Operation Management Suite (OMS)

Technical Guide

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In this guide, we will discuss the concept of Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS),

we will take a deep look about the concept of OMS, also in this guide we will discuss the

Implementation for OMS solution.

Note: This guide does not discuss the integration between system center operation manager and

OMS, for more info visit http://azuredummies.com

one big challenge facing the IT team in any company these days is to monitoring their

datacenters, this task is taking a high efforts and time from the IT team to keep their datacenters

under monitoring.

Nothing is perfect … Not even your datacenter, as everything else your datacenter need an extra

efforts and cares to meet the SLA in your company, there are a lot of products such as SCOM,

Nagios … etc. which help the IT team to monitor their datacenters, these products need to be

implemented ( Complex Implementation) in your environment in addition to the tuning of alerts

we will do after the implementation which will take high efforts and time, also in this case

sometimes you need to monitor the monitoring products itself

Now let’s take a look about detention of OMS:

OMS is a Microsoft cloud solution which responsible for monitoring your on premise

datacenters in addition to cloud ones if exist, OMS can provide the IT team with a meaningful

alerts and baselines to help them to be aware about the status of their datacenters.

OMS support windows and Linux machines, it works based on agent which need to be

installed on all servers with few clicks and the monitoring will start working automatically

without the need of implementation complexity.

The Magic of OMS:

OMS is up to date with Microsoft baseline and this is one of the great features in it, which means

if Microsoft release any new baseline check for AD, SQL, Storage … etc. it will be add to the

monitoring rules automatically, so the admins don’t need to be worry about editing any alert rule

or installing any management pack like in SCOM.

Also, OMS can be integrated with SCOM if you have to gain more benefits from it which we

will talk more about it in next part, but keep in mind here that if you already use SCOM you can

ignore the step of installing the OMS agent on the servers, in this case SCOM will be responsible

to collect the required data from all servers and send it to the OMS.

OMS as any other monitoring solutions have a baselines, the alert rules will follow these

baselines to generate an alerts, alerts have different status for example (High, very risk, Normal,

Need and action … etc.), for now you cannot edit these baselines, in other word you cannot say ”

Please OMS in next time when you generate this type of alert give a status of normal not Risk),

maybe in next days Microsoft decide to allow users to do this.

OMS have many pricing plans based on your environment requirements including a free plan,

you can use the free plan for a life time but with two major limitations, the first on is the daily

size of transferred data, which means if you decide to use the free version of OMS your servers

cannot transfer more than 500MB per day in addition to only max. of one-week data retention

For more info about OMS pricing follow Microsoft

site: https://www.microsoft.com/en/server-cloud/operations-management-suite/pricing.aspx

Now let’s move to the technical steps for the implementation of OMS, it’s an easy

process to implement OMS to start monitoring your on premise environment in addition

to cloud one if exist.

Sign Up for free version of OMS:

first of all visit the OMS site following this link : https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-

cloud/operations-management-suite/overview.aspx

Then click in Try for Free button as below:

Then click on Get Started button as below:

Fill the required information and click on create Button as below:

Workspace name: Give any name as a display name for your workspace.

Workspace Region: choose the nearest region for your environment.

Now after click a create a confirmation email will be send to your email, open you email

and click Confirm Now as below:

Now, you can link your OMS account with your azure subscription if you have, if you

don’t have click Not Now, in this example I have an azure subscription so I link it:

The OMS page will appear now, as you see nothing is configured.

Now before do anything you should configure what type of solutions you need to add to

your OMS workspace, for example if you need to monitor Active directory you should

add the AD assessment solution, if you need to monitor an SQL server you should add

SQL assessment solution from the solutions gallery.

before start adding the solutions from the solutions gallery, let’s take a look for what

solution is available until this time of writing this article since Microsoft is adding new

solutions, let’s take a three examples of solutions offered by OMS:

AD Replication Status:

The Active Directory Replication Status IP analyzes the replication status for domain

controllers in an Active Directory domain or forest. This solution helps you troubleshoot

AD Replication issues in your environment.

SQL Assessment:

Operations Management Suite SQL Assessment Solution assesses the risk and health

of your SQL Server environments on a regular interval. It provides a prioritized list of

recommendations tailored to your deployments. These recommendations are

categorized across six focus areas which allows you and your team to quickly

understand the risk and health of your environments and easily take action to decrease

risk and improve health.

The recommendations we make are based on the knowledge and experiences gained

by our engineers across thousands of customer engagements. Every recommendation

provides guidance on why the issue matters to you and how to implement the changes.

Change Tracking:

The Configuration Change Tracking Solution helps you easily identify software, and

Windows Services changes that occur in your environment — identifying these

configuration changes can help you pinpoint operational issues.

There are many solutions available now, you can see all of them in the OMS site by

click in solutions gallery as shown below:

Remember that OMS will give you some steps to solve any issue found, it provides you

sometimes with articles to help you to fix the issues, it’s very helpful tool for administrator.

Now, let’s go back to add the solutions we need, click in Blue box to get started as

below:

From solution tab, add the solutions you need, remember that you can add more

solution any time from the main page, for this example we will add any solutions,

choose the solution and click Add Selected Solutions button as below:

The new solutions added successfully as below:

Now to install the agent in the servers, go to connected source tab, you will see three

buttons, one installer for windows 64 bit servers, windows 32 bit servers and last one for

Linux OS, download the agent you need, for this example we will install it in windows 64

bit OS, so I will download the agent for windows 64 bit, also you need to copy

the Workspace ID and Primary key which will be used during the installation of the agent:

http://i2.wp.com/azuredummies.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/14-2.png

after you downloaded the agent, double click on it to start the setup, in welcome screen

click Next button:

Click I agree button:

Choose the installation path and click Next:

since we didn’t have an SCOM (we will talk about the integration between SCOM and

OMS in the next article), choose Connect the agent to Microsoft Azure Operational

Insights option and click Next:

Remember these Workspace ID and Primary Key:

Now in fill the workspace ID and primary key information, if you have a proxy click in

advance and configure it to allow the server to communicate with OMS server in the

cloud then click Next:

Ops, in My case it failed to connect to OMS server, I found that the date of the windows

is incorrect.

After I adjust the date, the wizard continues, choose what you want here and click Next:

Finally, Click install and wait a moment to complete the installation:

Click Finish:

After the installation finish, go to services you will find three new services appear as

below:

Microsoft Monitoring Agent.

Microsoft Monitoring Agent APM.

Microsoft Monitoring Audit Forwarding.

if you go to control panel, you will see a new icon called Microsoft Monitoring

Agent, double click on it:

You can edit any configuration if you need

After minutes, if you go back to the OMS portal you will see that you server appear in

the connected sources as below:

it shows that 1 new server Connected, if you click on it should display the server info:

Ops, no server info found, this is normal since it need some time to for OMS to index

the data:

Also the added solution need some time to start collecting data, for example the AD

assessment solution need around 4 hours to start display the health check.

Note: Some of OMS views and portal in this article it will not be same as your

management page since it’s depends in the customization you did, the snapshots in this

article just to demonstrate the concept of implementation.

I already installed the agent on five servers such as domain controller, SQL server …

etc.

After I login to the OMS portal, the OMS management page will be loading depends in

your structure as below:

in the left of the page, you can see four options, log search is the default page, My

Dashboard option is to customize your dashboards as we will do later in this

article, solutions gallery option to add the solution you need to activate and the last

option USAGE is determining how many MB’s transferred from your servers to the

OMS, as below:

In the right direction of the page you will see the summary of your deployment such as

the number of connected servers as shown below:

Now, again in the main page, you can see all solutions that you already added, for

example one of the solutions I already added is the System Update Assessment, this

solution simply used to identify all missing updates and classify the updates depends on its state

(Critical, Normal … etc.), so go and click in the solution:

It will display the dashboard of the solution, let’s try to click in the Critical or Security

Updates box:

It will display now all servers under monitoring by this solution, so click on any server

you need as below:

It will show you all required updates and its classification as below:

Now go back to the main page, I already added the Change Tracking solution, I love this

solution since it’s monitor all changes on the server, so imagine that you face an issue

suddenly in one of the servers and you need to know what all changes made to identify

if some changes cause the problem, Simply you can use this solution to monitor all

changes and who did the change, so as below click in the Change Tracking Solution as

below:

you can see many views that appear in the solution dashboard, let’s select software

changes box as below:

Choose the server you need to view all changes made on it:

For example, as show below you can notice that TeamViewer was installed recently on

this server, in addition it’s show the state before, for example the team viewer was not

installed before then it’s installed, if for example there was an existing team viewer

version was installed and someone upgrade to new version you will see this also:

Next few snapshots show an example of SQL monitoring as below:

The SQL solution dashboard appear as below:

It summarizes all issues in your SQL servers and the priority for each issue in addition

to Microsoft articles that will help you to fix the issues as below:

The priority numbers appear in above snapshots cannot be customized at least for the date of this

article.

Now if you Go to the options panel and select Solutions Gallery as below:

You can add any solution you need to activate, also as we mentioned the solution will

be activated in all servers automatically that’s applicable for the solution, for example if

you select SQL Assessment solution, it will have activated automatically in all SQL

servers, so simply click in any solution you need to activate it:

Then Click Add button, depends in the solution may it take time to start collecting and

analyzing data:

If you go back to the options panel, Click in My Dashboard option as below:

You will see the default dashboard, click in Customize button:

From the right panel you can drag and drop any view you need from the activated

solutions you already added:

the new view appears as below:

If you need to remove any view, just click on it and click Remove tile button:

I hope that this Guide help you to understand the concept of OMS and how to

implement it in your environment.

For more guides and articles, follow my blog http://azuredummies.com

About Author …

Ahmad Yasin (MCSA office 365, MCSE: Messaging, Azure Certified)

Ahmad Yasin in a Microsoft Cloud Engineer and the Owner & publisher of AzureDummies

blog. He also holds many certificates in office 365 and windows azure including Developing

Microsoft Azure Solutions, Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions and MCSA

office 365.

Ahmad is currently working in Specialized Technical Services Company (STS).

Find Ahmad at Facebook and LinkedIn