When talking about dashboards in SCOM you are sure to run into Savision Live maps. I will shortly discuss several dashboarding possibilities for SCOM soon in this series, but I especially wanted to call your attention to this one. I have been working with this product for years now and in some occasions it can be used to solve some of the challenges of creating groups and distributed apps if the objects contained are very diverse. Also these guys have been very fast in responding to any enquiry/question/ feature request /bug I have ever had about their products.
As far as dashboarding for SCOM goes, the Live Maps are by far the best product I have seen. Of course the Visio add-in that was developed later has part of the functionality, but surely not all of it. If you want to see some of the common scenario’s for using Savision Live Maps you can take a look at this page for nice and simple scenarios, which already look great: http://www.savision.com/node/41
There are examples of dashboard versions of distributed apps or application topologies, network topology, business process modeling, site and location modeling and more. But like I said there are more uses for the product and I have also seen some great dashboards built by people who seemed to be graphical artists next to being able to get the necessary information from SCOM on that same screen!
The best part of the story is that there is a free 5 map version available to you to start working with it and get as enthusiastic as I am about it.
Of course the guys at Savision have not been sitting idle, so they have added more and more features to the product. Next to that they have added a Live Maps for Service Manager and a Live Maps for the Cloud.
If you are on their site, also check out Vital Signs at http://www.savision.com/vitalsigns , another product of theirs that I will discuss later.
