Release Notes Live Maps 8.8.0 for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager
Contents 1. Introduction... 3 1.1 About this document... 3 2. Release Information... 3 3. s... 4 4. New Features... 11 5. Notes... 18 5.1 Supported System Center Versions... 18 5.2 End of Life for Windows Gadgets... 18 5.3 End of Life for Summary Widget... 19 5.4 Service Level Monitoring is disabled by default... 19 5.5 New Live Maps Portal... 19 5.6 Application Discovery Management Packs... 20 5.7 ServiceNow Scoped Application Versions... 20 6. Known Problems and Workarounds... 21 6.1 Slow drill-down on Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012... 21 6.2 Insufficient privileges when starting the... 21 6.3 Service Manager Integration does not work correctly with Service Manager 2012 SP1 21 6.4 is slow on a single processor machine... 21 6.5 After upgrading Live Maps console tasks are missing in OpsMgr... 22 6.6 Service Level health states and alerts are delayed... 22 6.7 SLA values are different since Live Maps 7.5... 22 6.8 Minutes defined in Business Hour Settings are ignored... 23 6.9 Microsoft SCOM Service... 23 6.10 Error while creating a SCOM group in a Live Maps Service MP... 23 6.11Group Health Rollup versus Maintenance Mode... 23 6.12 Health Icons in Internet Explorer... 23 6.13 Dashboards with Object Explorer abuse Static URLs... 23 6.14 Summary Dashboard performance... 23 7. Contact... 24 2
1. Introduction 1.1 About this document This document contains the release notes for Savision s Live Maps for Microsoft System Center. The following sections describe the release in detail and provide late-breaking or other information that supplements the main documentation. 2. Release Information Product Live Maps for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager Release 8.8.0 Release Date November 2017 3
3. s Release: 8.8.0 PowerShell widget better supports PowerShell scripting. Summary Dashboard loading performance improved. Interactive maps and static URLs working better together. Improved loading of Dashboards with many state icons. Custom Dashboards set to not visible in will no longer appear in the Portal. Object Explorer Large Performance Chart view data sorting improved. Object Explorer Loading improved. Diagram Sparkline graph positioning improved. Heath Explorer State Change events sorting improved. Upgrading after the 8.8.0 release will no longer delete the Configuration file. NOTE: this only takes effect with the uninstall or upgrade of the 8.8.0 release. Release: 8.7.0 Fixed issue with the Health Explorer and very large Context strings causing an OOPS page. Windows Authentication now has a Sign out menu item. Summary Dashboards - Web Page widget now able to display URLs that include & characters. Interactive Maps opening position closer to what is saved in. 4
Release: 8.7.0 Fixed a few issues with Static URLs. Diagram Dashboard loading has been optimized for performance. Default site theme can now be specified by an administrator. Fixed issue where, in some cases, objects were not going into Maintenance Mode. Diagram Dashboard objects with dynamic labels can now update. This feature is turned off by default but can be turned on by an administrator. Improvements for performance graphs. Fixed issue with the Services Health Index. Release: 8.6.1 Text formatting and positioning in diagrams improved. Resolved various small issues related to the redesign in 8.6 Fixed a bug where some maintenance dialogue buttons were wired in reverse, and others were invisible. Fixed a bug where summary dashboards containing diagrams could not be saved. Small general performance improvements. Migrated Interactive Maps from Bing version 7 to Bing version 8 Fixed an issue where one of our MSI installers removed shared DLLs during uninstall. Fixed an issue where saving a dashboard caused SQL to lock up. 5
Release: 8.6.1 Service Manager Integration Fixed an issue where the SCSM connector was not automatically syncing. Release: 8.6 General performance improvements In order to improve the performance of Live Maps Dashboards the default behavior in collecting alerts has changed. All Live Maps Dashboards will now only collect 1000 alerts and will ignore informational alerts by default. These defaults can be overridden if desired. Fixed Transparency with tiles for Diagrams. On Diagrams, Dashboard Items no longer show Health State icons when no object is attached. Fixed Edit Maintenance Mode for objects. Changing class defaults in console now displays complete results in List. User role dashboard scope is now respected for Live Maps Dashboards and Service Maps. Fixed Oops message on Summary dashboards after V8.5 upgrade after multiple refreshes. Fixed error when drilling into a dashboard from a Bing map. Hotspots now work when selected for Objects or Dashboard on a Diagram. Single value output for SQL Widget no reduces to size of widget. Improved Connector rendering on Diagrams. Service Manager Integration Fixed issue deleting a membership rule from a list dashboard. Fix for Service Manager when upgraded from SCSM 2012 to SCSM 2016 6
Release: 8.5 Fixed issue with SharePoint System Dashboard not displaying on some systems. Static URL, fixed user drilling down to a Service from Service overview if a Service Note was added when drilldown was set as disabled. Added fix for large environments that were not able to display SLO section on the Service Map page. Release: 8.4 Fixed Dashboard count not showing correctly for Licensing. Operator Role can now set Maintenance Mode when it has permissions. Fixed Alert custom fields being overwritten when updating an Alert. Fixed Performance shapes breaking in Live Maps 8.3. Fixed ability to remove Excluded members for Services created from a Distributed Application. Release: 8.3 Fixed duplicated alerts in alert details widget, when a high level class was selected like Logical Entity. Performance shapes in diagram dashboards caused an error when a non-default data warehouse database name was used. The Microsoft SQL Server System Dashboard now also work when there are only Microsoft SQL Server 2014 or 2016 management packs In SCOM. For some customers the query that loads the SLA data for a Service Map timed out, because of parallel process locking. 7
Release: 8.3 Trend indicator was visible for performance shapes in a Diagram dashboard when it was turned off in the configuration. Sometimes the labels in a Diagram dashboard were not rendered correctly. Date time problems with the maintenance mode dialog are fixed. In some cases the Export Performance Data task raised an error. For some monitors the monitor details were not displayed in the health explorer. The Summary Dashboard designer didn t handle the moving and resizing of widgets correctly all the time. Fixed Sync Failure and Authentication Failure issues when dashboards were left open for a long time. Operating System performance data was not shown for Linux and Unix computers in the managed entity dashboards., and Operations Manager When there were multiple performance rules for the same performance counter in the SCOM data warehouse database, the performance shape in a Diagram dashboards could show no data by mistake. Express Installer The express installer didn t detect if IIS was installed. That way the user didn t get the correct feedback. When a service was imported from a Distributed Application and objects were excluded from one of the perspective dashboards, all objects of that type were presented in that perspective dashboard. Release: 8.2 SQL Server 2014 objects were not shown in a SQL Server dashboards. Custom labels were not displayed correctly in a list based Live Maps dashboard. 8
Release: 8.2 Labels were rendered to close to the state icon in a diagram based Live Maps dashboard. Sometimes it was not possible to edit a custom dashboards when there was a performance counter widget used. Not all icons were displayed correctly in IE11 Sometimes a wrong performance counter instance was used for performance shapes in a diagram based Live Maps dashboard. Static URL s did work correctly when used with Windows Authentication. Health Explorer didn t show when monitors were unavailable or in maintenance mode Service Manager Integration Fixed upgrade bug from 7.* to 8.2. Release: 8.1 All When performance counters were not available the view could not be opened. In some cases it was not possible to save the web portal URL in the. SLA Monitoring SLA Monitor crashed when SLO objects were manually removed from SCOM. Some chars, in display strings were not handled correctly in a diagram view. Release: 8.0 All Health state filter buttons are now acting more intuitive in case of objects that are unavailable (grey icons) 9
Release: 8.0 Stored procedures needed for SLA calculations could not be loaded when the data warehouse database didn t have the default database name. After a service is created it can take some time before SCOM is finished with all the necessary workflows. More progress information should make this process understandable. It is now possible to delete views from the Exchange 2013 out-ofthe-box service. For a performance shape in a diagram, it is now possible to select a performance counter instance when the performance counter has multiple instances. For a performance shape in a diagram, it is now possible to select a performance counter instance even when there is no data collected for the last 24 hours. After upgrading to Live Maps V7.5 custom object labels could have been reset to the default label in a diagram. Viewer in OpsMgr Fixed an Unable to refresh alerts error that was sometimes raised. It is now possible to show Live Maps dashboards from more than one management groups on one desktop. (using multiple OpsMgr console dialogs) For some service perspective views the service navigation toolbar button was not visible. Mobile App A specific Service Map view could crash the mobile app. More information about what map has been changed is sent in the push notifications. IOS Mobile App When the user switched user account or management group the favorite maps were still displayed but didn t get updated. Now the maps registered on the server are loaded so the user always has the correct maps in his mobile app. 10
4. New Features Release: 8.8.0 Another Object Explorer Page has added to be able to explore the classes within your SCOM environment. This page allows you to create a Heat Map of Class objects and then export the Heat Map to a Summary Dashboard. Drilling down on an object in the Heat Map will take you to the Object Explorer Details page. Related Services have been added to the Alert Management page for an Alert. Object Explorer - Maintenance Mode dialog now includes Category selection. New Out-of-Box Service Dashboard has been added to this Release (Dynamics CRM). Release: 8.7.0 New Out-of-Box Service Dashboards have been added to this Release (examples: Veeam, Veritas, Citrix). A new Managed Entity page (renamed Object Explorer ) now provides more details for the Object selected. A new Alert Management page has been added to help you manage your SCOM alerts. Two new widgets are now available in the Summary Dashboards; OMS and PowerShell. System Dashboards can now be hidden from the Home Page and Menu via a new Settings Page tab. Release: 8.6.1 A new Active Directory Domain Services 10 System Dashboard has been created, along with an out-of-box Service. 11
Release: 8.6.1 The Heat Map Widget for Summary Dashboards now contains an option for group membership. Added option for running the in a DMZ All s Active Directory Domain Services 10 MP now has a corresponding Savision Service MP Release: 8.6 The default theme has been changed to the Light theme. Improvements have been made to all themes in order to improve the usability of all Live Maps dashboards. The SQL Query Widget now comes pre-loaded with three examples to help you get started with your own SQL queries. Keep an eye on this space as we plan on adding even more in future releases. The formatting of the state change details shown in the Live Maps Health Explorer has been improved making it much easier to make sense of the details provided around state change events. The Live Maps health Explorer will also allow you to search online for more information about the events. Release: 8.5 Service Overview Support Area An addition to the Service Overview page is the help section drop down area from the main navigation menu. Clicking on the Question mark will show this new section. 12
Release: 8.5 Service Map Support Area An addition to the Service Map page is the help section drop down area from the main navigation menu. Clicking on the Question mark will show this new section. Service Overview Health Index Services now display Health Indices if they have been configured through the. The Health Index metric is based on Configuration Items which have been placed into specific categories. Static URL improvements Now supports web farm environments through centralizing the encryption of credentials used by the Static URL link. Service Overview Widget Updated to show Health Index About Page A new page has been added which includes additional Support information, as well as a list of the currently imported Savision Management Packs. Service Health Index Services can now display a secondary Health metric based on Configuration Items placed into specific categories. 13
Release: 8.4 Learn Live Maps A new addition to the home page is the Learn Live Maps widget which displays links to getting started tutorials. These tutorials are geared to getting you up and running with key Live Maps features. Help and Support Area Another addition to the home page is the help section drop down area from the main navigation menu. Clicking on the Question mark will show this new section. What s New This section of the new Help and Support area gives a quick highlight of new features within Live Maps. Learning Center This section of the new Help and Support area shows the most recent Help articles and tutorials from: https:///learning-page Knowledge Base This section of the new Help and Support area shows the most recent Knowledge Base articles from: https://support.savision.com/support/solutions/5000139472 Support & Feedback This section of the new Help and Support area provides links to get technical support, as well as a form to send feedback directly from the application. SQL Query Widget The SQL server widgets display types are extended by a target gauge value. Now the user can choose between a grid view, single value or target gauge presentation. 14
Release: 8.4 Home Page Styling Summary Dashboards, Custom Dashboards, Services and System Dashboards are now identified by icons. Custom Dashboards and Services now display current health where available while searching. Service Overview Widget Summary Dashboards can now include Health state for all or specific services. SQL Authentication Configuration The web.config file can now be updated to use SQL authentication credentials when communicating with the Operations Manager database instead of the windows identity configured for the IIS application pool. Static URL improvements The static URL feature now uses shorter URLs and includes a Management section in the Settings page. Static URLs can now be configured and disabled. Out of Box Microsoft SCOM Service dashboard Now you can automatically monitor all-important SCOM components in a Live Maps service. 15
Release: 8.3 Users will now have access to themes that they can choose from to control the color theme used in the Live Maps Portal. Out of the box, Live Maps Portal will offer a Dark, Light, and Blue theme, with each also offering a color-blind friendly version. Users will also be to include their own custom CSS file to fully customize the Live Maps Portal to the colors of their choosing. Users will have the ability to create an alerts widget in a summary dashboard. This widget will give users the ability to manage alerts directly from the Live Maps Portal without having to access a SCOM console. Users will be able to scope the alerts widget to a particular group or object, ensuring that they can easily manage the alerts that are important to them. Users will have the ability to create a Top n Performance widget in a summary dashboard. This widget will provide a way for users to keep track of certain SCOM objects based on key performance indicators. For example: Top 5 Computers by CPU Usage, or Top 5 Disk Volumes by Available Disk Space. This widget is heavily used in the System Dashboards (such as Top DCs by CPU in the Active Directory dashboard). The SQL server widgets display types are extended by a single value. Now the user can choose between a grid view or single value presentation. In the Service Maps, users can now see SLA information of previous periods. License information is now also accessible in the. Users can now search for Dashboards and Services from the Home Page. Users can now create new Live Maps List and Diagram dashboards and use membership rules of existing SCOM groups. All s Live Maps will change the terminology used around licensing. We will no longer talk about views or maps, but rather just dashboards. Users can create diagram-based dashboards, business service dashboards, geographical dashboards, custom dashboards, etc. Summary dashboards will now count against the license (prior to 8.3 summary dashboards were unlimited and not counted against the license). 16
Release: 8.2 Added quick navigation feature. With this feature an object or dashboard can quickly be found and navigated to. More efficient menu design. Added recently viewed dashboards list. Improved Alert Management with configurable columns, more information in the alert details dialog and the ability to edit ticket id and owner. Improved Health Explorer containing knowledge, health state change events and the ability to reset or recalculate monitors. Added support for special health state colors for users with color vision deficiency. Added support for UI Customization, using css overrides. Added Export feature of performance data to a csv file for all dashboards. Added support for SQL Server 2016 for the SQL Server and SharePoint dashboards. Health details are now supported for the Live Maps diagram based dashboards. Installer Added an express installer that can install the portal including all the Live Maps prerequisites. Release: 8.1 BMC Remedy Integration ServiceNow Integration New BMC Remedy integration. Support for ServiceNow Geneva. The HTML5 web portal is now also available for Live Maps Lite and standard customers. 17
Release: 8.0 Out-of-the-box Services New HTML 5. Service Notes Every authenticated user can add or update a note for a service for operational purposes. Read-only Dashboards. Direct URLs can be generated which includes credentials and some restriction settings. These URL s can be used in other company web portals, SharePoint or send to people that don t have access to System Center data. Improved Service security authoring experience. It is now possible to set the security for all services and all user roles in one dialog. Windows DNS Windows DHCP Windows Remote Desktop Services Skype for Business 2015 System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Exchange 2010 In this release the look of the Out of Box Services Dashboards (Exchange 2013, SharePoint 2013, Lync 2013 and Active Directory) has been updated. There are new Management Packs available under the sub folder Management Packs\Applications in the s installation folder. NOTE: if you have already imported these Management Packs from a previous release into your SCOM environment and have made modification to them then upgrading to the new version of the Management Packs will override all of the changes you have made. 5. Notes 5.1 Supported System Center Versions The supported System Center 2012 versions are SP1 and R2. With the release of Live Maps 8.4 we officially support Microsoft System Center 2016, currently there are no known issues. The current and future releases of Live Maps will not be compatible with System Center Operations Manager 2007 RTM/SP1 and Service Manager 2010. 5.2 End of Life for Windows Gadgets Please note that Microsoft has ceased support for Windows Gadgets. Microsoft no longer hosts the Gadget Gallery see the statement found at http://windows.microsoft.com/en- US/windows/downloads/personalize/gadgets and a security advisory was issued warning 18
of vulnerabilities in gadgets and offering a Microsoft Fix It solution to completely disable gadgets. As such, Savision cautions against reliance on the Live Maps Desktop Gadget. 5.3 End of Life for Summary Widget Because we cannot guarantee that our summary widget will run correctly in every customer environment we have decided to remove it from Live Maps. Our summary widget uses Operations Manager s presentation framework. As this framework does not support component isolation it is possible that conflicts between components from different third-party sources will negatively impact native Operations functionality. To safeguard customer s Operations Manager environments, we have ceased distributing the summary widget. 5.4 Service Level Monitoring is disabled by default After upgrading from 7.x to 7.5 all existing services will not have their Service Level Objectives monitored automatically, by default the Service Level Monitoring is disabled. To enable the Service Level Monitoring in Live Maps 7.5 open the service designer in the Maps and select the new SLA tab, from there Monitoring can be enabled. 5.5 New Live Maps Portal In the Live Maps 8.0 release we have replaced the Live Maps Web with the new HTML5. The new Live Maps Portal will be updated more frequently independently of the Live Maps release schedule. Notifications for the new Live Maps Portal updates will be displayed on the portals home page. The new Live Maps Portal can be downloaded here. 19
5.6 Application Discovery Management Packs Please note that due to the impact of the "Application Discovery" management packs on large SCOM environments, we have removed them from the Live Maps 8.1 Release. 5.7 ServiceNow Scoped Application Versions The ServiceNow Integration Service included in the Live Maps 8.1 installation package requires the Live Maps 8.1.0 scoped application installed in the ServiceNow instance that the integration service is connecting to. Version compatibility information: Live Maps Version ServiceNow scoped application Live Maps Unity 7.* - 8.0 Live Maps Unity 1.2.0 Live Maps 8.1-8.6 Live Maps 8.1.0 Live Maps 8.7 8.* Live Maps 8.7.4 20
6. Known Problems and Workarounds 6.1 Slow drill-down on Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 When drilling down from one Live Maps view to another through the System Center 2012 Operations Manager on a Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 operating system, the console freezes for quite some time before showing the next Live Maps view. Performing the same activity through the Live Maps Portal or the System Center 2012 Operations Manager on Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008, this delay is not experienced at all. Solution: Apply System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 to include compatibility with Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 to System Center 2012 Operations Manager. 6.2 Insufficient privileges when starting the When UAC (User Access Control) is enabled on Windows 2008, authentication on launching the Live Maps fails with the following error dialog: Workaround: Launch the Live Maps with Run as Administrator. 6.3 Service Manager Integration does not work correctly with Service Manager 2012 SP1 Due to a known issue in Service Pack 1 for Service Manager 2012, Live Maps Service Manager Integration feature will not work properly. Solution: Follow the instructions in the section entitled PowerShell Tasks Created with the Tool Do Not Work Properly in the Service Manager 2012 SP1 release notes found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj614520.aspx. 6.4 is slow on a single processor machine For performance reasons, Savision recommends running the authoring console on a machine equipped with two or more logical processors. 21
6.5 After upgrading Live Maps console tasks are missing in OpsMgr This is because the Summary Widget is still installed in your environment. The solution for this is to remove the Savision LiveMaps Presentation SummaryWidget Library and Savision LiveMaps Presentation SummaryWidget Web management packs where this widget is defined in. We know this can be time consuming when you use the summary widget in several dashboards that s why we have created a cleanup tool for this. More details can be found in the following blog article: http:///resources/blog/missing-console-tasksoperations-console-after-upgrade-live-maps-v7 6.6 Service Level health states and alerts are delayed The time between reaching the Service Level Objectives warning or error threshold and the time the health state is changed, it can take up to 2 hours, depending on the SLO Monitoring interval and the time SCOM does its SLA value aggregation, for an optional alert to be raised. The SCOM aggregation is scheduled for every hour; in the worst case scenario the Live Maps SLO monitor runs right before the SCOM aggregation process and the SLO was breached at the beginning of the hour. In this case with the SLO monitor scheduled to run every hour, it means that the breach at 1PM could be alerted just before 3PM. It is not a good solution to set the SLO monitor intervals to 1 minute, this will have a larger impact on the SCOM environment because the monitor still has to wait for the hourly SLA value aggregation by SCOM, and it will only speed it up a little. 6.7 SLA values are different since Live Maps 7.5 In Live Maps 7.5 we introduced a new feature called SLA monitoring. Part of this new feature is that the user can define business times and days and a time zone that will be used in the value calculations. With SLA monitoring uptime values are compared against the goal and warning threshold, now set in the Service settings, to determine the health state and if you agreed on a certain goal that goal is set for the entire period and not just for the period there is data for. In the previous versions of Live Maps we calculated the uptime percentage from the start of the period till the current time but in the 7.5 release for the uptime calculations we fill in the data from the current time to the end of the period with 0% downtime. SLO Calculation Example: In Live Maps 7.4 if you had an SLA period of a Month set and on the first day of the month there was a downtime of 14.4 minutes then the uptime of the SLA would appear as 99% and if the Goal was set to 99% then the SLO was expected to breach, however the SLO with a GOAL set to 99% will actually breach after 7.2 hours of downtime. In Live Maps 7.5 we are calculating the uptime percentage over the whole month which will result in an uptime of 99.982% in this example, therefore the SLO would not be expected to breach yet. 22
6.8 Minutes defined in Business Hour Settings are ignored In the it is currently possible to define the Business Hours in hours and minutes but because Microsoft aggregates the data to hourly values it will miss the values from the first business hour and add values from the last business hour. For example: If the business hours in the are set to 8:30 am till 5:30 pm the first aggregated hourly values showing will be 9 am which contains the data between 9 am and 10 am and it will include the values between 5 pm 6 pm. 6.9 Microsoft SCOM Service The out of box Microsoft SCOM Service does not support SCOM installations that use Non default Database or website names. 6.10 Error while creating a SCOM group in a Live Maps Service MP When creating a Service within the Live Maps console, you are given a choice between saving it in an already existing Management Pack or creating one. If you use an already created Management Pack, you cannot create or change the groups within that Management Pack. The following SCOM method PerformGroupMembershipDiscoverySnapshot is not respecting the $MPElement reference for group Id as it should for Membership rules. This appears to be a SCOM issue. The work around is to use a Live Maps Group or List instead of a native SCOM Group in these scenarios. 6.11Group Health Rollup versus Maintenance Mode Due to changes with SCOM, moving an object to maintenance mode no longer removes its contribution to the group health rollup. If this causes issues for you, let Microsoft know and they may be encouraged to correct this behavior in SCOM. 6.12 Health Icons in Internet Explorer An existing issue with newer version of IE causes a failure of some older health icons to update when health colors change. Full-page reloads will correct the icons and future development will continue to work around quirks where browser patches are not anticipated. 6.13 Dashboards with Object Explorer abuse Static URLs Exporting the Object Explorer to a dashboard will cause aberrant behavior if that dashboard is viewed through a static URL. We recommend not using static URLs with Object Explorer. For the technical reasons mentioned, as well as it s probably a bad idea to expose that functionality in general. 6.14 Summary Dashboard performance Some users have noticed slow load times with some Summary dashboards. This situation has not been significantly improved, but will be in a future release. Your patience and understanding will be repaid thrice over. 23
NOTE: in the 8.8.0 release we have attempted to improve the loading of the Summary Dashboards by adding Multi-Threading. See section 5.1.9 of the Installation Guide for more information. 7. Contact For additional information, go to /support or email support@savision.com. 24