Richard J Green

Office 365 Management Pack for SCOM

Yesterday I got a chance to play with the Office 365 Management Pack for SCOM. Usual rules apply, read the release notes, import the Management Pack and then configure it, the same rules for all Management Packs you import into SCOM.

The installation was simple by downloading the .msi file from the Microsoft Download page at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=43708 however in that this is a Microsoft Management Pack for a Microsoft product, I would have expected this to be published to the Management Pack Catalog in SCOM not a separate .msi file download as it would have certainly streamlined the installation process a little.

Once installed, the configuration of the Management Pack is really simple as an Office 365 configuration link is added to the Administration view. It gets added to the very bottom of the list so if you think you don’t have it visible, make sure you’ve scrolled all the way to the bottom. From the configuration wizard, you simply feed it a friendly name for your tenant and give it the email address for a user in Office 365 or configured through your Azure Active Directory.

The reason for this post, other than to explain how simple the Management Pack is to deploy is to have a little gripe. The user which you create in Office 365 needs to be configured as a Global Administrator on your tenant. To compare things to on-premises, that’s like using an account which is a member of Enterprise Admins to monitor Exchange On-Premises, a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I personally like things to be least privileged so the idea of having a Global Administrator account for this purpose is an annoyance. In that the Management Pack is testing the health of services within your tenant, I personally don’t see any reason that this account couldn’t be a Service Administrator to still give it some administrative powers but lessen them or failing that, a standard user. I suspect the need for being an administrator comes from the need to query a service API which is only available to accounts authenticated with administrative rights.

The upside of course to my gripe about the account being a Global Administrator however is that you do not need to assign any Office 365 service licenses to the account so it means you don’t need to shell out £20 a month for your E3 license per user in order to be able to monitor Office 365 from SCOM.

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