SCOM - Integrating with Network Monitoring Tools? (SevOne)

Brad_McKenna

Hello All,

Looking to see what others do to integrate Network Monitoring Tools such as SevOne to SCOM.
We have acquired SevOne and I am needing to identify a good method to integrate at the very least alerts from SevOne to SCOM. Their two main stays were SNMP traps and Email Alerts.
Email alerts we would prefer to avoid, and SNMP traps I am hesitant with simply because this would be a 1st endeavour for our SCOM and 2nd, I wonder if there is a better way. (Maybe API calls)

What are the ways you have or have seen tools like this integrated? And what works best from what you have seen?

Tom_Hendricks

Great topic--I hope this generates some more discussion.  I am in a similar situation, but I will share some thoughts in case any are helpful.

We have been looking for network monitoring tools that have a SCOM management pack, but this seems to be missing from our favorites. 

I agree that email is not a good "integration," and traps seem more like replacement than integration.  I am in the (very) early planning stages of designing an SMA monitor runbook that will poll the networking tool's API for alerts in the network monitoring tool and re-generate them in SCOM.  Although I am not sure yet, this looks like it could potentially become too heavy and complicated as requirements are still being defined.

There are monitoring tools with SCOM MP's, such as Solarwinds, but I can't offer much perspective on the quality of the information gathered or the scope of what is provided to SCOM.

Supposedly, SCOM has gotten better at SNMP monitoring with 2016, and there is a tool from Microsoft that helps build MP's for SNMP monitoring, but I have not had my hands on this yet.  It might be a viable way to get this information.

Brad_McKenna

@Tom_Hendricks Curious if you ended up doing any integration with a network monitoring tool.

For us, the deployment timeline was delayed, and following a 3 day training on the SevOne product I noted that we would best be served with the existing PowerShell module that I found on GitHub that leverages SOAP calls (one day I can change to their new REST calls) to query the system for alerts to raise as incidents within Service Manager. One of those things that is on the list of to-do's.

Tom_Hendricks

It is interesting going back and reading my comment from June.  After many delays and setbacks, we are still looking at either doing a variation of what I described earlier, or just moving all the monitoring into SCOM.  Each approach has its own (significant) drawbacks, but both get all of our system health data (eventually) into a single platform.

For us, as you may have already inferred, it is important to give our monitoring platform the complete picture, rather than bypassing it and sending alert notifications directly to SCSM.  There are many ways that I could see this being unimportant for others, so I am not suggesting that this is the "best" way to approach this for everyone.  But for us, this architecture simplifies the kind of reporting that we wish to do and also provides alert notification in SCSM.