How to scope tiles on perspectives

When a tile appears on a perspective it can be dynamically scoped to the object that the perspective targets. So a tile's scope gives different options when the tile is on a perspective compared with a dashboard.

When a tile appears on a dashboard, its scope will show list, group and advanced. See How to scope tiles on dashboards.

On a perspective the scope shows different options, allowing you to scope the tile to this object, objects related to this object or other specific objects. It is using this relational scoping that the perspective can be made to dynamically show data for a number of objects.

Suggestions

The realtime contextual suggestions (available in SquaredUp v4.2 and above) provide a list of options based on the current scope's relationships. They aim to help you select a suitable scope, but do not cover every possible scope. These dynamic suggestions are only shown for tiles on perspectives (some tiles don't support suggestions), and no suggestions are shown if the object has no children, parents or siblings.

This allows you to quickly find a relevant scope for your tile, in a way that is more intuitive than navigating the SCOM object model for classes and groups. If you select a suggested scope and then click custom it will automatically fill in the selected suggestion, and allow you to edit it further, making it easy to create a scope that wasn't suggested but is similar to one that was.

The list of options includes:

• This object, the currently selected object
• Children of various types (particularly useful)
• Relevant parents of this object
• Siblings of this object (objects of the same type that are hosted by the same parent)

The options to select children are written as paths, which is especially useful when looking several levels deep. Some paths end with a wildcard (*), meaning that they select all objects of any type within a path. Other paths contain an ellipsis (...) part way through, meaning that you are looking for objects of a particular type in all of the objects contained in the path preceding the ellipsis. You can click the show more triangle to expand the list of suggestions.

For example, the path to find all the windows computers in an EA may read "Map / ... / Windows Computer", and will return all objects of the Windows Computer class contained within all of the tiers. To be more specific, you can expand that option and select a single tier (e.g., "Map / Web / Windows Computer", to find all Windows Computers in the web tier of the EA). Another option you might see is "Map / *", that would show all the tiers contained in the map, and can be expanded to show options to select all of the objects within each tier (e.g. "Map / Web / *").

Custom

If the desired scope is not visible in the list, then it can be created through the custom scope picker.

For example, for a perspective created for the group IIS8 Computer Group adding a Status tile scoped to show children with a class of object will show the group members, i.e. the members of the IIS8 Computer Group.

The scope of tiles will only show you the groups and classes that the object you have drilled down to is a member of.

Editing the scope to work for many objects

Often the purpose of a perspective is for the one perspective you designed to be shown for many objects. For this to work, you may need to edit the tile's scope so that it is not specific to one object, and will work for whichever object is being shown.

Editing a tile's scope for an EA perspective

Enterprise Applications (EAs) are designed so that you can map out the servers that make up the application. You can then configure tiles to show information related to just the servers on the EA's map. When you create a perspective you often want that perspective to show for any EA, not just the one EA where you created the perspective. To make the tile's scope work for any EA you may need to edit the scope as described below:

1. For an EA you want to scope to the servers that are specified on the EA map by selecting something from the suggestions (SquaredUp 4.2 and above) that shows something similar to the following:

   This /<YourApplicationName> Map / ... / Windows Computer

   The above will scope the tile to all the objects of class Windows Computer on this EAs map.

   The screenshot below shows some scope suggestions for an application called FinanceXS. The bold text shows the currently selected scope is This object. The cursor shows the option This / FinanceXS / ... / Windows Computer. Once chosen this scope will show all the Windows computers shown on the applications map.

   

   Next, we need to adjust the specified scope to allow it to work for all EAs, rather than just this one.

2. In the scope section click custom.

3. Click on the text <YourApplicationName> Map (children) which is your first scope step. This will expand the scope step so you can edit it.

   

4. Remove the auto-populated class <YourApplicationName> Map by clicking the cross x next to it.

   

5. Start typing Enterprise Application - Map and select this from the list to add this class. This is so that this tile scope will work for all EAs, rather than just this one EA.

   

6. The scope is now configured to show all the Windows computers on the EA's map, whichever EA you happen to be viewing with the perspective.

Other specific objects

If there is no relationship between the desired scope and the current object, then the scope can be selected with the other specific objects panel. This should be a last resort, as non-relative scopes will show the same items for every object this perspective is scoped against.

To learn more about the SCOM object model and see how tiles on a perspective can be scoped take a look at this webinar Perspective Tile Scoping (29 mins).