SCOM APM for Orchestrator, SPF, SMA and WAP

Orchestrator, Service Provider Foundation, Service Management Automation and Windows Azure Pack are all web applications or web services or both. They are all monitored by IIS 8 Management Pack in Operations Manager but that MP can only provide monitoring to certain levels to solve these limitations in SCOM (SP1 and R2 for IIS8) we have Application Performance Monitoring (APM). This blog post does not aim to show you some advanced features in APM but rather to show you how to enable some advanced monitoring for those services. As SMA and WAP are available only in R2 I will use the R2 wave. Let’s start with enabling APM for every service:

Service Provider Foundation

Open SCOM console. Go to Authoring pane. Start Add Monitoring Wizard.

Select .NET Application Performance Monitoring

Give a friendly name to the application and create new management pack where the settings for this application will be saved.

Select Add.

Click on Search and add the two web service in SPF – VMM and Admin. Click OK.

It is always a good practice to put Environment.

Accept the default settings. The idea is to fine tune these settings depending on the performance of the application in your environment. If you have more than one environment (development, test, production and etc.) these settings can be different because some environments will have less resources than other and the application can perform slowly because of that. SPF is only web service and because of that does not have portal so client-side monitoring is not relevant. On summary page click Create and wait until the APM for SPF is created.

And the result is:

From now on when you have data for a long term period you can fine-tune the APM settings. You can even set exceptions for some methods.

Orchestrator Web Service and Console

Orchestrator has Web Service and Console (Web Application).

One Web service and Web application (portal) added,

Orchestrator has web application but do not enable client-side monitoring for now.

To enable client-side monitoring you need first have to check if the web application could be enabled for this client side monitoring. This is done trough a task Check Client-Side Monitoring Compatibility which is available in Monitoring Pane –> Application Monitoring –> .NET Monitoring –> IIS 8.0 ASP.NET Web Application Inventory View. Select the web application you would like to test and execute the task from the Task pane.

I’ve enabled the client-side monitoring for the Orchestrator console but even I didn’t received any error in SCOM or on the Orchestrator portal no performance counters were shown from client-side:

Windows Azure Pack

You need to add all found Web Applications for Windows Azure Pack:

I am not using WAP intensively in this environment  so I do not have so much data:

Because I do not have even database created for WAP you can see the performance exception created for that:

APM can very useful to public user portal like Tenant Site in WAP:

Because of that I’ve tried to check if client-side monitoring can be enabled but unfortunately the check returned negative results:

Service Management Automation

Service Management Automation is part of Orchestrator setup but can be connected to WAP.

Only one web service is available so no client-side monitoring will be available:

 

As a summary I hope this will help you in providing advanced monitoring for these Web Services and Application as they are of the Microsoft Cloud OS and critical for Cloud Providers. What I would like to see in the future instructions or possibility from Microsoft on how to enable client-side monitoring for at least the Tenant Site.