If you are working with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) nowadays, then you have definitely heard of SquaredUP (the application dashboard company) and the solutions they offer for SCOM. There is one additional name you need to get familiar with – Cookdown. Cookdown is a SquaredUp spin out, offering different useful extensions for SCOM (i.e. Management Packs, Connectors and other solutions), many of which are community based, which means that you can have them for free.
I would like to present their solution Easy Tune, my contribution to it and how this all helps the SCOM community.
What is Easy Tune and what does it do?
Easy Tune is a free new solution (it is actually a management pack that you import in SCOM), which helps you in a quick and efficient way to configure different levels of monitoring by automatically setting management pack overrides for you.
So, if you are dealing with SCOM on a daily basis, you know that management pack tuning is an ongoing and time-consuming process. You have also definitely heard the statement “SCOM is noisy, it needs a lot of tuning”. Well that was really the case, especially if you have installed a brand new SCOM management group and you have imported all the management packs you need. After doing so all the countless rules and monitors within each management pack (most of them are enabled by default) start alerting, discoveries discover a wide range of objects and you have to start tuning each management pack.
Here is where Easy Tune comes into play. It provides you a console UI, where you can select different monitoring levels for each management pack. The tuning levels are actually defined within the so-called Tuning Packs (those are basically simple CSV files) and are actually a list of overrides, found in the respective Tuning Pack. So, if you are monitoring Active Directory for example you can import the AD Tuning Pack and select the level of monitoring you would like to have. The cool thing about this is that you can further tune (customize) those Tuning Packs according to your particular needs. And because the Tuning Pack are just CSV files, you can also forward those to the different teams within your organization (DBAs, domain team, etc.) and they can define the configuration set for their technical area of expertise without even needing access to the SCOM console. After importing the CSV in SCOM all the workflow overrides are created automatically for you and you are presented with a useful overview of what configuration is applies to what workload.
You can also watch a nice video overview of Easy Tune here:
Easy Tune Overview
https://youtu.be/mdluCDZthc0
Where to find Easy Tune and all the Tuning Packs
You can download the solution for free directly from Cookdown:
Easy Tune
https://cookdown.com/scom-essentials/easy-tune/
There is also a community store – a public GitHub repository, where all the Tuning Packs, created by the different experts are available for download. You can also submit your improvement suggestions and contribute to the Tuning Packs.
Easy Tune Tuning Packs Store
https://github.com/cookdown/easytune_overrides/
About the Active Directory Tuning Pack
My particular contributions is the Active Directory Directory Services Tuning Pack, where I have defined different levels regarding the monitoring of Directory Services. You can find more details about each tuning level by reviewing the Readme file, provided with each Tuning Pack. I have provided a short description of each Tuning level as well as some important additional information.
You can find the Active Directory Tuning Pack, I worked on, here:
Active Directory Tuning Pack for Easy Tune
go.cookdown.com/stoyantuningpack
More from Cookdown
Easy Tune is also offered in a PRO version, which you’ll have to purchase. It offers some great features in addition to the free Easy Tune version. You can find some more details here:
Easy Tune PRO
https://cookdown.com/scom-essentials/easy-tune-pro/