Welcome back to my second post of my OMS post series on blog.tritze.eu!
In this post we will have a look about how to get started with this great solution named Operations Management Suit. The give a basic overview about what this post covers, here is a kind a small agenda:
- Create your first OMS Workspace
- Connect Agents to OMS
- Installing Azure Solutions
- Working with OMS
So the first step towards OMS is to create a workspace. So basically we are starting where we started in the first post, at aka.ms/getoms. Now from this site we can create a new workspace in OMS – so Get Started > …
To create a workspace, we need an already active Microsoft Account. This can be a personal account or a work account. I the last week I have tried both, an account with my normal personal Microsoft account and a second workspace with a test user account from my on-prem environment witch is synced with an Azure AD. Both works perfectly, but for some other tasks around OMS and Azure Automation a work account is necessary. To create the new workspace, which is nothing different then a new instance of OMS, just specify a name and a region. I use the Azure “West Europe” region, which is currently the nearest region to my German home. Like I heard from the MS Ignite this year, the OMS product team will bring OMS also to the German Azure region which started a few days ago. So at this point, thank you to Ed Wilson and the whole OMS team for not forgetting Germany J.
Next step, select a Azure subscription, on which this OMS Workspace will run.
And this was the “installation process” of OMS. Pretty fast.. 😉
So, now this is a new clean, fresh and empty instance of OMS. No prepopulated data or something else.
As first step I want to connect some servers to monitor with OMS. In this first step I don’t want to connect my new OMS instance with my on-prem SCOM installation, but I will do this in one of my next OMS blogposts.
The first step to connect a new server is get the required connection data. So let’s switch to Settings -> Connected Sources -> Windows Servers. Here you can copy your exclusive workspace ID which identifies this workspace, also there are keys. To connect a new agent on a server the key is used like an authentication token. I copied both and the workspace ID just to have It save.
The OMS Agent is nothing else than the well-known Microsoft Monitoring Agent which is used in SCOM. In fact, I do not use SCOM in this environment, so I have to download the x64 MMA installer. I simply downloaded it, and copied it to four of my servers. In this case I used both Hyper-V 2016 servers and both DC’s, which are also running on Windows Server 2016.
As you can see, the installation is most times next next next…. (At this point I’m very sorry. While I installed the agent for this post I didn’t realize that the installer was set to German, but the option are on the same place in English.)
So here I’m just selectin to use this agent with OMS. It’s also possible to connect the agent to SCOM from here.
As I mentioned before, here we have to use the workspace ID and a key to connect this agent with OMS. Also you can configure a http proxy from here. If your environment doesn’t support a direct https connect to the internet without any proxy, you have to configure the proxy settings for this agent here. The agent uses only outbound http connections for data transmitting. So if you think about other tools, the network requirements from OMS are really easy to satisfy.
Now the agent is configured, and starts collecting data and uploading to OMS.
I installed another agent on other servers.
To start analyzing Log, I configured OMS to collect Log-Data from some default logs on my windows servers. For my first test of log analytics the default logs Application, Setup and System should be enough. I configured OMS to collect every type of log entry from this logs, so every warning, error and information entry will be transferred to OMS and saved there.
At the Windows Performance Counters, It’s possible to configure OMS to collect additional performance counters from the connected agents. The performance counters you can see in the screenshot below are the defaults. At this point I don’t want to collect more performance data than this.
Next step is to get a feeling of log search.
The first search I tried out was the star. Basically nothing different then pleas OMS show me all you have. For the SQL guy, it’s nothing different then SELECT * FROM OMS … 😉
Then I tried out the Computer= query, to get all events from my first Hyper-V servers named “HV01.tritze.int”. So with this query I got around 128 results from the last 24h. But this I just collecting and searching logs, OMS is much more than this 😉
The real big thing about OMS are the OMS Solutions. These things remind me a bit of SCOM Management Packs, but with more modern style. So when we go to the Solutions Gallery we see many of them. In this post I will start with the Agent Health solution. This solution uses data to get information’s about the OMS agents.
Just add the solution from the gallery to add it to the OMS workspace.
No we see the Agent Health solution on the OMS Dashboard. These solution tiles work a bit like the Windows Client OS or Windows Phone Live Tiles. At the dashboard you see basic information’s from this solution. In case of the Agent Health solution you see the total count of connected agents and the number of agents who didn’t connect to OMS in the last 24h.
When you click on the solution, it opens. And it displays a whole amount of nice information’s. In case of the Agent Health solution things like the OS type is displayed, and in my opinion these donuts are really nice.
After a few days of testing and deploying of agents, this solution also shows me this:
I never thought about it, but yes, 12 servers are in my testing datacenter in my basement and one is a Azure VM which is running in region Europe West.
And accidentally I used different agent installers so I have different agent versions running in my envirionment:
Last but not least, if you are using OMS for testing always have a look in the OMS preview settings. I enabled them all, because I like previews 😉
In this screenshot the View Designer was a preview, but since Ignite 2016 the View Designer is released!
So, I’m at the end of my second post about OMS! I hope you’re still excited about OMS as I am. If you have questions about OMS just commend here or use twitter (@tritze1693) to get in touch with me.
In the next post I will do stuff like connect SCOM with OMS and integrate Azure Automation into OMS, so stay tuned!