Creating Custom Monitors in SCOM

One of the awesome things about OpsMgr is that if you can't find a management pack to do something you need done, you can write your own. At a basic level, you don't need to write a whole management pack. If writing your own MP is akin to writing a cookbook, making a custom monitor is like writing a simple recipe. We're going to write a basic custom monitor in the instructions below.

The first thing you'll want to figure out is what you want to accomplish with your custom monitor. Having a goal in mind will ultimately shape how you build your monitor.

In the Authoring section, under Monitors (found under Management Pack objects), right-click, select “create a monitor” and then select “Unit Monitor…”

The “Create a Unit Monitor” wizard will open. From here, you can choose the type of monitor you wish to create. This is really where your end-goal comes in to play. Do you want to monitor a service on s specific machine? Do you want to watch the event logs for a specific event? These are the usual monitor types we have in our environment. In this example, I'm choosing to monitor a service. Before I can proceed, I have to add this monitor to a Management Pack. If this was a new monitor for a certain task I was already doing then I could select an MP and be on my way. In most cases, it's best to assign your custom monitors to their own MP. Making an MP is easy and often a necessary part of creating your custom monitor.

Click the “New…” button next to “Select Management Pack”. In the Create a Management Pack wizard, you should name your management pack accordingly. I usually make an MP specific to the custom monitors I'm setting up and name them that way. As you tune and tweak your monitor, you can keep a change-log in the description of the MP. Once you've put in the name and description, click the “Next” button and then click “Create”

When the MP wizard closes, you'll be back at the Unit Monitor wizard. Go ahead and click “Next”. At this point, you can give your monitor a name, a description, choose a monitor target and which parent monitor you'll use (It'll default to “Availability”). Click “Next”.

From here, you can select the service you want to monitor and on what machine. Click the “…” button.

The computer will default to the management server so you'll need to select the server that you want to monitor and then you can select the server. Once you've specified the server and service to watch, click “OK” and then “Next”.

You can specify the health-state of when the service is running and when the service isn't running. It'll default to Healthy when the service is running and Critical when the service isn't running or has stopped. When you've adjusted these to your needs, click “Next”.

You can also specify whether or not you want notifications from this monitor. This is off by default but you can check the box to enable alerts. Once you've gotten the alerts configured to your needs, click “Create”.