Create a SCOM Monitor/Alert with a threshold relative to a performance counter?

Question

Is it possible to have a SCOM monitor that is related to a performance counter. For instance, we monitor a WCF Service Operation that gives us an indicator of our system's workload ("Calls Per Second"), can we create a Monitor of errors that is related to this figure, a percentage say?

Surely this is a pretty standard requirement but I can't seem to see how this is done in SCOM.

Here's how see it:

Volume Monitor: (Based on 'Calls Per Second')
Error Monitor:  (Based on 'Errors Per Second' / 'Calls Per Second')

The we could generate an Alert on the Error Monitor say if it goes above 0.5% or some arbitrary value that we could tweak.

Could you clarify how you want the percentage to be calculated? And how would the errors be collected - e.g. an event log monitor? — Richard B, Mar 20 '13 at 09:09

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 20 '13 at 23:16

Unfortunately the standard SCOM modules don't provide a way of calculating the ratio of two performance counters, or using a performance counter as a threshold. Here's an old TechNet thread on the topic - nothing has changed in SCOM 2012.

One option is to author a custom monitor that uses a script module to perform the calculation. (Note: if you use the performance data mapper to map the resultant ratio to performance data, you can at least use the standard modules for threshold comparison etc)

If you have control over the source application, it may be easier to modify it to provide the error ratio as a performance counter.

Create a SCOM Monitor/Alert with a threshold relative to a performance counter?

1 Answers1