Copy SCOM monitors inside sealed management packs

Have you ever wanted to copy a monitor inside of a sealed management pack? For instance copy the Microsoft Logical Disk Space Monitor and make it work the way you want to.

On the surface this seems extremely difficult because there is no copy button inside the console. But it is actually is not too difficult.

Normally you would need to extract the XML from the sealed management pack and find all the dependencies for that monitor.

With MP author free and pro you are able to make a copy of the monitor.

Once you have MP Author downloaded then you can open up the sealed management pack

Select the monitor you want to copy.

Right click on the monitor and create fragment.

Click Save As and save to your local computer.

Before you close MP Author you will want to copy the Target as MP Author will automatically change the target to a variable.

Now let’s open up the mpx file or management pack fragment in Notepad++

Find and replace the text “##ClassID##” with the target ID that we copied earlier.   In my case it was “Microsoft.Windows.Server.10.0.LogicalDisk”

Now you have a complete copy of the monitor with all the dependencies.  To use this management pack fragment we will need to create a new management pack either in visual studio or in MP author pro.

One thing I wasn’t aware of until recently was that you don’t need to change the class names.  All ids in a management pack need to be unique inside the management pack, but they do not need to be unique inside of SCOM.  The management pack id acts as a namespace if you are familiar with programming.

For Information on how to build a management pack with Visual Studio and the management pack fragment we just created click the links below.

Visual Studio: Authoring Management Packs – the fast and easy way, using Visual Studio??? – Kevin Holman’s Blog

MP Author Pro:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGFoh2qcUJ4