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Enabling Open Access

Catherine
  • Updated

This article describes how to automatically or manually enable Open Access. This gives the SquaredUp application pool account read-only permissions in SCOM.

Open Access enables easy sharing of dashboards throughout your organisation. Open Access dashboards do not require authentication and do not consume user licences.

A Teams edition licence (or above) is required for this feature.

To upgrade please contact sales@squaredup.com.

To check the licence edition you are using see How to check which licence key is being used. To see what is included in different product edition licences see the Licensing Overview.

When users view an Open Access dashboard on SquaredUp v5 they see a version of the dashboard with simplified interactivity. (On SquaredUp v4 Open Access dashboards are server-rendered bitmap versions of the dashboard).

When Open Access is enabled, normal dashboards can still be accessed on the normal URL and will work as you'd expect, but individual dashboards can be made Open Access and then accessed from a distinct Open Access URL.

Check the Server Spec and Sizing Guidelines for information about memory recommendations for running Open Access.

Publishing Open Access dashboards

You can choose to use the Open Access navigation bar to give easy access to a range of Open Access dashboards, or simply give users an individual Open Access dashboard URL without the navigation bar.

See How to publish dashboards with Open Access

Troubleshooting Open Access

Many issues can be resolved by rerunning the Open Access configuration, as described in this article, to ensure that the SquaredUp application pool account has read-only permissions in SCOM. On SquaredUp v5 we also recommend re-running the generate option for the Open Access dashboard experiencing problems from ☰ system > Open Access, and on SquaredUp v4 it is important to check the loopback URL.

For more information see Open Access troubleshooting steps.

Automatically configuring Open Access

Following installation the setup process will automatically configure Open Access. If this stage was skipped you can automatically configure Open Access by returning to that stage of the setup wizard:

  • Browse to http://SquaredUpServer/SquaredUpv[Version Number]/setup?stage=openaccess
    (where SquaredUpServer should be replaced by the name of the server where SquaredUp is installed).
    For example for SquaredUp v5 this would be http://SquaredUpServer/SquaredUpv5/setup?stage=openaccess

If the setup wizard is unable to configure Open Access you can manually configure Open Access by following the instructions later in this article.

Manually configuring Open Access

Give the SquaredUp application pool account read-only permissions in SCOM:

  • If SquaredUp is installed on a Management Server, add NT AUTHORITY\Network Service to a Read Only SCOM role.
  • If SquaredUp is installed on a single dedicated server, add the server account (e.g. myserver$) to a Read Only SCOM role.

The SCOM management console does not allow you to add computer or service accounts directly to a SCOM role. Instead you will need to use Set-SCOMUserRole PowerShell cmdlet to add these users.

Open the Operations Manager Shell: Start > Microsoft System Center > Operations Manager Shell.

Complete the following:

  1. Run the following command in your SCOM powershell.

    Get-SCOMUserRole | select Name,Id | ft -auto

  2. From the list output select your operations manager read-only group ID and save it as the following variable.

    $RG = 'Your Group ID'

  3. From the above list select the name of your read-only group and save as the following variable.

    $mg = Get-SCOMManagementGroup

  4. Run the following command, this will get the security role previously set.

    $role = $mg.Security.GetUserRole($RG)

  5. You need to add your SquaredUp server to the security role. You can do this by running the following command.

    $role.Users.Add("<domain>\<server>$")

  6. Finally run the update command to add this to the role.

    $role.Update()

Alternatively, you can first add the server account to an Active Directory security group and then add the security group to the SCOM role.

Webinar: Open Access on v4 - Under the hood

For a more in depth look at how Open Access works you may like to watch the webinar below (40 mins):

 

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