There are plenty of blogs out there about issues with Microsoft products and focus on when something in them needs to be fixed. I wanted to post about a recent positive experience using SCOM and show a real world scenario of how SCOM served as more than just a monitoring tool.
On a SCOM project I was configuring and tuning Dynamics AX monitoring. As a part of the project the client had a long time issue they were trying to solve. The problem was that the Dynamics AX developers needed access to the Dynamics AX servers with the ability to stop/start services so they could deploy new code and the ability to see when AX was back online. The only way to accomplish this was for the developers to have administrative access to the AX servers. The system administration team did not want to give the developers administrator access to the AX servers. The solution to this problem was simple but a big win!
Within SCOM we created a new role for the development team, scoped the security to the Dynamics folder, and gave them access to the SCOM web console. When the development team logged in all they could see were objects for Dynamics AX. When in the instances view the development team was able to view real time up/down status of the AX instances, start/stop the AX services, see how many users were online with AX in real time and more. Doing this enabled the development team so they could stop an AX instance, push the new code to that AX instance and start the AX instance again when they were done. They could do all this after hours on their own without any staff from the system administration team and without administrator access to the server.
This solution was a huge win because it satisfied both the develop teams need and the administrative teams need. Let’s just say both teams and IT management were very happy with the outcome and SCOM had a chance to shine!
