter.ServiceDesigner.Library management pack. If there are no reference relationships between component groups, VADA will be unable to detect dependency ordering and will order the component groups randomly.