Situation Having performed over 300,000 eye surgeries, Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute (PCLI) is one of North America's most unique and experienced eye care facilities. Founded in 1985 in Chehalis, Washington, PCLI is a referral and consultation facility specializing in LASIK procedures and cataract care, and complements the expertise of optometric physicians throughout the Pacific Northwest. The Institute provides high caliber medical care in the areas of cataract surgery, LASIK surgery, glaucoma care, corneal care, eyelid surgery, and retinal care. PCLI’s IT Department is comprised of approximately thirteen employees, and is responsible for the management and maintenance of all software and hardware connected to the corporate network, from traditional servers and desktop hardware to specialized medical equipment. To effectively manage both local and remote systems and assets, PCLI’s IT Department staff utilize 4-6 different monitoring programs to understand the health and responsiveness of their technology at any given time. The department’s primary tool for evaluating system health is Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (SCOM). SCOM provides an API that system administrators can use to communicate with their servers and extract status and performance data from various systems. SCOM provides PCLI IT staff with a text-based listing of many different system issues, but it was difficult to effectively review issues raised and identify systemic issues from a text display. According to Jeffrey Grimes, a Systems Engineer in PCLI’s IT Department, SCOM is a good tool for tracking data and understanding what is happening across systems at any given time, but it operates more like a back end application with a limited user interface. This made it difficult to interpret system health indicators and data, particularly for IT department staff unfamiliar with the application. “If the tool isn’t easy to use, no one will use it. It’s useless to overwhelm your IT staff with system information, because you can’t process the information quickly enough to identify systematic issues,” explains Grimes. “What we wanted was a simple tool that could give us the majority of the information needed to make logical decisions around what to do next.” Difficulty accessing and interpreting system health information had a number of impacts on PCLI’s IT department: Increased system downtime, as staff could not always interpret systematic issues fast enough to pre-empt failures,
Increased training costs to teach IT staff to use the system and interpret data, Increased time required to resolve helpdesk tickets as Tier 1 staff would have difficulty isolating issues, coupled with an increase in Tier 2 helpdesk traffic, Increased labor costs to the IT department, as more senior resources were required to monitor system health and translate SCOM reports, and Increased maintenance costs for applications, hardware, and network infrastructure. As with many IT departments, PCLI had developed a series of Microsoft Visio diagrams to document their technology infrastructure. These diagrams were used primarily as a reference point and did not provide any dynamic information regarding the systems and assets depicted. PCLI wanted to investigate a potential solution that could combine their existing Visio infrastructure diagrams with the detailed system data provided by SCOM. Solution PCLI turned to Visio 2010 for a way to visually combine their SCOM data with their Visio-based infrastructure diagrams. PCLI wanted to use Visio 2010 as a front-end dashboard for their SCOM data and use it to provide a graphical view of system and asset health, such that it would be very easy for someone to quickly develop a comprehensive view of PCLI’s system health. Jeffrey Grimes had heard about a Visio 2010 add-in that could connect PCLI’s existing Visio diagrams to SCOM and provide much of the desired functionality. The Visio 2010 Add-in for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 combines the strengths of two applications widely used in enterprise IT to simplify the creation of customized graphical dashboards showing the management and monitoring of IT infrastructure. The Visio 2010 Add-in for SCOM would provide PCLI with a number of important features: Easily create new Visio diagrams and link shapes to any managed object (computer, database, web site, perspective etc.) to show the current health state, Automatically link entire existing Visio diagrams to the computer and network devices managed by SCOM by matching computer names or IP addresses, Publish and Refresh diagrams from the browser using the SCOM data adapter for Visio Services in SharePoint 2010, making SCOM a data source for the client and the server. Export diagrams from the System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Console as Visio diagrams, automatically showing live health state information on the exported objects when opened in Visio