Thee ways to monitor websites with SCOM

There are three different ways to monitor a website with operations manager in SCOM.  Each of the different ways has its own pros and cons.

1. Web Application Management Pack Template
2. Bulk URL Editor or BUE
3. Custom URL management pack by Russ Slaten

Web Application Management Pack Template

Pros:

• Ease of Use
• Integrated into the Console
• Supported by MS Support

Cons:

• Produces a lot of alerts
• Not very scalable
• Alerts are not very descriptive to what the actual issue is
• Creates too many groups
• Time consuming to setup a lot of websites

Bulk URL Editor

Pros:

• Scales to 3,000 websites per management servers and 12,000 per management group
• Saves time by importing a list of of multiple websites from a text file
• Each URL creates its own instance so putting individual URLs in maintenance mode is easier
• Less groups are created
• Supported by MS Support

Cons:

• Not Intuitive
• Not integrated and requires an extra console to be copied for tool to be run
• Produces a lot of alerts
• Alerts are not very descriptive to what the actual issue is

Custom URL management pack by Russ Slaten

Pros:

• Easy to add and remove websites
• Reduces number of alerts by consolidating them and only alerting if website is really down.
• Alerts are descriptive telling you exactly why the alert was created
• Doesn’t create any extra groups
• Doesn’t require extra console as everything is added and removed from an csv (Excel) document
• Seems to scale well
• Reduced administration as csv document can be modified by anyone with no knowledge of SCOM

Cons:

• Not integrated in console
• Initial setup of MP is more difficult
• Logging of performance data is not possible but could be added
• No MS Support if you have issues

In all actuality there is probably a ton of custom ways you can monitor a website with SCOM.  For simplicity I am just going to cover the three most common.