We were back with a new Coffee Break session last month! Harold Dyck, President and CEO at Silect, and Jason Baudreau, VP Product & Marketing at SquaredUp, shared tips and tricks for migrating to SCOM MI, plus how to monitor and get full visibility of SCOM MI.
You can watch the full webinar here, or read on for the highlights:
SCOM MI Migration tips & tricks
Harold kicked us off with a quick overview of SCOM MI then tips and tricks for your migration.
What is SCOM MI and why use it over SCOM?
SCOM MI is simply SCOM in the cloud. What’s running in Azure becomes Microsoft’s responsibility to maintain but you retain responsibility for your customer environment – where you’re running SCOM, all your agents, the consoles, management packs, etc. You no longer need to worry about your management server infrastructure or SQL infrastructure with SCOM MI.
Using SCOM MI lets you focus on ensuring IT services are being delivered effectively and scaling SCOM. It also simplifies SCOM updates, lets you take advantage of SCOM 2022 features, and take a step toward cloud adoption.
Things to consider in SCOM MI migration
The first thing on your list when you’re considering making the switch to SCOM MI will be the cost. Harold shared a screenshot of the cost for one month of a basic setup of SCOM MI at Silect. The cost came to about CA$1196.
To calculate your own costs, most of the expense will come from SQL, so use the Azure SQL Managed Instance pricing calculator to get a (pretty accurate) estimate of how much your running costs will be.
Other things to consider before you make the leap to SCOM MI include:
- How do you preserve existing SCOM investments?
- Are you using any other third-party solutions?
- If this is your first time using SCOM, what’s the learning curve?
- Is the necessary network infrastructure in place to support sending agent data to Azure?
Here’s a quick checklist of things you will want to put in place and check before your migrations.
(For a more comprehensive list, check out TopQore’s migration blog.)
- Ensure your SCOM environment is healthy
- Review your SCOM setup and monitoring configuration
- Database and grooming settings
- Alerts, rules, and monitors – do you need them all?
- Review and organize overrides
- Have copies of all sealed and unsealed MPs
- If currently using older sealed MPs, changes to these MPs can break unsealed MPs and other monitoring scenarios
- 3rd party MPs may be tied to name of Management Group
- Gateways will likely remain on-prem in most scenarios
If you want to make the whole migration to SCOM MI smoother, you can use Silect Migration Assistant – it’s just had a major update to dramatically simplify SCOM side-by-side migration, including migration to SCOM MI. It’s available free if you already have Silect MP Studio, or contact [email protected] for pricing information.
Silect Migration Assistant includes migration of:
- Management packs
- Agents
- Notifications
- Maintenance schedules
- Database settings
- Accounts
- And more!
Get the full run through of how to use Silect Migration Assistant in the 6-minute demo in the webinar from 17:21.
Visibility and monitoring for SCOM MI
Despite the new location of SCOM – in the cloud – a core SCOM problem remains: the SCOM web console interface. If you want powerful dashboarding and visibility into your SCOM MI data, Microsoft recommends SquaredUp Dashboard Server to bring all your monitoring to life.
There are many teams who need access to the data SCOM holds but they aren’t admins, and SCOM is simply too complex for their liking. SquaredUp provides easy and sharable visibility into SCOM data for all teams through dashboards.
And if you’re already using SquaredUp Dashboard Server, it now supports direct migration to SCOM MI.
Pull in data from all your applications alongside SCOM data
In the recent The Big SCOM Survey 2022, it was clear that SCOM isn’t going anywhere. However, it’s reaching its limits as a single pane of glass. Organizations are using a host of cloud monitoring tools alongside SCOM, showing that you need a broader view of your monitoring data is required to get the big picture.
If you also need to gain broader visibility to monitor all your other tools and applications, you can visualize SCOM MI alongside a huge variety of other applications using the native integrations in SquaredUp Cloud. The SquaredUp Cloud platform is the answer to your cloud migration needs for a single pane of glass.
In short, you have three options for your SCOM MI dashboards:
- Use the default SCOM web console
- Benefit: no third-party software
- Challenge: not designed for sharing dashboards and visibility
- Use SquaredUp Dashboard Server for SCOM
- Benefit: Fast, modern HTML dashboards, easy to share
- Challenge: Visibility beyond SCOM is limited by Management Packs
- SquaredUp Cloud as a single pane of glass for all your applications and tools
- Natively integrated with SCOM (MI), Azure, and 60+ cloud, monitoring, and DevOps tools
Find out more in the 10-minute run through of SquaredUp from 22:36:
Coffee Break resources
If you want more resources for the SCOM community, check out these resources:
- Let us know what you’d like us to talk about next: community.squaredup.com
- Sign up for future sessions: https://scomathon.com/#subscribe
- Get the recordings and slides published via: https://ds.squaredup.com/blog