MP Analysis and Reporting
Management Packs continue to be a bit of a mystery and we often get asked if we are able to help users understand what’s in a Management Pack. This could be for any number of important reasons:
- the IT monitoring group wanting to know the impact of deploying a new or updated MP on a service that is being monitored;
- IT needs to share monitoring configuration details with a stakeholder or application owner;
- review the validity and severity of the alerts that an MP could generate;
- ensure the MP follows corporate guidelines for data collection, alerting, etc.
- check to see what MP elements are being overridden or exactly what workflow is running on an agent.
Management Pack reporting and analysis is one the 3 key functional areas of MP Studio (with the other 2 being advanced MP development and release management and customization). This is a key area that we continue to invest in and will be bringing some exciting updates over the coming weeks and months.
Today there are several ways to analyze and report on MPs within MP Studio. Once an MP is either imported into the MP Studio database or accessed via a connection to a Management Group, it can be opened for viewing, analysis and reporting.
To start the reference tree view shows the relationships between the MP and the MPs it references.
From here you can drill into the MP you need to analyze. The resulting viewing grid is highly customizable where columns can be grouped, sorted and filtered to only see the information that’s important to you:
From this view you can also see all of the properties of any of the elements in the grid and this customized view can be exported to Excel preserving the formatting you have applied.
MP Studio also provides a 1-click documentation command which provides options to generates a full report showing the contents of an MP in either HTML format or Excel .xlsx format:
These reports can also be scheduled to run automatically to for example update an internal Sharepoint site or send out to a distribution list.
MP Studio can also generate reports showing the resulting workflows running on a SCOM agent including ALL overrides. This is particularly useful if looking to share the results with application or platform owners.
On top of all this we are also doing some really exciting work in this area leveraging Power BI to provide a much more visual, dynamic and flexible experience working with the contents of Management Packs. Keep an eye out for updates to our reports and dashboards in the coming weeks and months.
Here’s a small sample prototype we’ve put together that shows actual workflows running on agents which can be filtered by MP, agent, group or MP element type:
