New F5 Monitoring Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
Comtrade now offers two flavors of monitoring packs integrating F5 into Systems Center. Last October, Comtrade introduced a Monitoring Pack that took advantage of F5’s BIG-IQ to display BIG-IPs, monitor device and application health and more - all in Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. Now, Comtrade has expanded their offering with a Management Pack that works directly with BIG-IPs - and does not require BIG-IQ. Why is this needed? Well simply, most customer don't yet have BIG-IQ. And while we would like to change that, the new MP dramatically increases the immediately addressable market - and makes integration of BIG-IPs into SCOM simple and straight forward. If you have BIG-IPs and use SCOM, try out the monitoring pack.It’s worth having. The Comtrade Management Pack for F5 BIG-IP enables IT teams to monitor F5 devices with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). With Management Pack customers will will be able to: See all virtual servers, organized by application service or by device, without leaving SCOM Easily monitor multiple BIG-IP devices from one pane of glass Address issues early and maximize availability of configured application service and virtual server by providing expected QoS level Act as soon as the issue is detected and make sure application services are operating with expected QoS level and diminish danger of device becoming unavailable due to reboot or due to disk being full Monitor SSL Certificate status Find all applications configured on a specific BIG-IP device Monitor load on virtual servers, find the least and the most used virtual server configured on specific device and optimize device configuration to provide expected quality of service View application availability to service user requests and identify root cause for either poor performance or unavailability Protect configured application services and make sure no single point of failure exists in HA setup and HA setup is working as expected A free trial is available here.
Monitoring Pack installation failure
So I went to install the latest (downloaded today) Monitoring Pack on our main SCOM server and it failed. The end of the setup log shows an MSI exit code of 1603, but scrolling through the log I see it failed during the database section. The root case was an access denied to an xml file in my user temp folder: C:\Users\stuartd\AppData\Local\Temp\F5 Networks\Management Pack\20140404_135942\ManagementPackDatabaseDefinition.xml. I had specified a new domain service account for the management pack to use, and at the SQL step of filling out the setup GUI leaving it set to Windows login was the only option. So how do I do this successfully?