SCOM Dashboard orchestrator

Mustafa Kaşıkcı February 6, 2014 0 Comments

When you start utilize Orchestrator to integrate between services and execute workflows you soon realize that you need to get an overview of what Orchestrator is actually doing. With the Orchestrator management pack for Operations Manager 2012 you get a good foundation of monitoring the Orchestrator infrastructure, but not that much about what Orchestrator is really doing. If Orchestrator is integrated with Service Manager most runbooks will run as an activity in a work item in Service Manager and then we can use Service Manager Reports to review what has been executed. In this example I will show you how you can build a dashboard in Operations Manager 2012 to show what is going on in Orchestrator.

With Operations Manager we can run a VB script and return the result as performance data. We can then use reports, performance views or dashboards to look at the performance data. In this example I have created a number of rules that runs VB scripts every 15 minute. Each script query the Orchestrator database for some information and sends the result back as performance data to Operations Manager. Some of the rules could be merge together to one SQL query, but as this is only an example and not complete management pack I did not re-wrote that. In Operations Manager I have created a dashboard to show the data.

Each script have an override controlled parameter, Script Arguments, which input Orchestrator database server and Orchestrator database name to the script. My example rules use a run as profile named “Contoso – Orchestrator – DB read account” to configure which account to use when query the Orchestrator database. With default settings, in this example, each query runs every 15 minutes and ask for data for the last hour.

 
 

My example dashboard includes five widgets, each widget show a number of performance instances.

• Queue
  
  • Pending Jobs, show number of runbooks with pending status, meaning they are waiting to start
    
  • Top minutes in queue, show number of minutes top 1 job have been in the queue.
    
• Runbook Results
  
  • Success, show number of runbooks that have ended with success result
    
  • Warning, show number of runbooks that have ended with success result
    
  • Failed, show number of runbooks that have ended with success result
    
• Runbook Jobs. This widget show number of times each runbook have run with success result. You can easy see which runbook that most often executed. The names you see is the name of the runbook.
  
• Orchestrator Server Status, show status of my Orchestrator roles. In this sandbox all roles are on the same server, SCO01.
  
• Orchestrator Alerts show alerts generated by my Orchestrator machine.
  

You can download my example MP here, NOT SUPPORTED – Contoso.Orchestrator – v2 . Note that this is provided “AS-IS” with no warranties at all. This is not a production ready management pack or solution for your production environment, just a idea and an example.

As always, big thanks to Patrik for support and good discussions around System Center.

Other examples around scripts in rules, generating performance data, can be found here