Monitor a website using SCOM 2012
So you just installed SCOM? Now you are excited to put it to use. One of the first things I wanted to do is to monitor a website. Here I will describe how you can do it quickly.
First some references:
Here is how I actually did it:
Step 1: Deploy an agent
- Open the console and click on “Monitoring” on the left side (should have been already there).
- Click the link Configure computers and devices…
- On the Discovery Type page, click Windows computers and click next
- Select Advanced discovery
- Select Servers Only and click next
- Select Browse for, and Click Browse button. Search for and select some servers to start with. Click Next.
- Type a domain account which has local admin rights. We have a service account for this purpose.
- Click Discover and it shows you the server name with a checkbox next to it.
- Check the checkbox and allow it to install the agent.
Refer to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh230731.aspx for further information.
Step 2: Import Management Packs:
Follow the instructions in this document. I chose to install these management packs, to start with:
- Windows Server 2003 Operating System
- Windows Server 2008 Operating System (Monitoring)
- Windows Server 2012 Operating System (Monitoring)
- SQL Server 2012 (Monitoring)
Step 3: Monitor a website
Ok, so I want to monitor a website. I wanna be notified as soon as it goes down. I followed this document to setup a new monitor for my website.
Step 4: Setup SCOM for sending email notifications
So now you have setup SCOM to monitor your website but you still need to setup SCOM to be able to send e-mail notifications in case the website goes down. Here is how:
Setup a notification channel
Click through Administration >> Notifications >> Channels >> New >> E-Mail (SMTP)
Complete the steps in the wizard, it is pretty self explanatory.
This will tell SCOM which SMTP server to use if it needs to send out an e-mail to you or any other e-mail ID.
Setup a Subscriber
Now you need to tell SCOM the e-mail ID of the people who need to get notifications.
Click through Administration >> Notifications >> Subscribers >> New >>
Complete the steps in the wizard, it is pretty self explanatory.
Step 5: Setup a subscription
Now you need to tell SCOM the situation in which it needs to send a notification e-mail ID out.
Click through Administration >> Notifications >> Subscriptions >> New >>
- Give a subscription name and a detailed description and click next.
- On the next page (subscription criteria) in the conditions box, check “raised by any instance in a specific group”
- In the “criteria description” box click on specific and find “Web application availability monitor group” and click next
- Click “add” and select subscriber and click next.
- Select a channel (SMTP channel) and click next.
- Click Finish.
Step 6: Test! Test! Test!
Now you need to test if SCOM is monitoring your website properly. For this, you need to:
- Take down your website (stop IIS or whatever webserver you are running).
- Wait for the time period specified in SCOM’s monitor.
- See if you get an e-mail from SCOM.
3 Comments
Martha
Rajeev:
Thank you for the info! It’s been very helpful. I have successfully built my monitor and tested it and have gotten an alert.
The question I have is should I get a separate alert every time the conditions aren’t met or do I have to manually close the alert that is open?
Reason being…I got the one alert, it’s open in my Open Alerts View. I purposely set the conditions to send another alert but I haven’t received one.
Any help is greatly appreciated!
Martha
Rajeev
HI Martha,
You will get only one alert each time the condition “Changes”…meaning if the website goes down you will get one alert e-mail…. then when the website goes up, you will get another e-mail. I have not yet found a way for SCOM to keep sending me alerts (say every 10 minutes) until the website goes up again.
Inside SCOM’s console, you will see the alert go away once the website is up. The alerts also have a history….you can check when the site went down in the past. If you configure reporting, SCOM can also generate uptime reports….something which I have not configured yet. The managers keep asking for those reports 🙂 It is on my to-do list.
ASR
Hello Rajeev
Can you please suggest how to remove website from SCOM monitoring.