There are many tools to monitor cloud applications. Some examples are AzureWatch and SCOM 2012 (System Center Operations Manager). But the new Azure management portal, which recently got out of the beta preview, has added many features too. But for now I’ll be talking about how SCOM 2012 works with Azure and giving you an overview of the major steps for configuring SCOM 2012.
Step 1 : Install Azure Management pack of SCOM 2007
SCOM 2012 is still fairly new, so it’s not yet fully compatible with Azure yet. The current way for SCOM 2012 to work with Azure, is to install the Azure Management Pack of SCOM 2007. This management pack is also the first thing you’ll have to add in SCOM 2012 before you start configuring which cloud applications to monitor. The management pack consists of several basic configurations specifically targeting Azure, which allow you to monitor some basic key performance indicators (KPI) like CPU, Memory, Requests/sec and so on.
Step 2 : Configure the “Run As Accounts”
The first step you need to do for monitoring, is to configure two Run As Profile accounts. These accounts will be used for authentication. The first account is a ‘Run As Profile Blob’ account. This account will have a certificate in it. This certificate also needs to be uploaded to the certificate manager of the Azure portal. The second account “Run As Profile Password’ will have a username and a password. The username can be anything, but the password must match the password for the certificate.
Step 3 : Assign the “Run As Accounts” to the “Run As Profile”
After you’ve created the two ‘Run As Accounts’, you will need to assign them to the Windows Azure Blob Profile. Here you will also assign which computers will have access to the credentials provided in the two Run As Accounts you’ve created earlier.
Step 4 : Add the monitoring for the Azure application
After you’re done configuring the Run As Accounts and Run As Profile, you can start adding the applications to monitor. Start up the monitoring wizard as shown below in the picture.
The wizard will ask for a name and optional description. You also have to specify a destination management pack. Next you’ll have to fill in the following information:
- Hosted service name: The prefix part of the .cloudapp.net URL.
- The Subscription ID in which the application is hosted.
- Which environment to monitor. Production, staging or both.
- The two Run As Accounts you made earlier.
Step 5 : Check the application status
Now that you’ve added the application, you first have to check if SCOM can find the application by going to the Monitoring tab > Distributed applications. If done correctly you should see a healthy green icon.
Note: It might take a while for SCOM to find and show the application after adding the application.
Step 6 : Viewing the performance counters.
When your application is healthy, you can view the graphs of the default performance counters of Azure. The Azure management pack adds a folder named ‘Windows Azure’ in the monitoring tab. Here you can find the preconfigured views like: state, performance and alerts.
