Archive | SCOM

A few important SCOM KB Articles were released

I ran into this one myself with a new installation and ended up just re-installing the database clean. This would have helped!

KB946421 – The Root Management Server encryption key is unavailable after you replace or reinstall the Root Management Server server in Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007

KB946417 – When you restart Root Management Server, the Health Service does not start in System Center Operations Manager 2007

Continue Reading

Performance data collection process unable to store data in the Data Warehouse in a timely manner

Are you getting this error from your Data Warehouse?

I immediately started getting these alerts after I upgraded my Data Warehouse Library Management Pack to version 6.0.5000.26 from this knowledge base article http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=09f74984-7e9d-42ef-8b38-ad770b084363&DisplayLang=en. I believe the issues exists in SP1 RC1 as well.

The problem is caused by a few hardware MPs, primarily HP and Dell that populate the Data Warehouse with “last discovered on” date as a property, basically, making an object different every time they happen to run the discovery and not only when object really changed.

This has been fixed in SP1 (RTM not in RC0) with some scripts that I am posting. Theses scripts came from Microsoft and were installed by a number of other customers with no issues, however I cannot claim that they are fully tested. They will not prevent upgrade to SP1.

The scripts create indexes in the Data Warehouse. I verified them with one our DBA’s and he said they were safe to run. As soon as I ran the scripts the alerts stopped immediately

https://www.scom2k7.com/downloads/Datawarehouse.zip

Continue Reading

Event data collection process unable to write data to the Data Warehouse

If you are getting this error. You can fix it by installing Operations Manager 2007 Data Warehouse Library Management Pack 6.0.5000.26

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=09f74984-7e9d-42ef-8b38-ad770b084363&DisplayLang=en

After installing that you might get this new error. Performance data collection process unable to store data in the Data Warehouse in a timely manner.

You can fix this error by referencing.

https://www.scom2k7.com/performance-data-collection-process-unable-to-store-data-in-the-data-warehouse-in-a-timely-manner/

Continue Reading

Drastically reduce alert noise in SCOM

I noticed a way to reduce our alert noise by up to about 80%. This may seem very obvious but it wasn’t to me till after I realized it.

In my environment we are using a ton of different applications by various software vendors. Some of these applications automatically restart their windows services during the day and night. Other times we will get a heartbeat notification in the middle of the night.

With the majority of these notifications we will get an open and then a closed alert almost immediately. In my environment SCOM is setup to send an SMS alert to the on-call admin. This meant that the on-call admin would often be getting woken up in the middle of the night for an issue that automatically resolved itself.

I wanted to reduce the number of alerts that the on-call person (which is sometimes me). I came up with the idea to set alert aging on initial alert by 5 minutes.

We were already using alert aging for escalation but by aging the initial alert drastically reduced the number of alerts that the on-call person gets. The majority of the Open and Closed alerts are no longer bothering the on-call person in middle of the night

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being that SCOM is state based anything that is really down or causing an issue will still page the on-call person.

Continue Reading

SCOM 2007 Targeting

A new SCOM 2007 targeting poster has been posted to help everyone understand targeting.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/a/7/fa73e146-ab8a-4002-9311-bfe69a570d28/BestPractices_Rule_Monitor_REV_110607.pdf

To sum it up

Target all new monitors at Windows Server or one of the targets that Microsoft has created such as IIS or SQL Servers.

Set the rule to be disabled by default.

Create an override that will enable the rule only for the computers or group of computers you want the monitor to run on.

Here are a couple of KB articles that describe this.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938999/en-us

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943239

Continue Reading

SCOM 2007 Script to Monitor File Count inside a Directory

Below is a script that I wrote to monitor file count in a directory.

To Implement this please reference my earlier post on how to setup a Script-Based monitor.  https://www.scom2k7.com/create-a-script-based-unit-monitor-in-opsmgr2007-via-the-gui/

In the Parameters: Dialog box you will need to specify a directory path in quotes then a space and the type in the number of files you what to have in your directory before you want to alarm.

For Unhealthy Expression: Property[@Name=’State’] Equals BAD

For Healthy Expresion: Property[@Name=’State’] Equals GOOD

Dim oAPI, oBag, objFSO, objFldr, bSendError, strOut

bSendError = False

Set oAPI = CreateObject("MOM.ScriptAPI")
Set oBag = oAPI.CreateTypedPropertyBag(StateDataType)
Set eBag = oAPI.CreateTypedPropertyBag(StateDataType)
Set oArgs = WScript.Arguments


If oArgs.Count < 2 Then
strReturn = "Script aborted. Not enough parameters provided"
Call eBag.AddValue("State","BAD")
Call eBag.AddValue("ret",strReturn)
Call oAPI.Return(eBag)
WScript.Quit -1
End If  


strOut = checkfolder(oArgs(0),int(oArgs(1)))

If bSendError Then
	strReturn = strOut
	Call oBag.AddValue("State","BAD")
	Call oBag.AddValue("ret2", objFldr.Files.Count)
	Call oBag.AddValue("ret",strReturn)

 
Else 
	'WScript.Echo("GOOD "& vbNewLine &  strOut)
	Call oBag.AddValue("State","GOOD")
	
End If 


if 0 <> Err.number Then
    strReturn = "An Error occured: " &  Err.Description
    Call eBag.AddValue("State","BAD")
    Call eBag.AddValue("ret",strReturn)
    Call oAPI.Return(eBag)
else

Call oAPI.Return(oBag)

end if


Function checkfolder(strfldname,numberfiles)

Set objFSO=CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objFldr=objFSO.GetFolder(strfldname) 
If objFldr.Files.Count > numberfiles Then

checkfolder = numberfiles
bSendError = True

End If

End Function

https://www.scom2k7.com/downloads/FolderFileCount.txt

Continue Reading

Microsoft Management Summit 2008 registration open

Recent Microsoft product releases which will be covered in detail during MMS 2008 include:

System Center Operations Manager 2007
System Center Configuration Manager 2007
System Center Data Protection Manager 2007
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007
System Center Essentials 2007
System Center Remote Operations Manager 2007
System Center Capacity Planner 2007
Desktop Optimization Pack for SA
Windows Server Update Services 3.0

In addition during the event there will be early looks at some releases due to ship during the coming year, including:

System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP1
System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2
System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1
System Center Mobile Device Manager

MMS 2008 is the ideal opportunity to come listen to the product teams describe these new releases, try out the new products and discuss real-world deployment experiences with leading industry experts and your peers within the IT industry.

Microsoft ForefrontWindows Server Update Services Group Policy WS-Management / WinRM

WMI Microsoft Windows PowerShell

Continue Reading

OpsMgr 2007 SP1 Release Candidate had been released

SP1 RC1 Can be downloaded at http://connect.microsoft.com/

New Features

The new features that are in Operations Manager 2007 SP1 are:

· Improved performance and reliability when working with alerts, overrides, and searches.

· In all Alert views, performance has been increased through better fetching and yields alert row selection that is three times quicker. Actions and reports are fetched in the background, which further improves performance. Alert knowledge that is displayed in the Alert Details pane can be shown or hidden according to the user’s preference.

· Operations Manager 2007 advanced search has been improved by enabling the ability to search across monitors and rules by their overrides.
· Support for the discovery and monitoring of both SNMP v1 and SNMP v2 network devices. Users can select which SNMP Community Version to search for in the Discovery Wizard.

· Support for exporting Operations Manager 2007 diagrams to Microsoft Visio VDX file format. Note that the Visio button is located on the toolbar when in a diagram view. Diagram layouts can now be saved and will be remembered when the diagram view is selected again.

· Support for copying and pasting (CTRL+C and CTRL+V) from the Alert details pane.

Setup and Recovery

The following are improvements in setup and recovery:

· To make backup and recovery easier, setup in Operations Manager 2007 SP1 starts the Secure Storage Backup Wizard at the end of setup, by default, to back up the RMS encryption keys. This is the same command-line tool used in the original version of Operations Manager 2007, but with an easier-to-use wizard interface. The wizard is actually started by using the command-line version of the tool when no parameters are passed to the tool or it is started from Windows Explorer. The Secure Storage Backup tool is located on the installation media in the Support Tools directory. The Secure Storage Backup Wizard can be started according to the user’s preference.

· To make the recovery of a clustered RMS easier, Operations Manager 2007 SP1 enables the repromotion of the RMS cluster to the RMS role after it is fixed. This addresses the situation where a clustered RMS has failed and another management server in the management group has been promoted into the RMS role.

User Interface and Experience

The following are improvements in user interface and experience:

· To make the creation of new management packs easier, Operations Manager 2007 SP1 introduces the ability to copy views from any existing management pack to an unsealed management pack. This is done in the Monitoring view. For example, if you have created a management pack for SQL Server overrides and want to use one of the SQL Server management pack views in the SQL Server overrides management pack, you would simply select the desired view, right-click to copy it, and then paste it into the target management pack folder.

· In all Alert views in the Monitoring space and in the Web console, Operations Manager 2007 SP1 ensures that the Repeat Count value is incremented correctly.

· After you have created an override for any management pack object, you can look at the summary of overrides for the object type in the Overrides Summary box. Operations Manager 2007 SP1 ensures that the description of the override target is complete. For example, if you create an override for Logical Disk Free Space for the C:\ of Server1, the summary will display ‘server1/c:’

Core Product

The following are improvements in the core Operations Manager 2007 product:

· SP1 ensures that when agents are uninstalled from a computer in the Administration space\Device Management container\Agent Managed node of the Operations Console, that they are also removed from the computer views in the Monitoring space.

· Scripts can now be used for diagnostic tasks.

· View names, data and, display strings in the Operations Console that have been collected from computers running different language versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems are displayed correctly.

Reporting

The following are improvements to reporting:

· When you are in a report, you can now choose to publish the report by selecting Publish from the File menu. This will allow you to publish reports to multiple locations, such as Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Web sites.

Web Console

The following are improvements in the Operations Manager 2007 Web console:

· The Operations Manager Web console provides access to performance data. Users can then select specific counters to graph. In Operations Manager 2007 SP1, it is now possible to construct a filter for the desired performance counters to ease searching and navigation. This ability is available when a performance view is selected and displays in the Performance legend pane. The search options available are All items, Items in the Chart, Items not in the Chart, and Items by text search.

· The Web console has been further improved so that the Favorite Reports container is now available in My Workspace.

Audit Collection Services (ACS)

The following are improvements for ACS:

· New discoveries and views have been added. These features detect and indicate which agents and servers are ACS-forwarding enabled.

· There are more monitors and alert generating rules to track the health state of the ACS collectors. For example, Operations Manager 2007 SP1 includes the ability to watch the DB Queue % full level against default thresholds, such as the back-off threshold or disconnect threshold.

· The ACS forwarder feature is now supported on the Management and Gateway Server roles. The ACS Forwarder is disabled by default. When enabled, it will allow the inclusion of security auditing data for these server roles.

· When using ACS, one of the most common tasks is to enable forwarding on ACS agents. In Operations Manager 2007 SP1, an Operations Manager Command Shell script can be used to enable forwarding for entire computer groups, thereby greatly easing the deployment and administration of ACS.

Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM)

AEM now provides an improved appearance and functionality of AEM reports.

More at What’s New in Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 http://connect.microsoft.com/SystemCenter/content/content.aspx?ContentID=6859

Continue Reading

OpsMgr 2007 MP Authoring Console Release Candidate Released


The Release Candidate version of the Authoring Console was released today on Microsoft Connect.

The new version of the Authoring Console can be downloaded at http://connect.microsoft.com/

Description

This package contains both the 32 and 64 bit versions of the Release Candidate for the OpsMgr 2007 Management Pack Authoring Console. This console is designed to be used by partners developing Management Packs and by advanced users developing custom MPs.

Continue Reading