I have been working in IT since 2001 for companies such as Computacenter and Getronics. I started out as a first line support analyst supporting heterogeneous networks but rapidly worked my way up the ranks expanding my knowledge as I went to include areas such as system builds, deployments, networking, and security to name a few.In 2008 I decided to concentrate on the monitoring and management of large enterprise networks using Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2007 of which I have extensive knowledge. As testament to this the Windows Management User Group (WMUG), invited me to join their ranks as a Community Leader where I have been invaluable in helping to bolster the OpsMgr skills to the benefit of the group and it's members.I have now moved into an OpsMgr 2007 consultancy role to do what I like most - working with OpsMgr and sharing my knowledge and experiences with the community.
Yesterday, Brian Wren at Microsoft released a sample widget for OpsMgr 2012 dashboards, which shows how you can make dashboards much more dynamic and displays some of the dashboard functionality I would have liked to have seen out of the box.
The screenshot below displays the sample dashboard, and what you’ll notice is that the for performance widgets on the right are displaying data for the computers selected in the left widget. This makes the dashboard so much more powerful and useful as I can now see 4 different performance metrics just by selecting the computer once. And, then by selecting further computers, I can easily compare multiple performance metrics of multiple computers.
You can download the sample from Brian’s blog post at http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/PerformanceMonitor-Sample-0714ddd0. Also on this webpage, Brian shares some information on how he collects the data to be displayed and defines the performance counters.
By using this sample as a base, I’m hoping we’ll all start producing some really good, and very useful, dashboards!
Enjoy.
David