Presenter Nathan Lasnoski is Concurrency’s Infrastructure Team Lead. His presentation highlighted themes previously presented at Microsoft Management Summit 2012 in Las Vegas, where Nate presented Top 10 Production Experiences with Service Manager and Orchestrator and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V FAQs, Tips, and Tricks.

At the Release Events, Nate shared insights about how System Center tools are integrated to meet specific needs. By a show of hands, about half the attendees in the room were already running or familiar with System Center. These Release Events, therefore, were not just a 360-degree tour of features, but a “live” look (using Concurrency’s own platform via web access) at active management. For example, Nate explained that business intelligence about IT services “used to be impossible or cost a gazillion dollars”—and then showed on-screen how Service Manager can transform an organization’s strategic approach to IT.

In Chicago, a second speaker joined Nathan Lasnoski as presenter: Annur Sumar, who is a Chicago-based information architect for Concurrency.

Concurrency and its clients have participated extensively in pre-release versions of System Center 2012. The presenters shared best practices from their experience planning and deploying the platform on a pre-release basis in regional multi-billion dollar companies.

The presentation covered technical and business benefits of System Center components including System Center Configuration Manager 2012, Service Manager 2012, Orchestrator 2012, Operations Manager 2012, Virtual Machine Manager 2012, Data Protection Manager 2012, and Advisor 2012.

About Nate Lasnoski.

Increasing Query Result Max Sizes in Request Offerings

 In order to increase the query results in a Request Offering to a larger number, you’ll change the maximum query results configuration on the SCSM Portal Web Server.  You’ll open the XML at “\inetpub\wwwroot\System Center Service Manager Portal\ContentHost\Clientbin\Settings.xml” and modify the key to the value you want “<Setting Key=”DEFAULT_MAX_RESULTS” Value=”4000″/>”

If you’d like more information on this, check out Travis Wright’s blog here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2011/11/08/advanced-query-results-customization-for-request-offerings.aspx

You’ll need to be careful about using this option.  If you increase the maximum of query results size too large you’ll be causing unnecessary IO against your Service Manager infrastructure and could cause performance problems.  The general idea is that the maximum results returned should be no larger than you require to serve the customer.  I’ve rarely had a reason to go over 2,000 results, especially since a query result larger than that quantity is not as useful as it would seem.  The idea is that we want to make the return of data as effective at finding the right data to select as possible, vs. causing the end user to tab through the query results.

Using Query Result Filters

 I’ve found that when you are querying content from large data sets, such as 20,000 computers or users, you can’t simply increase the size of the query results, since it will cause a significant load on the server.  Also, users will spend too much time looking through results that don’t match their needs.  In order to deliver users more specific content to select from you can use pre-filters using previously entered data. 

 Let’s pretend that we want to return a list of workstation(s) for a primary user from inside our domain  You’d use this for requests such as self-service application deployment, workstation refresh, and settings pushes.  We don’t want to change our maximum query results, since returning 30,000 workstations for every request would be a bad idea.  Instead, we’re going to ask the user questions to filter the list of workstations that they are presented with.  In order to provide faster results and cause an immediate blank first pass, we’ll also use a pre-filter which aids our request process.   In our case, the desired result is a list of workstations which match our specific requirements.

 I started working on this type of request and immediately created a user search box and the CMDB query.  These two combined to form a functional search, but also resulted in a poor user experience, since the initial return was searching for blank data and took an extended time to return a useable user prompt.   The result was an initial screen load that looked like this:

I found that if I used “Token Portal Username” it worked perfectly and the response was almost instant.  However, in this case the workstation isn’t tied to that user, so I can’t leverage existing data.

 I found that by configuring simple lists with filtering criteria in combination with my search I was able to provide a very responsive interface and also better results for my request offering.  In this case I added a drop-down list to ask for the domain of the workstation, which then functioned as a filtering criteria through an AND statement to create my results.  I found that even when combining this with a filter criteria which included all workstations, this was drastically faster.  The trick was to setup the simple list to include no initial results, which provided very fast form load and quick search result return speeds. 

The query filter critera looks like:

Resulting in this:

I’ve used this same technique in searching for many other types of values, such as computer’s based on primary user, groups, or software items.  The key is to choose something that helps the user narrow down the result set.  Ideally I want the device, application, or group to be returned without the user needing to do any additional filtering to select it.

I hope this helps everyone out. 

Nathan Lasnoski

We know that different persons within the IT department are going to want to know different things, as in this slide I used from MMS, we describe that around our business services, we need both strategic and operational knowledge.  Check out the data around the service that provides visibility into the service at an aggregate level, across many service management functions.

In System Center Service Manager and Operations Manager we leverage the concept of the service.  In Service Manager we articulate the service in our Business Service listing in the CMDB.  In my example, you can see several individual services, each of which are listed with a different function, priority, etc.

As we open a service, such as Active Directory, you can see how we’ve included detailed contact, priority, and business information.  This is also the place where we’re aggregating individual incidents, service tickets, change requests, releases, and risks.  We can use this aggregate information in decision making, as well as operations such as approvals (a blog for another day). 

Also note that the configuration of this service from Operations Manager is synchronized into Service Manager, making up one model, from which we can manage changes as Operations Manager automatically detects them.  The reason why is because both Service Manager and Operations Manager share the same management pack structure.  The Business Services in Service Manager are the same as the Distributed Applications in Operations Manager.  Here is the view of that data in Operations Manager:

…and in Service Manager. (showing the same configuration)

You can see how this information is super-valuable.  It allows us to manage our efforts, configuration, and costs around an individual service.  This provides the visibility, such as through a scorecard, that IT Directors never had before.  It also provides the information to IT Analysts, who want to know the configuration of a business service.  Finally, it aids in automations, being used in approvals, releases, and service offerings. 

We also see the changes to the service and the associated work items tracked and logged in the history.  You can see in my case that I’ve been using Service Requests to automatically add Active Directory users and that the requests have been associated to my Active Directory business service.

 I hope this provides a new look at how to articulate your world within System Center!  In the next post we’ll talk about how you synchronize management packs and distributed applications from Operations Manager into Service Manager.

You can also learn more about this concept by listening to our MMS session:

http://blog.concurrency.com/infrastructure/top-10-production-experiences-with-service-manager-and-orchestrator/

Nathan Lasnoski

Digital MMS:  Get entire recorded presentation here!

http://www.mms-2012.com/digitalmms

 Nathan Lasnoski

For more information about the connectors check out Travis Wrights post:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2012/04/15/exchange-connector-3-0-rc-released.aspx

To download the connectors directly click the following link:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=29423

Enjoy!

A full list of commands as well as the download is located here:

http://smlets.codeplex.com/

Sharing from their in-depth production experience will be Concurrency information architect and infrastructure team lead  Nathan Lasnoski, who is based at Concurrency’s Brookfield, WI headquarters, and information architect Annur Sumar, who is based in Chicago.

Both Nathan Lasnoski and Annur Sumar are Microsoft MVPs well-known for their expertise and knowledge-sharing about system management solutions. Each year Microsoft bestows the MVP honor on selected professionals to recognize “exceptional technology community leaders worldwide who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with users and Microsoft.”

The presentation at MMS 2012 will cover best practices from implementations serving thousands of users and “crazy interesting” application automation. Attendees will find out what they need to know about these tools before deployment.

The presentation title is: Top 10 Production Experiences with Service Manager and Orchestrator. MMS 2012 attendees should register for session SD-B316.

 
Service Catalog and the New Self-Service Portal

Before we look at the new Self-Service Portal we need to understand the Service Catalog. The Service Catalog is made up of two main parts Service Offerings and Requests Offerings. Service Offerings are user facing catalog items that describe and IT Service that you provide. Service Offerings contain a set of specific services inside the IT service that the users can request known as Request offerings. Request offerings contain a set of questions that the user can answer in order to create a Service Request or Incident. You can find the Service Catalog in the Library section in the Service Manager Console.

The Service Catalog is presented to the end user through the New Self Service Portal hosted in SharePoint 2010. On the Main Page of the Self-Service Portal you will see a selection of Service Offerings to choose from.

If you click on one of the Service Offerings you will see a list of all the request offerings that are listed inside.

If you click on a Request Offering you will be sent to a screen with help articles related to the request offering and a go to request form button. If you click on the go to request form you will be prompted with a request form that is created during the creation of a request offering.

Once the user has submitted a request they can click the my request button on the quick navigation and see all the Incidents and Service Requests they have created.

If they click the My Activities button they will see all of the activities they have assigned to them through Incidents and Service Requests.

New Connectors

There are two new connectors in System Center Service Manger 2012. The first is the System Center Orchestrator connector. This connector will allow you to import Orchestrator run books into Service Manager. Once you have them imported you can create Runbook Activity Templates. The Paramater Mapping section of the Template will import the paramaters from the Initialize Data activity at the begining of your run book.

You can use the Self-Service Portal questions to populate the Parameters in the Runbook Template and have full automation of Request offerings. For example if you created a Request offering for Create a New User the requestor would fill out a form on the Self-Service Portal that would then kick of the Runbook activity. This process would automatically create the Active Directory user, Exchange Mail box and Lync account then e-mail the information to the appropriate people. You can see how Service Manager and Orchestrator working together is a very powerful tool.

The second connector is the Virtual Machine Manager Connector. The VMM connector imports the Clouds and VM templates you can also use these when creating service offerings. This will come in handy if you want to do things like automate Virtual Machine Deployment.

Cubes and Reporting

Service Manager has added prebuilt OLAP Cubes to service Manager 2012. These will allow you to export the data to excel and create pivot tables. You can also use the Performance Point Service in SharePoint to create reporting dashboards!

Service Requests

Service Requests are used by Request Offerings when a user makes a standard request within and IT service. The Service Request form will often be used when users are filling out forms from the Self-Service Portal.

Now lets take a look at the Service Request form. On the general tab you have the basic information about the request. You will notice a User Input section this will contain the information submitted by the user from the Self-Service Portal.

The next tab is the activities tab here you can put the different activities involved in completing the service request. Service Manager 2012 has also added the ability to have parallel activities so you can have multiple activities happening at the same time.

Service Level Agreement Support

Service Manager now has a much more robust Service Level Management feature.

The Service Level Objective hours are now controlled by a calendar this allows you to add specific hours, days and holidays that are not counted against your SLO.

Service Level Objectives now use Queues this allows you to have them apply based of any of the available properties in the class you chose. You can then set you target time and warning based taking into account your calendar.

Parallel Activities

The activities tab in Change and Service Requests now have a tree view. This allows you to have parallel activities so can have multiple actives occur at once.

Release Management

SCSM 2012 has also added the Release Management feature. A Release Record will be a related item to a Change request and is used to track a specific release.