I was chatting with my friend Mr. Anson today and he asked about a use-case a number of his end users were asking about.  They were asking Mr. Anson when CPU spikes were occurring on their server.  Unfortunately, the end users did not know when these spikes were occurring, just that some users were mentioning that their experience was being effected through the day.

 
In this blog post, we will show you how to locate CPU spikes and patterns by investigating SCOM data with IT Analytics.

Finding the Spikes
We first start with the SCOM Performance Daily cube and filter on the Windows 2008 Server Management Pack and the % Processor Time counter. This is across all 2008 servers and across all dates and times.

We then add the server name (Host Entity – Display Name) and sort descending.  What is listed are servers that have spiked at 100% across all time.  There are others (75% or less) that have not.

The next result set is to only look at the machines that have spiked 90% or greater.  There are a number of servers that have not spiked significantly (75% or greater).

Next, we only look at data from 2012:

There is an even smaller set of computers that have spiked over 90% in 2012.  We'll filter on those next.

These are the servers we will now be concentrating on. Next add month to see the trend for all servers.

We will filter on VMDCFTP001 to look at the daily trend.

Since the highest spike is at the first of the year, we re-create this chart in the SCOM Performance Hourly cube to see the hourly trend.

We then filter on dates 01/04/2012 – 01/21/2012 and add the Hour dimension to see what hour the CPU spikes are occurring.

Now that we know when these spikes are occurring, we can investigate other data by changing (or adding) the Management Pack and associated counters to see what other information is being gathered on that server and correlate that data to investigate the root cause of the discovered CPU spikes.

Rob has over 11 years of experience in software implementation and sales. Since joining Bay Dynamics in 2003, Rob has held a number of technical, sales, and sales engineering positions that have made him a valuable asset to the organization. He continues to assist clients in effectively optimizing both their physical and virtual infrastructure through the use of IT Analytics.

New product releases are an exciting time!  New features, functionality, integration and so on.  However, there are those “practical” considerations we have to take in to account: new hardware, architecture, migration processes, software compatibility, data integrity, etc.  Once this migration is complete, how does one know the migration is done?

Unless the migration plan is a “Rip and Replace,” the System Center 2012 database/data warehouse will gather data during the transition from System Center 2007.  By using IT Analytics, Administrators, Management and Executives can quickly build granular views and high level dashboards for deep insight to the environment and migration state.

IT Analytics is designed to provide you with the ability to report on your System Center 2007 and 2012 environments – side by side – while you migrate!  To do this in IT Analytics, you would create two data connections: one pointing to the 2007 instance and another pointing to the 2012 instance.  Once the data from both sources are processed, the data can be viewed and “split” according to the source server.  Once your migration is complete, you simply “turn off” the connection to 2007 instance. 

This ability to quickly view data from two System Center data sources - in one place - helps to ensure a smooth and successful migration to System Center 2012.

Rob has over 11 years of experience in software implementation and sales. Since joining Bay Dynamics in 2003, Rob has held a number of technical, sales, and sales engineering positions that have made him a valuable asset to the organization. He continues to assist clients in effectively optimizing both their physical and virtual infrastructure through the use of IT Analytics.

In our previous two posts, found here and here, we showed you how to create and present KPIs in a number of different ways. In this last article of our KPI series, we will show you how to present these KPIs by creating a scorecard in Microsoft Excel 2010.

Business Need

Management has been very excited with the number of new reports available, along with the speed in which these have been made available.  There are some additional users that are offline and would like to view this data in Excel.

Create the Pivot Table View in Excel

We will start by creating a Pivot table view that filters on the Windows 2008 Monitoring Management Pack and the Counter Name "%Free Space." We then add "Average" as our measure, filter on the servers we are interested in and add  "Entity - Name" to see the average value for each associated disk drive.

We now click on the "Export to Microsoft Excel" button to recreate our pivot table view in Excel.

With the pivot view ready, we have access to all the dimensions and measures within Excel.  We will add the KPI Trend measure to the spreadsheet, rename the column to "Trend" and add some formatting.

Create the Scorecard

Now that we have the data, we can focus on formatting the scorecard.

First, we will add indicators to the "Average" measure.  We highlight the average values in the "B" column and click on "Conditional Formatting" and select "Shapes."  These shapes are then automatically added to the cells we had highlighted.

We will next select on "Manage Rules" under "Conditional Formatting" and click "Edit Rule".  For this example, we select the third option so the shape formatting is applied to all "Average" fields.  The last change is regarding the scale for the icon values.  We change the values to match the thresholds we defined in our SSRS report and change the type to "number" since the "Average" is already set as a percentage.

Below is a screenshot of how our scorecard is looking.

Next is to format the "Trend" column by selecting the trend value in column "C."  We click on "Conditional Formatting" and click on directional shapes.

We then go to "Manage Rules" and click on "Edit."  We select the third option to apply this formatting to all trend values.  We check the box "Show Icon Only" and leave our values and percentages at default.

After some additional formatting to the spreadsheet, we have our final scorecard.

Summary

IT Analytics has made it extremely easy to find data, allowing us to focus on presenting data in a number of formats.  We were asked to create a scorecard in Excel so even more users could view the data.  We built out a pivot table view, exported this view in to Excel and added formatting to the pivot table view.  In Excel, a multitude of users can view the latest information quickly, and act accordingly.

Microsoft's SharePoint 2010 and PerformancePoint offer powerful tools to create custom KPIs and Scorecards.  You can also use the SharePoint framework to easily and securely share this information to any user in your enterprise. 

Previously, we showed you how to create KPIs within IT Analytics.  In this post, we will walk you through the process of creating custom KPIs and scorecards exclusively within SharePoint using IT Analytics data.

Business Need

In the first post of our KPI Series, we were able to present a scorecard based on IT Analytics data in SQL Server Reporting Services.  Management has now asked that we expand the presentation of this data to SharePoint.  Along with the scorecard that was already created, additional metrics like CPU, Memory and Network utilization would like to be included.

Find the Data

First, we investigate the data in the Performance Daily Cube and filter on the "Windows 2008 Operating System (Monitoring)" management pack.  Next, we select he counters  we are interested in.  We will be using these values to filter our data, and use that resulting data set to create specific KPIs.

Create the Key Performance Indicators

Data Source Configuration

To create KPIs within SharePoint, we must configure the "Time" tab in our data source.  This configuration will allow us to define the date range for the trending of our KPI.

• First, select the data source for the Performance Cube and click on the "Time" tab.  Set the "Time Dimension" field to "Date.Performance  Evaluation.Performance Evaluation Date - Date."

• To define the Reference Member, click the "Browse" button and select a date where the trending will begin.  For this example, "2011-01-01" was selected.

• There are several options in Hierarchy (year, quarter, month, hour, etc.), so in our example, we will select "day" since that maps to the time dimension we selected.

• Next, the reference date should map to the date selected as the Reference Member.  Here, we will select "2011-01-01."

• Lastly, the aggregation should be the same as hierarchy level.  In this example, it is set to "Day."

NOTE: If you are interested in trending across a different hierarchy levels, say Month or Quarter, create a separate data source for each level.  Reason for this is to ensure calculations are across the proper level.

Our first KPI will be for CPU Utilization over the past 30 days.  In the Dashboard Designer, we click on "Create - KPI."

The first row is the "Actual" value.  To set this value, we click on the "Data Mappings" cell to bring up a new dialog box.  We will change the source to map to the IT Analytics Performance Daily Cube data source we configured earlier and click "OK."

Once the data source is set, we will filter down to our actual value for the current counter.  We do this by selecting the "Average" measure and by adding a couple "Dimension" filters.  The first is the Windows 2008 Management Pack and the "% Free Space" counter.  We then aggregate the members by "Average."

We now click on the second row to define the target.  We click on the "Data Mapping" cell for Target and enter "75" in the value field.

We can also adjust the scoring pattern and change the indicators for the "Target" value to match how we want the data represented.  In this example, we leave the default indicators and thresholds.

Next, we must define the trend value for this KPI.  We will click on the "New Target" button and a new row will be added to our KPI.  We rename that row to "Trend," and click on the "Data Mappings" cell.  We will repeat the steps we followed to get the "Actual" value, but we will be adding one new filter, a "Time Intelligence Filter."

Since our data source has a hierarchy of "day" we enter in the formula "day:day-30" to show data only from the past 30 days.  You can see the formula and a sample of the resulting data set below:

Finally, we configure the scoring pattern and indicator.  After highlighting the "Trend" row, we click on the "Set Scoring Pattern and Indicator" button.  In this dialog box, we want to show that an increase is better, but also display the trend relative to the actual value.

After clicking next, we select a half-circle indicator to show the trend.

The last page does not require any additional configuration, so we click "Finish."

After renaming our KPI, our final configuration should look like this:

Creating a new Scorecard

To view the KPI, we will have to add the KPI to our first Scorecard.  From the "Create" tab, we click on "Scorecard" and select the Analysis Services template.

We will also select our Performance\KPI data source:

Then select "Create KPIs."  Don't worry, we will be able to import the KPIs we just created.

On the next page, we click "Select KPI," we select the KPI we just created, and then click OK.

Once the KPI has been added, we leave the default settings for the remaining pages and click "Finish" on the last page.  With some additional formatting, our new scorecard and KPI is available.

We created 4 additional KPIs and added them to our new Scorecard:

Drilldown Scorecards

Being able to view overall KPI trends is invaluable, but being able to see that data at a server or entity level is the sort of forensic analysis IT Analytics and SharePoint 2010 can make a reality.

We start by creating a new KPI called "Win2008 Server Disk Space Utilization."  We based this KPI on the Windows 2008 Monitoring Management Pack and the Performance Counter "% Free Space."  We set a goal of 75% as our upper threshold and in our scoring patter options, we select increasing is a positive trend.

Next, in the "Create" tab, we click on "Scorecard" to create a new scorecard and add our newly created KPI.

To build out the drilldown, we will drag and drop the "Host Entity - Display Name" dimension, located in the right pane, after the KPI name as a "last child."

After the dimension is added, we are prompted to select the target servers for this KPI.  We select the servers we are interested in, and then click "Refresh" on the "Edit" tab and we get the resulting scorecard.

Next, we will add "Entity - Name" to the right of the server as a "last child."

Again, we click on "Refresh" on the "Edit" tab and the scorecard is updated.

To ensure that we don’t have any empty rows in our scorecard, we will right-click on the "Target" and "Trend" headers and select "Filter Empty Rows" for both columns.  Note that the filtering does not appear in the Designer view, but will be in the final published scorecard.

Publish the Scorecards

Finally, we add both scorecards to a Dashboard and publish.  We can now view the KPIs and Storage scorecards in this new SharePoint page:

Summary

Using feature rich Microsoft technologies and robust IT Analytics data, we were able to locate the metrics our management was interested in and quickly created a number of Key Performance Indicators and two different scorecards to display these metrics.  These scorecards offer tremendous insight and are readily available on SharePoint, enabling the team and management to view the current state of the environment, without any additional custom report  or custom query development time.

IT Analytics makes it easy to navigate System Center data and identify metrics to measure against.  While these metrics can be identified and managed within the Service Manager console, Microsoft has a number of technologies that makes it easy to share this information.  In this post, we will show you how to create a Scorecard that shows performance against a defined goal and the KPI Trend relative to that goal, all within a SQL Server Reporting Services Report.

Business Need

Management continues to ask the team about disk space utilization and how we can continue to optimize available disk space to support our growing environment.  Since all this storage data does exist in SCOM, we will create a scorecard listing the servers of interest, the drives associated to each  server, and free space metrics.

New KPI

The first item we will need to create is a Key Performance Indicator.  This KPI will be based on the "Windows Server 2008 Operating System (Monitoring)" management pack counter "% Free Space."   By creating this KPI based on this single counter, we will be able to split this metric across servers and drives in our scorecard.

We highlight the grand total value and click "New KPI."  In the "Edit KPI" dialog box, we add a goal of "75" and trend this over the past 180 days.

After clicking on "Save KPI," the KPI values are saved to the cube.  We can now include these values in a SQL Server Reporting Services data set.

SSRS Scorecard

Following the steps outlined in this blog entry to connect to the IT Analytics SCOM Performance Daily cube, we create the dataset we are interested in.  We include KPI Trend data as well.

Next, we build out the report by adding host name and entity name to our rows, counter name as a column and the average as the main value.

The next two columns we add will make our scorecard really come to life.  We right click on the cell that contains the "average" value and select "Insert Column - Inside Group - Right." 

We will do this action twice: one for the state indicator and one for the trend indicator so our table looks like this:

The first indicator we will insert is the "state" indicator.  We will place this indicator in the first cell to the right of the average.

Once the indicator has been placed, a dialog box will appear allowing us to select what indicator we want to include.  For this first indicator, we will select Shapes:

Once in place, we right click on the icon and select "Indicator Properties" to modify the default settings.  On the first page, we name our indicator.

In the Value and States section, we set "Value" to [Sum[Average]].  While these can be adjusted to match requirements, in this example we will leave the default settings.

In the actions page, we leave the default settings of "None."

We will repeat the process above and insert a second indicator to the right.

The second indicator will be a directional indicator:

We then right click on the indicator to change the Value properties.  Since the KPI Trend is part of our data set, we can use that value to calculate the trend indicator. We set the value field, adjust the states and click OK.

After some additional formatting, we can view our scorecard detailing for each server, the percent free disk space for each associated drive and how the percent disk space has been changing over the past 180 days.

Summary

Management asked for a report based on free space data within SCOM and to present this data in an easy to understand format.  Within IT Analytics, we were able to quickly investigate the Free Disk Space data and define a Key Performance Indicator.  This data was then the basis for our SQL Server Reporting Services Scorecard.  This scorecard can now be embedded in a web page, included in a SharePoint site, or subscribed to for frequent updates.  This new report will enable the team and management to review performance and trending relative to defined goals and make more informed decisions regarding disk space utilization.

System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2012 beta is here!  The goal of this post is to demonstrate how to configure .Net Application Performance Monitoring in SCOM 2012, and then analyze that data with IT Analytics.

AVIcode Configuration

After SCOM 2012 has been installed and SCOM agents deployed, we then configure Application Performance Monitoring (APM).  All of the necessary agent functionality is now integrated within the SCOM 2012 agent.  All we need to do is configure a monitor to get up and running!

First, APM is .NET exclusive in 2012, so we need to identify and create a monitor for a specific .Net Application.  We click on "Add Monitoring Wizard", as shown on the following screen:

On the first page, we select the type of monitor:

Next, we name the monitor, give a brief description and select and existing Management Pack (MP) or create a new MP. In our example we created a new MP named AVIcode. Please note that the Monitor name cannot be changed once created.

On the next page, we specify what sites we are going to monitor.  The SCOM 2012 agent is able to scan and return .NET compatible applications.  This discovered data populates the component list, making it easier to select which applications to monitor.

In SCOM 2012, AVIcode monitors are specific to the application, regardless of what server it is located on.  To track performance of an application on a specific server, you specify these servers by clicking on the "Search" button in the Monitored Servers section and select any default group or user created groups.

For Server Side Monitoring, we leave the default options and performance event threshold.  We click on the checkbox so we can gather data on the end user experience as well.

Here, we have enabled client side monitoring for the site we are interested in.  We have not excluded any pages at this time.

This next page allows us to refine the monitor even more.

Last page is a summary of the settings.

Now that our monitor is created the final sep is to restart IIS on any servers the monitor applies to in order to enable monitoring.

Out of the box Reporting

The SE Viewer has been brought back in SCOM 2012, see:

The raw performance data about the site can bee seen at the URL http://localhost/AppDiagnostics/ on the SCOM server.

Management Pack reporting is consistent as well:

AVIcode Data Analysis with IT Analytics

To view all the available AVIcode/APM performance data, we create a pivot view where we filter on the "Operations Manager APM Library" and break this down by the available counters.

We filter on the "Avg. Request Time" counter and add "Entity - Name" to see each site we are tracking.

Next, we will convert this in to a chart.

To investigate that API further, I switch back to a table, filter on that App and look at the daily trending.

The 11th of August has an unusual spike.  I'll filter on that date and add "Performance Evaluation Time - Hour" to my table to get more detail.

Looks like this spike was an anomaly.  To see the trending for the remainder of the day, I exclude the "0" hour, and change this table to a chart.

Summary

The tighter integration of .Net Performance Monitoring in to SCOM 2012 will prove very beneficial, and the setup is fairly straight forward.  Once that data has been collected, the OpsMgr cubes in IT Analytics enable you to analyze that APM/AVIcode data in a fast and flexible manner, giving you the insight you need when you need it! 

Bay Dynamics is interested in GreenIT and finding more effective ways to manage and track the power consumption of the Dell servers in our data center.  Using IT Analytics to analyze the power performance data collected by the Dell Management Pack, we can review power usage and find ways to reduce usage over time.

I downloaded the Dell Management Pack from here: http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/d/solutions/dcsm-openmanage-microsoft-scom-sce.aspx

We installed the Dell Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager to get additional insight in to our Dell infrastructure.  Once this data was reported to Operations Manager, we processed the SCOM data to our IT Analytics cubes to view the available data.

We can see that the the management pack has some great performance data around power consumption, which is the exact data I want to focus on. 

I am interested on how much energy the servers in my data center are using, so I've added the server name to my pivot table, along with the minimum, average and maximum values.  By slicing and dicing the data, I can get deep insight as to how many Watts each server is using. 

Let's visualize this data in a chart and compare these servers.

I can see that my averages are close to the bottom end of power consumption, which is a good thing.  However, I am curious about the spike on my one of my SQL servers.  When did that occur, and could it be a trend?

Rather than following up with my DBAs to build out a complex report that may take several hours to build, I modified my chart so I can filter on the SQL server I am interested in, along with adding dates to see what the daily power consumption. 

More good news!  The two spikes look to be an exception and only occurred across two specific dates.  Filtering on those two dates and adding the hour to the pivot table, I can see this server's hourly power consumption.

With our GreenIT initiative in place, my management was concerned about quantifying our efforts.  We had developed and implemented a plan that we felt was sound, but really needed to understand how these changes effected our data center environment.  The Dell Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager gave us invaluable power consumption data.  By using IT Analytics, I was able to easily navigate this power consumption data and quickly create a number of reports for my management team.  Also, since the report is as dynamic as the data, my management team can review the latest information, when they need it, without having to wait for a new report or additional processing time.

With IT Analytics, not only is it easy for analysts and users to get the System Center data they want on demand, but using the subscription capabilities in SQL 2008 Reporting Services makes sharing System Center data even easier!

In this post, I will walk you thought the process for subscribing to IT Analytics reports.

Prerequisites

To make sure the subscription process works smoothly, I want to check the following prerequisites.

Enable SQL Server Agent

Reporting Services uses SQL Server Agent to kick off a subscription and this service must be enabled.  I can check the SQL Server Agent settings in the Services window.  My SQL Server Agent should be set up up to run automatically as a startup service.

SQL Server Reporting Services E-mail Settings

To send reports via email, I need to have the SQL Server Reporting Services E-mail Settings configured, specifically: Sender Address and SMTP server.

Data Source Access

For Reporting Services subscriptions and scheduled reports to work, this service must know what account to run as.  To do that, you must specify this account within the Data Source definition.  This can be configured within the "Reporting" tab that is part of the IT Analytics Configuration Manager.

User Access

Next, I need to check my access to the Reporting Services instance.  If I, or any other users, are to subscribe to any IT Analytics reports, we must have the “Browser” assigned.

Subscriptions

Now that I have all the prerequisites in place, Subscriptions can be accessed from SQL Server Reporting Services Report Manager.  The Report Manager URL may be in the following format:

http://<<reportserver>>/reports

Here is a listing IT Analytics reports on my Report server.  Now that I found a report that I am interested in subscribing to, I click on the dropdown arrow next to the report name and select "Subscribe..."  This will bring up available subscription options.

Emailing a Report

Now, I have two delivery options to choose from: “E-mail” and “Windows File Share.”  Both options are listed in the "Delivered By" dropdown.  For this first example, I want this report sent via email.

I pick “E-Mail” in the “Delivered By” dropdown and a number of new options are listed.  In the screenshot below, I typed in my email address in the "To" field and added a comment.  If I click the "Schedule" button, I can specify how often this report should be sent to me.

If there is a subset of data I am interested, then I can use the "Report Parameter Values" to refine the data that is included in my report.

Now that I have my subscription set the way I want it, I click "OK" to save the subscription.

When I visit the “My Subscriptions” page, I can review when all my subscribed reports were sent and status of that send.

Below is an example of a report that was emailed to me:

Windows File Share

Another requirement I have is to have a monthly snapshot of this reports.  I can use the "Windows File Share" subscription option to make this happen.

When I select "Windows File Share," I am presented with a number of options, including where to save the file, credentials to be used and the schedule.  Just like the email settings, I can edit the parameters to filter the data that will be saved to the file.

I click "OK" to save the subscription and go to the specified drive to view the saved file.

With a few clicks, my users and I can get the latest Microsoft System Center data when I need it, further empowering me and enabling me to make informed decisions about my environment.

For any additional help, please contact us at ITAnalytics@baydynamics.com