Essential Microsoft Operations Manager

6.8. Customizing the Operator Console

The basic four-pane arrangement (five counting the Tasks pane) needn't be a static one. You can configure additional Results panes, each displaying different information based on the view group and selections in the Navigation panes. Additionally, for views that can display data with a time component, say events or alerts that have occurred between certain times, you can configure different time windows.

Additional Results panes and other settings are controlled from the File menu Console Settings configuration page, as shown in Figure 6-25:

MOM Management Group

Point 1 in Figure 6-25 indicates the management group that the Operator console is currently connected to.

MOM Management Serve r

Point 2 in Figure 6-25 is the text box that shows which management server you are connected to, and it is also where you can enter the name of a management server in a different management group when you want to change management groups.

Alternate MOM Management Servers

All of the management servers in the management group are listed in the text box shown at point 3 in Figure 6-25. You can switch between management servers by selecting the server name in the text box and clicking OK or Apply.

Refresh data

The Operator console will refresh all data that it displays according to the interval that is configured at point 4 in Figure 6-25. As noted in the figure, 30 seconds is the fastest that the refresh can occur. When there is a great deal of data to be displayed, it may take the Operator console a longer time to render the data than has been set here. The result is that the Operator console never gets to finish rendering its data before it has to start a refresh cycle and render from scratch. If you find yourself in this situation, increase this interval until the console can successfully render all its data before the refresh cycle starts.

View pane configuration

Point 5 in Figure 6-25 is a simple drop-down menu with the values of 1, 2, and 3. When you select 2 or 3, one or two additional Results panes are displayed. Figure 6-26 shows the Operator console with two panes displayed.

In Figure 6-26, one Results pane is displaying MOM operational data in an Alerts view and the other one is showing a State view. The details pane always shows the data of a specific item in the Results panes; in this case it is the Critical Error alert on homesqlserver.

When you find a configuration that is particularly useful to you can save it as a file with an .omc extension (File menu Save as) as shown in Figure 6-27. Here you can see that a two- and three-pane configuration has been saved.

To control the time frame of the displayed data, use the View Date and Time Filter toolbar button. If it is not displayed, select it from the View menu Toolbars View menu. Once available, the icon for this filter appears on the toolbar as shown in Figure 6-28.

When you select this, the View Date and Time Filter page is displayed, as shown in Figure 6-29. This additional filter allows you to display data that occurred within a given period of time using the "Within the time range" options or simply within the last number of seconds, minutes, hours, or days using the "Within the last" options.