Hello, I´m struggling with Distributed Applications and I'm trying to understand the non-containment Relationships. I´m wondering how those dependencies act in health roll-up, alerting or something else. All the documentation i read talks about how to create and edit Distributed Applications, but i can't find find information about what can i do with non-containment relationships after the configuration using DAD. Any help (links for info, books, tips...) is appreciated. Best Regards,

When you create a relationship you only have one choice. In the background it checks if the one item is contained within the other one. Lets say if the website is located on the server you are linking it to. If it is not contained (a website connecting to a database on another server) it will show the blue dotted line of non-containment. So the non-containment relationship points to a dependency on a component contained somewhere else. If item 1 goes down than item 2 will have its health affected, eventhough item 1 is not a part of item2. Does that make sense? The relationship should behave the same I think in the health explorer parts. The System Center Operations Manager Unleashed book mentions DA creation and is in any case the book any serious scom admin should have.Bob Cornelissen - BICTT (My BICTT Blog)

Thank you Bob. What you describe makes sense, but i can't make it work! For example, i created a test DA with two components named VOIP-1 and VOIP-2 (containing ping targets) and linked VOIP-1 to VOIP-2 defining that VOIP-1 depends on VOIP-2. If VOIP-2 goes critical, nothing happens to VOIP-1, the health is not affected! Snapshot of the diagram view: http://img842.imageshack.us/i/datest.png

Unless the host/agent topology of the two classes is "unhosted contains hosted" or "hosted hosts hosted" the rollup will not occur. You cannot make health state roll across peers in a hierarchy unless the same agent manages them. Literally, roll-up implies rolling from agent to rms Microsoft Corporation

in this case what this did was just visually make a link between the two entries, but not make them rollup the state fro one to another. Dan already explained why.Bob Cornelissen - BICTT (My BICTT Blog)

So, when i link 2 components in DAD, it's only for visual purposes (blue dotted lines). If not, where can i find a good example showing the value of those (non-containment) relationships?

So, when i link 2 components in DAD, it's only for visual purposes. If not, where can i find a good example showing the value of those (non-containment) relationships?

The rule of thumb you should adopt: Blue dotted lines NEVER roll up health. They were not designed to do health rollup. Only the solid lines can roll up health. These come from already discovered objects. To create what you want requires advanced MP authoring to discover the distributed app at the type-level or if for specific instances, one would use powershell and the SDK to find the instances (hard coded in script to GUIDS) and then create a containment relationship between them, as well as a dependency monitor to drive the roll-up behavior. Even if you did this, if the roll-up you are seeking is what I would call a "roll to a peer on another peer managed server" then the roll-up would not happen, even though the containment line would be solid instead of dashed. Rule of thumb two: health cannot roll up across two different agents.Microsoft Corporation

In addition, regarding Distributed Application design, I would like to share the following with you for your reference: Defining Classes and Relationships http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee957025.aspx Distributed Applications design question http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/operationsmanagerauthoring/thread/400a4690-164c-4827-88a1-3255a8c3119b/ Hope this can give you some hints. Thanks. Nicholas Li - MSFT Please remember to click “Mark as Answer” on the post that helps you, and to click “Unmark as Answer” if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.