June 2008 - Posts

• HP MP Bug

  HP Proliant MP Bug There appears to be a bug in the HP Proliant MP. If you are familiar with the MP they use an installer to extract an applet and the MPs, then automatically import the MP into OpsMgr. There are three MPs that should get installed Hewlett-Packard Servers Core Library Hewlett-Packard Proliant Servers Base Hewlett-Packard Servers SNMP Management Pack What we have found is the SNMP Pack is not automatically imported. You may need to manually import that particular MP. Its rather important that this MP gets imported as it contains many monitors and rules that you will want. Posted Jun 26 2008, 12:58 PM by Operations Manager 2007

• Overrides a detailed look

  Overrides a detailed look On the Overrides box when you are making changes it's important to notice and watch what the screen is telling you. For instances look at the last line of this screen cap (this override is targeted at a particular DC). Here we see that Intersite Expected... Override setting appears to be set at 15 min. But look at the Effective value column next to it, here we see 180 min. So what this  is saying is that someone set an override at a higher level (in our case at the Active Directory Domain Controller 2003 Computer Role level). Which means that the Effective Value of this rule is Intersite Expected Replication = 180 minutes.   Now let's look at the change status column. Here we see three different values, [Deleted], [Added] and [No change]. What these values are saying is the first row, an Override was just removed (in this window) by you, the second row is saying you just added this Override setting, and the rest are saying that No change has been made by you at this time. The last column labeled Enforced, nothing is checked. That means that no one is Enforcing an Override from a higher level. These are some subtle things to watch out for as you set overrides, especially if there is more than one SCOM admin. Posted Jun 20 2008, 10:59 AM by Operations Manager 2007

• Photo Album: Blog Images

  Blog Images More Photos... Posted Jun 20 2008, 10:59 AM by Operations Manager 2007

• Cross Platform Extensions

  Cross Platform Extensions Over the last couple of days I have been attempting to build a Linux VM lab to test the new SCOM Cross Platform Extensions (CPE, or XPlat). Honestly the hardest part was finding a distribution of Linux that was A. FREE, B. Would work in VPC, C. lastly and most importantly is compatible with CPE. Some things to note if you are going to attempt this... 1. This is beta software so be prepared to see some small glitches or problems. 2. CPE only works on a few Linux distributions a. SUSE 10.1 (NOT 10.3 or 10 but only 10.1) at least in my testing. b. Redhat 5.0 and 5.1 3. You need to have SP1 (SCOM) installed. As there are certain MPs that need to be at 6.0.6278.0 4. After you install WS_Man 1.1, you need to set the client auth to Basic (it's all in the setup guide) the statement for that is as follows winrm set winrm/config/Client/auth @{Bacsic="true"} Pay special attention to the syntax of this statement. When reading through the docs and the cmd help it's hard to see what the spacing and syntax is, and trust me it's important. What gave me some problems and I found (thanks to Google) is the auth @{... part of the statement, it's actually auth <space> @{ 5. Interestingly enough I ran into a few errors during the discovery/agent push. However I logged on to the Suse server and found the agent (really two daemons) were installed and running. The errors were due to the the Client Auth not being set to Basic.  Once the agent is up and running, the Mgt server is running and the MPs are installed I would override the discoveries to a shorter time (ONLY in your lab, and ONLY for testing). The discovery of servers is done through the Monitoring Pane, NOT in the Administration pane as with standard Windows Agents. If you are familiar with the Jalasoft product, CPE works the same way. Hopefully when SCOM SP2 is released, and CPE goes RTM they will be able to extend the Admin console so all discoveries will be done in the same place. Also when you are looking through the different views you may notice that populating the details pane can be some what slow. If you highlight a server/Agent and the details don't show right away, I would wait a few minutes to see if they end up populating. This could have been due to my lab being a little slow (all VMs running on my laptop). Thus far I have been very impressed with the whole process and product. You should make sure to read through both Daniele and Anders blogs on their expereinces with CPE. Posted Jun 19 2008, 10:32 PM by Operations Manager 2007

• Expanding all the Monitors

  How to Expand all the Monitors for a given Scope One thing I have found frustrating when tuning MPs is having to manually expand all the monitors, then expanding the Aggregate monitors to see the unit monitors. One trick to use as an 'Expand All'  is to the 'Find' feature. If you put your mouse in the Find bar (as if you were going to do a search), but instead of typing hit the space bar then click find now OpsMgr will expand all the Monitors for you. Before... After (by simply 'searching' for a <space>)   Posted Jun 19 2008, 12:03 PM by Operations Manager 2007

• MOMADADmin.exe in Child Domains

  MOMADAdmin.exe in Child Domains While working in an environment that has an empty forest root with child domains we needed to prep all the domains with the ADAdmin tool. Normally if you need the proper syntax you can type the command with no params and get the usage statement. However the useage statement for the MOMADAdmin.exe isn't detailed enough to make the command run successfully, if you are not very familiar with it. Normally one would use the FQDN of the Groups and computer however after running in to a few errors we decided to RT*** well I sure you understand where I am going from here... anyway we ran a Google search and found a few articles about the tool, however once we hit Technet and found the documentation for the tool and noticed that it states you have to use the Domain\Group and Domain\RSMServer syntax. Once we followed the instructions we were able to prep AD (all 4 child domains) for SCOM from the RMS. From TechNet MOMAdminSecurityGroup is a domain security group, domain\security_group format, which is a member of the Operations Managers Administrators security role for the Management Group. For Active Directory integration to work, the security group must be either a global security group (if Active Directory integration needs to function in multiple domains with 2 way trusts) or a local domain group (if Active Directory integration is only used in one domain) To make a security group to be Management Group Operations Manager Group Administrator, use the following procedure. In Operations Console, select Administration. In the Administration pane, select User Roles under Security. In User Roles, select Operations Manager Administrators and click the Properties action or right click Operations Manager Administrators and select Properties. Click Add to open the Select Group dialog box. Select the desired security group, and then click OK to close the dialog box. Click OK to close User Role Properties. Note We recommend one security group, which might contain several groups, be used for the Operations Manager 2007 Administrators role. That way, groups and members of groups can be added and removed from groups without a domain administrator needing to perform manual steps to assign them Read and Delete Child permissions to the Management Group container. RootManagementServerComputerName or RunAsAccount. RootManagementServerComputerName: The value must be the computer name, domain\computer_name format, of the root Management Server for the Management Group. For information about identifying the Root Management Server, see How to Identify the Root Management Server for an Operations Manager 2007 Management Group. RunAsAccount: Reserved for future use. Domain is the name of the domain in which the Management Group container will be created. MOMADAdmin.exe can be run across domains only if a two-way trust exists between them Posted Jun 18 2008, 02:44 PM by Operations Manager 2007

• Agent Fail over

  Agent to Gateway Fail over I have come across some interesting test results with regards to Agent fail over and gateways. I am working with an environment that has server (agents) in different regions around the world (Latin America (LA), Asia (AP) and North America (NA) ). We have placed two Gateways in each region (which are also fully trusted child domains of the larger corporate global forest) for fail over. We have also set up Auto Agent Fail over with in the Admin pane so that LA Agents report to the 2 LA gateways, same in AP, NA etc. What we wanted to find out is what happens when both Gateways go offline (in a fully trusted environment). We already know that in a non-trusted environment where we are using certs and have to deal with Firewalls that the agents will queue their data until the GW come back online. Now in an environment where the domains are all trusted and there are no firewalls it appears that if both GW servers go offline the agents take it upon them selves to search for a report to the RMS. You can see this by looking for an Event 21017 in the Ops mgr Evt log. Something to keep in mind when planning fail over strategies. If you are looking for more great information and the best technical training available on Operations Manager 2007, check out http://www.infrontconsulting.com/events.htm. Posted Jun 18 2008, 10:55 AM by Operations Manager 2007

• SQL Agent Job Overrides

  While onsite with a customer recently we were working with the SQL MP and their DBAs on some noisy alerts they have been experiencing. The noise was from some SQL Agent jobs that tend to run long or just fail out right.  One of the things we had done while installing the SQL MP was to enable the SQL Server Agent Job Discoveries. What that did was expose all of the SQL Server Agents and their associated jobs. What this does in turn is allow us (and the DBAs) to set overrides per JOB or per AGENT, as well as per server.          As you can see from these screen shots, using SCOM07 is giving us the ability to granularly control the environments we are tasked to support. In this case we were able to set overrides on all of the jobs that ran long on certain servers (to not alert or just disabled the monitors all together). If you are looking for more great information and the best technical training available on Operations Manager 2007, check out http://www.infrontconsulting.com/events.htm. Posted Jun 03 2008, 07:24 PM by Operations Manager 2007

• MP Guides online

  I don't know about you, but I am always looking for the Guides to Microsoft Management Packs. While looking around on Technet this morning I came across this page http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc540358(TechNet.10).aspx which has all of the MP guides available to read online. Just a handy tip I thought I would pass along. Posted Jun 03 2008, 05:46 PM by Operations Manager 2007