Global Service Monitor for System Center 2012: Observing application availability from an “outside in” perspective

First published on TECHNET on Jun 19, 2012

Dear Users,

With the CTP2 release of System Center 2012, we announced the immediate availability of the Customer Preview of a new System Center component called “Global Service Monitor”.

Global Service Monitor is an Azure-based service that extends SCOM 2012 capabilities into the cloud. It allows you to schedule synthetic transactions from geo-distributed locations to monitor availability, performance and reliability
of your externally facing web applications.

You can think of Global Service Monitor as providing “agents in the cloud” (managed by Microsoft) that you can use to test your applications. These agents return the same kind of data to your Management Group as your on-premise agents, i.e. alerts, performance data and state data, and you can use this data in the same way in notifications, reports, views etc.

Installing Global Service Monitor

To use the customer preview version of Global Service Monitor you need to sign up on the Microsoft Connect site .

We will send you credentials to sign up, as well as give you access to the Global Service Monitor bits (it’s essentially a set of Management Packs).

To install Global Service Monitor, you can use either a SCOM 2012 RTM installation, or the Beta release of SP1. Notice that the Customer Preview is not supported in production.

Setting up tests

This blog explains how GSM builds upon Web Application Availability Monitoring template functionality in SCOM 2012, and how you can leverage cloud-based capabilities provided by Microsoft to build a more comprehensive monitoring solution for your web application.

Visualizing the data

There is a map dashboard included in SCOM 2012 that you can use to visualize status of your Global service Monitor tests

A detailed dashboard allows you to see a breakdown of the performance data returned

In CTP2, there are also two "360 dashboards” that allows you to see combined Global Service Monitor and Application Performance Monitoring data in one dashboard, combining the “outside” and “inside” perspectives of application health. See the
CTP2 documentation for more information.