SharePoint 2013 and SCOM Management Pack Ranking the Rules
-As SharePoint evolves with new features, the foot print for on-premises customers grows and more servers needs to be maintained and managed. One of the key responsibilities of a SharePoint administrator is to monitor the health of the farm. Yes SharePoint has a built in Health Analyzer from SP2010 but the rules cannot be modified to meet an organisations SLAs. However fortunately there is management software out there like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager which makes it easier to manage large server farms with the help of management packs.
However many customers who use SCOM deploy a management pack, and the first thing that happens is administrators complain that this generates to many alerts and soon alerts are sent directly to recycle bin, and genuine issues are left unattended until downtime occurs.
To overcome this issue management packs needs to be tuned, and the issues fired need context as to why the issue is firing and how is the service affected. In summary the entire management pack out of the box comes with rules and tracking that will benefit all customers. However the alerting system needs to be tweaked so that issues fired are tuned to your organizational needs.
The attached spreadsheets are the rules in a management pack with a priority methodology f the following:
- Critical: Issue that will cause impact to a single users usage of SharePoint in regards to accessing content.
- High: Any issue that needs to be addressed but the end user will not be immediately aware a problem has occurred. For example logging service not running.
This should help an organization better understand what issues affects users directly, and what issues cause problems to the farm but users will not be directly aware.
NOTE: Project Server rules have not been classified as I have not worked with project server.