Monitoring Dynamics CRM Using System Center Operations Manager (part 3) - Installing the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Management Pack

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Management Pack has built-in metrics for a healthy CRM environment. The management pack collects performance-analysis and capacity-planning data by tracking various system metrics. This management pack has predefined thresholds for the monitoring and alerting engine to warn administrators of potential problems.

By managing these Microsoft Dynamics CRM components in SCOM, administrators can quickly and accurately react to critical events or key performance bottlenecks, and take appropriate action to prevent Microsoft Dynamics CRM system outages.

The SCOM Management Pack monitors the following components:

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM asynchronous processing service

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM deletion service

• Operability of ISV plug-ins

• IIS - World Wide Web Publishing

• Web application requests processing

• Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) exceptions, and unexpected failures

• Detects brute-force attacks and denial-of-service attacks

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM database indexes

• Database query processing

Installation of the Management Pack

In this section, we install the appropriate management packs for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform:

SCOM is a great tool for monitoring the system as a whole and can produce a consolidated view of the health of the system.

SCOM stores all the historical data, but aggregating and viewing the data in a single view can be time-consuming. Figure 5 shows a consolidated view with the uptime of the servers. The figure shows a hierarchical view of servers, grouped by the various services running on different servers.

Figure 5. SCOM data in a pivot table.

Figure 6 shows server uptime. In this example, the service is not performing at the optimal level because of server (one server) unavailability.

Figure 6. SCOM data in a graphical format.

You can use Microsoft toolkits to build some of the dashboards and thus leverage the following systems:

• SCOM 2007 R2: Monitor server health (via performance counters, event logs, and service status).

• Microsoft SQL Server Database Server: Store data collected by SCOM.

• Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services: Transform transactional databases into data warehouses.

• Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services: Organize SCOM data in an analytical format (dimensions, fact table, measures, and key performance indicators).

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Provide the foundation layer to view aggregated data from many sources.

• Microsoft Performance Point Services 2007: Create a presentation layer for a high-level view of the entire system.