Andrew Hale: IT Talk & Other Topics

So, over the summer I've been setting up and configuring SCOM in our environment.  I've gotten pretty decent with it if I do say so myself. I've written a few custom monitors, have a few management packs imported, you know, generally rocking out with SCOM. My boss wanted me to figure out how to suppress closed alerts in SCOM and I could see why. It was getting a little chatty and most of the custom monitors I had going were set to auto resolve after a certain amount of time. We'd get an email for each resolution state of a critical alert.  

OpsMgr is a very large and complicated program. It's best described as a framework. It's not a matter of installing it, deploying some agents, importing a few management packs and moving on to the next project; It's like an infant being left on your doorstep and you have to raise it up into a productive member of society.Our overall goal for OpsMgr is to handle some of the one-off tasks we can't accomplish with Cacti, not to replace or override Cacti. Cacti is our primary monitoring system. It's predates us using OpsMgr and has had 6+ years to grow into what it's doing today (which is a lot). Though we've had OpsMgr before (SCOM 2007), it was setup to handle some specific monitoring items that Cacti couldn't do. No monitoring system is plug-and-play so any product you get can do a lot with enough work. However, OpsMgr, being designed by Microsoft and part of their System Center suite of IT Management programs, can very deeply monitor the health and avail

One of my current responsibilities at work is managing a system called InformaCast which is an IP paging system created and sold by Singlewire Software and ties into Cisco Unified Communications Manager. InformaCast is engineered with being the foundation of an Emergency Notification System or Mass Notification System. It uses Cisco IP Phones, IP speakers and Desktop computers as an endpoint to deliver text and/or audio messages to. It can also be used by schools or manufacturing plants to control bells and such.