Service Uptime Report in SCOM

This is a question that I often get asked by the customers I work with and apparently a lot of others as evident by the related questions on the forums.

One way of doing it is to author your own service monitor, but that involves considerable amount of knowledge and experience of management packs and the underlying coding. It usually takes a lot of time as well. Not everyone has the right knowledge or the time to spend on it so I thought I’d share a quick trick I do to measure uptime of a service and also be able to present it to the concerned parties in the form of a report.

It often happens that you have a service running on your servers and many organizations use it as a “proof” to show that the application was running, or maybe as analysis for troubleshooting, hence it becomes necessary to be able to measure the uptime of the service accurately and to be able to show it to the management and/or to pass it around.

The thing is, when you’re creating a monitor to measure availability of a service in SCOM, you usually choose a “Basic Service Monitor”. This monitor is not very “intelligent” and simply places an instance of itself on every server belonging to the class that you choose. However, you do have another option to monitor your service with, and it is the “Windows Service Template”. This type provides you much more features and finer control on your service monitoring. I wrote a blog earlier comparing these two options of service monitoring and when to use what.

SCOM basic service monitor Vs Windows Service Template

So the way the Windows Service template works is that it creates a discovery of it’s own and hence creates an actual class. This class can further be used to target other workflows that you may have to monitor this class of servers. Another advantage of that is you can now use this class to fetch a “Service Availability” report. For example:

Let’s say I’m monitoring the Spooler service on a bunch of servers, and I need to be able to see the uptime of this service on each of these servers. So I create a Windows Service Template monitor, call it “Test Spooler”.

Now once it’s done, go to “Discovered Inventory” tab under Monitoring. Click on “Change the target type” and you can see that now the “Test Spooler” is a class available for targeting.

This means you can also target your availability report to this target as well and measure the uptime of the service it is monitoring.

You can also fetch a report for a group of service monitors created this way. There’s a good discussion we had a while back regarding this exact requirement:

Service Availability Report

Hope that helps!

Cheers