Tuesday, July 5, 2011

SCOM Dashboards - Part 2 - Installing the Dashboard Solution Accelerator

Before reading this post, please ensure you have reviewed my previous posts on SCOM Dashboarding from the links below:

SCOM Dashboards - The Intro
SCOM Dashboards - Part 1 - Installing WSS 3.0

In this post, I will go through installing the Dashboard Solution Accelerator. If you are reading these posts, then you are probably aware of the fact that SCOM 2007 R2 doesn't come bundled with any easy-to-consume dashboards that you might want to use to present your infrastructure data to senior management or 'Level 100' service desk personnel. Instead, the dashboards that come out of the box with SCOM 2007 R2 are really only useful for either SCOM administrators or high level technical staff.

This is similar to the problem that System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and System Center Service Manager (SCSM) administrators were having and Microsoft resolved this by releasing a free solution accelerator dashboard solution for each of these two products - but not (on the surface of it) for SCOM!

The dashboards that these solution accelerators can produce are really impressive and work by injecting SQL queries into Web Parts and selecting the chart type such as Pie Chart, Graph, Scorecard etc. and then presenting the SQL data into a nice graphical interface to be displayed for all the (non-technical) world to see!

What Microsoft don't shout from the rooftops on these solution accelerators however is that  not only are they for SCCM and SCSM but they work perfectly with SCOM too! This post will explain how to install this solution and remove all references of SCSM or SCCM and replace it with SCOM!

For the purposes of this demonstration, I am going to be using the SCSM dashboard as it is newer than the SCCM dashboard and comes with the tabs pre-configured (you can manually create the additional tabs in your SCCM dashboard following the steps in these posts if you currently have that in use though).

To begin, download the SCSM dashboard solution accelerator from the following URL:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=16445

Once you have downloaded the zip file, extract it to a location on your SCOM Management Server (or the server that you have installed WSS 3.0 onto) and using an account with Administrative permissions, double click on the installer as below


 Click next to continue


Input your administrative user account details and your SCOM SQL server and database names as below


On this screen, make sure you specify the server name that you installed the SQL database for the WSS 3.0 website onto in the 'Sharepoint Database Server Name' field and at this point, it is worth making a note of the URL and port number that the dashboard will be accessible from

Click 'Install' to continue


All going well, you should see the screen below when the wizard is finished installing the SCSM dashboard


Browse to the URL and port number that you noted earlier and you should see the default SCSM dashboard window similar to the one below


Now that we have the SCSM dashboard solution installed into our environment, Part 3 will be about customizing it and removing all the references to SCSM and replacing them with SCOM!

10 comments:

  1. Thanks for this series of great blogs! I am a bit confused as to the differences in using the SCOM SLD v2.0 vs using the SCSM SLD. Could you please explain in a little more detail? Thanks.

    Richie T.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Richie,

    Thanks for the positive comments about the blog!

    To clarify, the SCOM SLD v2.0 is actually a very specific Service Level Dashboard that allows you to create Service Level Objectives based on uptime/downtime and usually tagged onto Distributed Applications.

    Marnix Wolf (SCOM MVP) has written a handy post on the SCOM SLD v2.0 which is worth a read:

    http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/2009/05/scom-r2-service-level-dashboard-mp.html

    The SCSM dashboard is not out of the box a 'Service Level Dashboard' and as such is not referred to as the SCSM SLD. It is in fact a dashboard built using SharePoint Foundation and was originally designed with custom queries and webparts that were for the SCSM product. See the link below for information on this one:

    http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2010/06/22/announcing-service-manager-2010-dashboards.aspx

    The SCSM dashboard is an upgrade with some additional out-of-the-box features to the original SCCM dashboard that Microsoft had released to provide data transparency from within an SCCM environment. See the link below for information on the SCCM dashboard:

    http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=2753

    To finish, both the SCSM and SCCM dashboards are very similar - just the SCSM has some newer functionality and themes - and the SCOM Service Level Dashboard (SLD) v2.0 is specifically for your Service Level Objectives / Agreements.

    Hope this helps!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Kevin,
    Very nice tutorial. I'm new to SCOM and trying to learn it.
    We've SCOM with SQL server technology (bundled).
    Can I use the same SQL for this WSS 3.0? or do I need a separate SQL Server?

    Regards,
    Raghu

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Raghu,

    Thanks for the comments and good question about the SQL and SCOM bundle.

    If you purchase a licence for SCOM and it comes with SQL bundled, then this SQL installation is only for SCOM and nothing else unfortunately.

    I know Microsoft have good discount pricing for purchasing SQL as a separate product when purchasing a System Center product but if you've already purchased the bundle then that's not much help to you!

    I would recommend speaking to your Microsoft licence reseller as technically, if you are only using WSS 3.0 for SCOM dashboards then it is part of your SCOM deployment - although this is a gray area and one that would need clarification before installing it.

    You could try installing an instance of SQL express and see if that allows you to go any further but it's not something I have tried in the past as I usually install the WSS databases onto the SQL server install that I have my SCOM instances on.

    Hope this helps!

    Kevin.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi there, awesome tutorials here, Wondering if you can shed some light for me on this, My install fails after the ActivateViewerWebpart section and rolls back the installation.

    Ive dumped out the log files and im getting this in the logs just before the rollback actions.

    this seems to tbe what its doing after the activate
    Calling custom action Microsoft.DashboardFramework.Components.CustomAction!Microsoft.DashboardFramework.Components.CustomActions.ImportMetadata

    and then this is the error i think thats causing my probs

    System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))

    Its clearly an access denied, but i have no idea to what exactly?

    Any help would be awesome .. this is a fresh build and im stumped as to why this is causing me so many problems (pebkac probally)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Nevermind kevin, i tracked down the domain admin and it installed all ok under that account.
    Thanks again for a great guide!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hi Scott,

    Thanks for the great comments and glad you managed to figure out the issue.

    I was going to suggest that you retry the install again with the domain administrator account as I had this problem in the past although it is most likely related to a permissions issue on the SQL instance or local server for the original account that was giving you the error.

    Thanks for reading my blog,

    Kevin!

    ReplyDelete
  8. How do we uninstall The SLD form Sharepoint server and reinistall It. i have some errors for certain SLO's that show in the Sharepoint site
    As decribed in my post here http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/da/operationsmanagergeneral/thread/ca77a540-39f2-4ff4-8574-b2340e038c91

    regards,
    Kitaab

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hi, I am facing issue in installing the SLD. I have SCOM 2007 R2 and MSSQL 2005 SP4 on Windows 2003. Please help me...

    Logs posted on below link.

    http://contactgprabhu.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  10. hello,
    thank you for sharing,
    except in my case, I have a problem with installation SCSM dashboard, here's a tip of the msi log ServiceManagerDashboard:
    MSI (s) (E8: 90) [14:47:27:785]: Calling SRSetRestorePoint API. dwRestorePtType: 0, dwEventType: 102 llSequenceNumber: 0, szDescription "Installed Service Manager DashBoard".
    MSI (s) (E8: 90) [14:47:27:785]: The call to SRSetRestorePoint API failed. Returned status: 0. GetLastError () returned: 127
    MSI (c) (08: DC) [14:55:44:024]: Windows Installer installed the product. Product Name: Service Manager DashBoard. Product Version: 1.0.1. Product Language: 1033. Manufacturer: Microsoft Corporation. Installation success or error status: 1603.

    my config:
    W2008r2 server for WSS
    W2008r2 server for scom
    SQL Server cluster W2008r2 for BDD: SCOM, WSS

    The account used is a director of all servers.

    thank you for your help.

    Ludoo.

    ReplyDelete