Configuration Manager Dashboards

This lecture was much more interesting, it involved a brief discussion about Dashboards for SCCM and how Microsoft IT use them, with some demos chucked in.

Dashboards have been developed for two key personas - firstly, the business user who needs to make decisions without too much information overloads, and secondly, the IT professional, who needs 'at a glance' management, customisation and create your own abilities, as well as having a dashboard that can fit on an office plasma screen.

The dashboard itself is a freely downloadable Microsoft Solution Accelerator, and is near real time (configurable amount of minutes between refreshes). You can create lots of individual tailored dashboards (GTS might want problems, Commercial would want license compliance, IMPACT deployment %ages and so on). By default it comes with six reports - Software Update management, OS deployment, Software Distribution, Client health and OS overview. Furthermore as we deploy Sharepoint, teams can add a relevant dashboard to their team site, you don't have to always go to a dashboard. For example, GTS may have a patch deployment screen on their website to relate to calls logged.

The demo was literally less than two minutes to set up a new dashboard, the only part we may struggle with, is that it uses SQL queries (however MS provide many examples free). MS IT manage almost 261k machines via their dashboards, so an obvious improvement they took was to add a filter, this way a dashboard could be broken by site, machine model, patch etc.

(As a side note, I noticed their stats showed they manage 224k physical machines and 37k virtual, that is more virtual PCs than all of 'traditional' Mars, secondly they are 50/50 split between 32 and 64bit computing - I think this is a good suggestion of our future!)

Finally they showed the dashboard configured to suit a plasma screen, I think this would be a great addition to the Mars IS hub site screens, very simple but very rewarding!