This post is a continuation of SCOM and Distributed Applications: Associating Components. In part 1 I talked about DAD at a high level and pointed you towards a good example of setting up your first distributed application. For this post I'm going to go a bit deeper into modeling your distributed application.
Going forward I am going to use PetStore 2.0, from Sun's BluePrints program, as the sample service that I am going to model which has been ported to work on JBoss with an Oracle backend running on Linux. This service will help me highlight some of the complexities you will run into when modeling your service. So the main components that make up my service are:
- JBoss Application Server 5.0
- Oracle DB 11g
- SLES 10
The first step of course is to build the initial components and relationships as outlined in Maarten's video blog. The initial results for me are:
This is a pretty simple model, but I'm already running into issues if I just save this out and start to use it. The main problem that I hit is that I'm getting more errors than just the ones for PetStore. From the OS level I also have an Apache HTTP server being monitored and these roll up to the SUSE computer object, I have multiple Oracle Instance on this machine as well, so I am getting alerts from both Petstore and JOPR. So the 2nd task when it comes to build out a distributed application comes down to a choice:
- Go generic and scope the data manually via the performance and dashboard views you create .
- Model using specialized objects instead of generic objects so you can control the rollups.
- Pull out your XML editor or the Authoring Console and re-work the exported MP manually.
For this discussion I am gong to follow the 2nd path and simply use specialized objects, I will be touching on the 3rd option in a future post when I talk about extending the health model.
So making the model more specialized leads to:
The main benefit of this is that all up/down health that is reported by default will be scoped only to the objects that make up Petstore, we won't be notified of the other Oracle instances and JBoss servers on the host.
So at this point we've built out our application, we have the default diagram and state views available to us and it's time to go to the next phase which is building out custom state views, diagram views, performance views and dashboards.
That will be our next topic.
Part 1 - Associating Components
Part 2 - Building the Service Model
Part 3 - Building Custom Views
Part 4 - Building Performance Views
Part 5 - Service Level Objectives
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