It was with great excitement that I read that Microsoft has acquired Bluestripe . I have been working with their product Factfinder for a while now and is impressed with it’s features. The acquisition means even better integration and features for a solution that is already great and right now provide immense value to any SCOM and SCSM solution, which is why we always recommend our customers to consider Factfinder as part of their System Center implementation.

Without Bluestripe’s product Factfinder, mapping services and creating distributed applications in SCOM, is typically a manual task and requires you to collect information from system owners and architects to get the overview the application dependencies you need to build the distributed application. With Factfinder, this is automated and dynamically updated as your infrastructure changes, moves to the cloud whether it runs on windows, Linux etc.

Key features capabilities

  • Automated discovery of application structures – see what your application actually depends on, reduces time to troubleshoot and finding bottlenecks.
  • Visibility into transactions – set and monitor performance thresholds.
  • Synchronization to SCOM – dynamic distributed applications.
  • Cross platform support  – really – includes those components running on Linux, Solaris etc. in the distributed application.
  • On-premise or cloud -  discover, map and monitor.
  • Service level monitoring – effectively monitor performance service levels.

A Factfinder discovered application synchronized to SCOM

The screenshot below show a Factfinder discovered application structure in SCOM. The view is automatically created and is dynamically updated. Performance data is updated real-time and shows metric for both the entire application end-2-end and the individual servers and components. Already discovered objects such as SQL databases are merged with the Factfinder service map so you benefit the monitors from you existing management packs. The best of both worlds.

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This is just a small glimpse of Factfinders capabilities – look out for more posts in the near future about Factfinder and System Center/Azure.

We have been working with Bluestripe and Factfinder for a while now and looks forward to continuing this good relationship at Microsoft and helping our customer to benefit from Factfinder to optimize their System Center and Azure implementation and Service Management processes.

Have a nice day.