New features are coming on Live Maps, Cloud Reporter and Cloud Advisor

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I have become familiar with Savision because of Live Maps. Live Maps Unity is a great Business Service Management solution that monitors service health performance and with it you can create dynamic and graphical dashboards easily. This is done in combination with OpsMgr, which I implement for different customers.
Within Live Maps you can create dashboards with drag-and-drop functionality at once. It's like Microsoft Visio, but then using different build-in templates and live objects!

Caption from Live Maps Unity

End of this month, during MS TechEd in Barcelona, Savision will bring new releases and updates on Live Maps, but also on Cloud Reporter and Cloud Advisor. Let's have a look at the changes:
-Live Maps Unity, will have new features such as Performance Data, Out-of-box Services and .Net Application Discovery. Savision have been working very hard during this year to move away from being just an OpsMgr add-on, and only dashboards and maps, so with their Live Maps Unity release, they have become instead a Business Service Management solution.
-Cloud Reporter is a robust capacity planning solution for private clouds based on Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, which will have the same wisdom and analysis to VMware that is offered for Hyper-V.
-Cloud Advisor integrates natively into the Virtual Machine Manager and vSphere console, analyzes your Hyper-V or VMware environment for problems, and then provides specific and detailed recommendations to tune VM's and hosts for better performance and availability.

To give you a glimpse of upcoming features in Live Maps Unity, have a look at these posts already:
-Performance Data
-Out-of-Box Services
-Dynamically Updating Services

Within the posts you can see that the following features are coming:
-Performance information with HTML5 support for performance data
-Out-of-the-box templates for Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft SharePoint (which looks great to me!)
-Cloud Reporter and Cloud Advisor can be used for both Microsoft’s Hyper-V as VMware vSphere in the next release.

Update: There are multiple webinars to come for new Q4 2014 Releases. Don't miss them!

-Live Maps Unity Webinar by Dennis Rietvink, co-founder and VP of Product Management of Savision
US: Monday, November 10, 2014 11:00 am EDT/ 17:00 pm CEST
EU: Tuesday, November 11, 2014 9:00 am EDT/ 15:30 pm CEST

-Cloud Reporter & Cloud Advisor Webinar by Steven Dwyer, VP of R&D of Savision
US: Tuesday, November 18, 2014 11:00 am EDT/ 17:00 pm CEST
EU: Thursday, November 20, 2014 9:30 am EDT/ 15:30 pm CEST

Creating multiple dashboards in OpsMgr 2012 R2

As mentioned before I did a Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2012 R2 installation already. One of the great items in OpsMgr (for myself) is creating dashboards. In OpsMgr dashboards can be created multiple ways. Some can be created in OpsMgr by default, some can be created with additional software needed. It's not my point to describe how to build them, but to point you in the right direction which is possible. Here we go!

Dashboards can be created mutiple ways, following is possible:
-Default dashboards (which can also be a Service Level Dashboard or Summary Dashboard)
-Microsoft Visio dashboards (which is published in SharePoint)
-Savision Live Maps (many possibilities, but additional licenses needed)
-Distributed Applications (chain monitoring of .NET applications)

Default dashboards are created with a layout and widgets. Widgets are powerful objects which can be used many ways. First decide how to build the framework, you can choose between:

-Column Layout (enables up to 5 vertical columns to displayed in a row)
-Grid Layout (allows layouts of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 9 cells)
-Service Level Dashboard (shows the data for a pre-configured SLA)
-Summary Dashboard (adds 3 default widgets in a 3-cell configuration)

Widgets can be choosen from the following list:
-Objects by Performance Widget (sort of Top 10 dashboard)
-Object SLA Widget (group that has an SLA applied to it)
-Performance Widget (creates a performance graph)
-State Widget (can be based on multiple configurations)
-SLA Widget (shows the data for a pre-configured SLA)
-SLA Configuration (Service Level tracking)
-Alert Widget (allows the display of alerts)
-Details Widget (shows the details of selected alerts)
-Instance Details Widget (show details of a selected group or instance)
-SLA Configuration Note (monitor Service Level Objectives)

Microsoft Visio dashboards are created with SharePoint 2010 using Microsoft Visio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Extensions for System Center 2012. Just make sure you have SharePoint 2010 Enterprise edition installed, because only this edition has the Visio Web Service available. Within Visio a dashboard can be created and used in SharePoint with Extensions. That way a graphical dasboard can be created with OpsMgr Health Explorer access on all items. Have a look here for installation: http://blog.scomfaq.ch/2013/07/10/scom-2012-sp1-publish-visio-dashboard-in-sharepoint-2010-walkthrough/

Live Maps for System Center is the enterprise visualization solution for Microsoft System Center. Their interactive dashboards, maps and diagrams add business context to every alert and incident, making sure your limited resources can focus on the things that really matter to your business. Live Maps is ready for R2! The upcoming release of Live Maps is compatible with System Center 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1. The release will be available on October 18. No SharePoint 2010 or Visio 2010 are needed with Live Maps. Just install the product and get started. All objects in OpsMgr will be automatically available for dashboard creation.

A Distributed Application in OpsMgr is an application that is comprised of multiple objects. These objects may be defined by different management packs and may be managed on the same agent or on different agents. The purpose of the distributed application is to provide an overall health for an application that is comprised of different objects. Distributed applications do not provide any additional monitoring for the objects in an application. Instead, they include objects that are already being monitored. The value of the distributed application is to provide a relationship between the health of objects that are part of a single application. You can create distributed applications using the Distributed Applications Designer in the Operations console.

A few examples on this:

Summary Dashboard in SharePoint 2010

 

A Distributed .NET Application

 

MAP View with Active Locations

 

Integration with Microsoft Visio

 

Performance Widget - Grid Layout

 

Service Level Dashboard

 

Network Monitoring

 

SLA Widget - Grid Layout

 

They look just great isn't it? Possibilities are many on this point.
Want to know more? Just leave a comment on this post.