Recently I have spent a considerable amount of time playing with Savision Live Maps 3. For those of you that aren't familiar with Live Maps, it's a great third party SCOM mapping and business workflow product.  In previous versions of the software you would build a custom map of the world, country, region, state etc, add your SCOM agents and or network gear manually to build your map. The new version of the software has a new dynamic list/group feature. This feature allows you to build your custom map at any level (from the world view down to the server rack view) and create a dynamic agent list to populate your map (using discovered SCOM objects). This is very helpful for organizations that have multiple data centers and want to create dynamic group of servers that live in these data centers. This way when the engineers build a new server (that meets the criteria you have set) and adds the SCOM agent not only will it get all the SCOM rules, monitors, etc they also get added to the Map.

Live Maps not only has a Mapping feature but the ability to create Business Processes Workflows and Dashboards. You get the same same alerting, dynamic lists etc only in a standard workflow/flow chart type of view.

There other features of this products that make it work looking at...

• They have a feature that will make an audible alert when a SCOM alert is generated. This is a feature many customers ask for as they are putting this map in a NOC type setting and they want their NOC to get an audible notification when there is an alert.

• The ability to embed maps. This allows you to drill in to your maps down to the Server Rack level. Granted you have to build the maps down to that level and populate them (using dynamic lists hopefully). What this does is allows your NOC to quickly and efficiently identify where the problem systems are.
• Live Maps 3 also includes the ability to use objects discovered by SCOM and put them in your map or business work flow.

• One last feature I want to mention is the ability to use custom Visio Diagrams or other JPEGs to build your map. This allows you to build custom Data Center maps for your business.

Over all I am very pleased with this product and say it's a must have for any organization that is running Operations Manager. For a more detailed look at the product including Install and Config consider taking our Operations Manager Boot Camp where we have included a module on Savision.

Read the complete post at http://david-stclair.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!112A71B19678F08D!309.entry