Read the full series:
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Ch.1 — What OMS is and how to use it with Veeam MP |
If you are a System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) user, you must have heard already about the Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS). Whether you are at an event, watching a webinar or reading online about this solution, the most asked question we get around OMS is whether you should keep investing in OpsMgr or start moving to OMS. Before I get to that point, let’s have a look at what OMS exactly is.
What is Microsoft Operation Management Suite (OMS)?
OMS is a cloud-services based solution that is able to retrieve data from your servers or through your operations management solution and gives you insight in that data through solution packs. These solution packs can be chosen from a gallery and come with pre-defined thresholds, rules and algorithms but can be customized by creating your own dashboards and thresholds. Solutions such as log analytics, IT automation, security and compliance and more are already available today. The list of solution or intelligence packs grows at a fast pace and additional services are delivered by Microsoft very quickly. In essence, it delivers in the cloud what Operations Manager has delivered on-premises already for years but is being developed very fast, whereas development in Operations Manager is slower and takes longer to get to the market.
So I can replace OpsMgr?
Does this mean I should stop investing in my Operations Manager installation and start moving to this cloud-based service? Can I remove the burden of maintaining the operations manager installation on-premises and just use the services from the cloud-based solution without having to worry about updates or down time?
You probably can when you have a few servers in your environment and don’t want to go through that burden of deploying an on-premises solution. You probably also can if you don’t mind delegation or don’t need specific insight into your hardware or other specific items. And you probably also can if you don’t worry about delegation…
While it is perfectly possible to only use OMS, it is the combination of Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) and OpsMgr that makes it a very strong solution.
The Veeam Management Pack
The Veeam Management Pack is a solution for Microsoft Operations Manager that provides you with app-to-metal visibility of your virtual and physical environments, giving you the visibility into VMware, Hyper-V and Veeam Backup & Replication. It is a third party management pack with lots of data gathering and intelligence built-in.
Using the power of both
In this series of blog posts, we are going to use the Veeam Management Pack and it’s data and intelligence and create some custom charts and dashboards, effectively using the power of both solutions combined. We are going to stream alerts and performance data and build custom views and dashboards based on data gathered from a VMware environment. Of course this can be done also from the data of our Hyper-V solution or Veeam Backup & Replication solution in our management pack.
To get started, we need to connect our existing, on-premises Operations Manager solution (that has the Veeam Management Pack installed) to your OMS subscription. I won’t go into details on how to create this subscription, those steps can be found on Microsoft TechNet.
After you have created a workspace, you can connect your existing on-premises solution to OMS.
This is rather easy to do.
Just click on “Register to Operations Management Suite”, and enter your OMS account credentials and connect to a Workplace.
Then, make sure that all Management Servers or agents with Veeam VMware Collectors are connected to OMS which can be done by going to Operations Management Suite\Managed Computers, clicking Add Computer/Group and adding Windows Computer with Veeam VMware Collectors installed on them.
From now on, depending on the solutions you have configured or selected in Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), data is already being streamed to OMS. For example, if you have deployed Alert Management then alerts data is going to be available in OMS out of the box. On the other hand, streaming performance data into the cloud isn’t that simple. OMS does provide a way of adding counters from Windows Performance Manager but it doesn’t contain the possibility to add custom WMI namespaces. So to be able to stream VMware performance data, which is collected by our management pack, you will need to do some additional configuration steps.
In the next part, we are going to look at the alerts that are being streamed and use that data or those alerts to create some visualization.
In the last part we are going to look at performance data and how to stream that into Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) and again use that raw data to create some queries and visualizations.