Operations Manager Services have been renamed

Something that we have noticed, that’s a bit of an annoyance (in OpsMMgr R2), is that Microsoft has renamed the Operations Manager services. What was the OpsMgr SDK is now the System Center Data Access, OpsMgr Config is now the and the OpsMgr HealthSystem Center Configuration Service Service is now the System Center Management Service.

It’s a bit of an annoyance that admins need to be aware of.

Interested in our training offerings, see http://infrontconsulting.com/

Operations Manager R2 RC was released today (version 6.1.7000.x). I just finished building a new Lab Environment and have seen some very interesting things I wanted to share.

The first thing I wanted to share was the Overrides view in the Authoring Console.

This view allows admins and authors to see overrides, without having to run an overrides report, or drilling into an overrides summary.

The next interesting items, which were well publicized are the new templates that are available. As you can see there are built in Unix and Linux Templates as well as the new Process Monitoring Template.

The OLEDB Template has the ability to Run SQL Queries again monitored DBs, something a lot of our customers have been asking for (without custom scripting).

The Process monitoring Template has a lot of great options that were only available via scripts and custom monitors (pre-R2)

As promised the Administrator console has been extended to allow admins to discover and push agents to non-Windows Servers

There are quite a few Reports for Non-Windows servers as well

There is also a new option available from the Monitoring workspace. When you right click on an alert you can still do all the 'normal' tasks (close, Maintenance Mode etc), however now you have the ability to Create a notification based on the alert.

It appears that the "Disable" Rule or Monitor has not been improved. You still can't choose what MP to save it in, it lands in the Default MP.

Health Explorer has also come to the WebConsole... Very nice!

There is also an Overrides Overview VIEW

These are just a few of the improvements in R2. As I continue to dig in I will keep you updated.

Next I plan to look the URL monitoring, as it's been overhauled fairly significantly.

Interested in Operations Manager training, MP Development training, OSD training? Check out our offerings at www.InfrontConsulting.com/training.php

I spent last week teaching the MOC 50028 - Managing Operations Manager 2007. In all fairness I must also admit that I work for an organization that has a competing class (a 4 day custom Operations Manager BootCamp that is NOT the MOC). One of our Canadian customers asked us to deliver the MOC class specifically, so we did.

What a disaster this class is.

First off the Class title is Managing Operations Manager, however 60+% of the class revolves around install and config. There is a small section that talks about management packs and health modeling, however it doesn't go in to enough detail. Being a consultant as well as an MCT I was able to augment the class material with my own knowledge, but it was very obvious to the students that the class was very weak in certain areas (and it also reflected in their evaluation scores). Our 4 day bootcamp covers in the first two days, what the MOC covers in 5. The material Infront Consulting covers in the last 2 days (our Fundamentals class) is touched on very lightly if at all in the MOC.

The worse part of this MOC are the labs. The lab launcher crashes regularly and when the launcher crashes it removes the .vmc files which in turns can ruin the labs (which results in making the students start from scratch). I am teaching this class again next week and luckily have a few work arounds to put in place, but as an instructor I shouldn't have to use class time to figure out how to fix labs. If instructors don't have a lot of Virtual Server experience I can see this class being a huge problem for them.

The class material also has quite a few typos, wrong references and instructions, causing confusion among students that are seeing this product for the first time. I would think being that this is revision B of the class that these types of problems would be fixed. Since they aren't I can see why many students aren't happy with the class.

If you or your organization is looking for true Operations Manager training, taught by consultants that are out in the field using the product, go to http://www.infrontconsulting.com/training.php

If the MOC was a decent class I would not blog about it, as like I said it is in competition with our Bootcamp., Considering what a disaster this MOC class is I would like to see companies and students spend what training funds they have on a class that will leave them feeling like they learned something they can take back to the office and actually use.

MP Authoring / Group Creation weirdness

I've been creating an MP in XML and have come across a very weird problem. I was creating a static membership Group that will contain one server. Seems easy enough right.... here is part of the code I was using (the important part for this blog anyway)...

Now the strange part happens after I import the MP into the console.

Look at the Group Membership rules in the UI (remember this is a static entry membership group):

OpsMgr sees this rule as a Dynamic Entry rule not a static membership rule, and what more is it's using the Relationship type as the Qualifier for the group, not the server name in the <MonitoringObjectID> tags. This group membership is empty.

Now if I change the <MonitoringObjectID> tag from the server name to the GUID of the object I'm trying to add to the group look what happens:

Here's the change...

Here's the outcome...

It now sees the Group membership correctly, as a static entry not a dynamic one, and it adds the correct server to group.

What this means to all the MP authors out there, is that as you create your MPs if you need a static membership group (and of course you are building your MP in XML) make sure you use the GUID of the objects you want in the Group, not the server name.

Interested in our training offerings, see http://infrontconsulting.com/

Virtual Machine Manager MP WITH Reports released today

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d6d5cddd-4ec8-4e3c-8ab1-102ec99c257f&displaylang=en

Microsoft has release a new version of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager MP for Ops Mgr. This new version includes Reports. Hopefully this MP has been better QA tested and run through than the DNS MP that has been causing customers grief. Check back later for a full review.

Interested in Operations Manager training, MP Development training, OSD training? Check out our offerings at www.InfrontConsulting.com/training.php

Hyper-V/Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM) Uninstall

Over the last few months we have been playing with the Beta version of Virtual Machine Manager. A few days ago I decided to uninstall the beta version and install the RTM version. Since it was in our lab I was going to wait to reinstall, since I have some other things that needed my attention first. Well I was contact by a co-worker today about the VMs running on that server not behaving. After taking a look in the Hyper-V console we realized that the all the VM network adapters had failed to load.

We have had these machines up and running for some time now, so we know they have been working. This particular lab build is a single physical server running 2008 x64 bit, and Hyper-V. We installed VMM on this physical host to manage the VMs on the server along with an ESX test server and some minor Virtual Servers 2005 boxes. The tests have been running just fine the problems started with the uninstall.

Uninstalling VMM was a simple process, Control Panel - Add/Remove Programs. Once complete I uninstalled the consoles, admin site and was on my way. I verified that all the VMs were up and running (which they were), I could RDP to the server etc. The problems started when we noticed the above issue with the Network adapters. We attempted to restart the Hyper-V Services only to get an error complaining some files were missing. These are the services that wouldn't start...

We were getting

Log Name:      Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-Network-Admin
Source:        Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-Network
Date:          1/2/2009 2:09:55 PM
Event ID:      14112

and

Log Name:      Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-VMMS-Admin
Source:        Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-VMMS
Date:          1/2/2009 1:47:57 PM
Event ID:      14096

We rebooted the server and got the same results.

Read how we fixed the error at http://www.InfrontConsulting.com/resources.htm 

For training on any of the SystemCenter Suite of products please visit us at http://www.infrontconsulting.com/events.htm

InterOp Connectors Released

I got this following email a couple of days ago. The InterOp Connectors have been released. This  should make the R2 version of Operations Manager a complete end to end solution...

We are excited to announce the release of the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Interop Connectors (Beta 2) to Connect.
This package contains the beta software for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Interop Connectors.
The following Connectors are included:

• Operations Manager 2007 R2 Connector for Tivoli Enterprise Console
• Operations Manager 2007 R2 Connector for HP OpenView Operations
• Operations Manager 2007 R2 Universal Connector

Savision Live Maps 3.0 has Gone Live

Live Maps 3.0 has gone live (pun intended). I have written about this product and how valuable I think it will be for enterprises running Operations Manager 2007. If you are interested in seeing this product or have any questions about it feel free to contact us through our website or at sales'AT'infrontconsulting.com

The official announcement....

We are proud to announce the release of Live Maps v3 for Operations Manager 2007. This version opens many new doors to all the data collected by System Center Operations Manager 2007.

Business process availability monitoring or web enabled executive dashboards? Network topologies or live application diagrams? Live Maps v3 in combination with System Center Operations Manager 2007 brings you all that and more!

Key New Features:

• Network and application topology maps
• Business process maps
• Executive dashboards
• All maps are dynamic and change-aware
• Network-link monitoring on any map
• Wizard and template based map creation

Key Enhancements:

• Enhanced scalability of the Web and Authoring console
• Changed architecture for health state roll-up

Upgrading

Live Maps v3 can be installed next to v2. A migration tool will be posted soon.

If you have a beta version of Live Maps v3 installed first uninstall this version and manually remove the v3 management packs before installing the new version.

OpsMgr R2 Beta

The Live Maps v3 OpsMgr Extension is not yet compatible with Operations Console of OpsMgr R2 beta. An R2 compatible version will be posted soon.  

Recently I have spent a considerable amount of time playing with Savision Live Maps 3. For those of you that aren't familiar with Live Maps, it's a great third party SCOM mapping and business workflow product.  In previous versions of the software you would build a custom map of the world, country, region, state etc, add your SCOM agents and or network gear manually to build your map. The new version of the software has a new dynamic list/group feature. This feature allows you to build your custom map at any level (from the world view down to the server rack view) and create a dynamic agent list to populate your map (using discovered SCOM objects). This is very helpful for organizations that have multiple data centers and want to create dynamic group of servers that live in these data centers. This way when the engineers build a new server (that meets the criteria you have set) and adds the SCOM agent not only will it get all the SCOM rules, monitors, etc they also get added to the Map.

Live Maps not only has a Mapping feature but the ability to create Business Processes Workflows and Dashboards. You get the same same alerting, dynamic lists etc only in a standard workflow/flow chart type of view.

There other features of this products that make it work looking at...

• They have a feature that will make an audible alert when a SCOM alert is generated. This is a feature many customers ask for as they are putting this map in a NOC type setting and they want their NOC to get an audible notification when there is an alert.

• The ability to embed maps. This allows you to drill in to your maps down to the Server Rack level. Granted you have to build the maps down to that level and populate them (using dynamic lists hopefully). What this does is allows your NOC to quickly and efficiently identify where the problem systems are.
• Live Maps 3 also includes the ability to use objects discovered by SCOM and put them in your map or business work flow.

• One last feature I want to mention is the ability to use custom Visio Diagrams or other JPEGs to build your map. This allows you to build custom Data Center maps for your business.

Over all I am very pleased with this product and say it's a must have for any organization that is running Operations Manager. For a more detailed look at the product including Install and Config consider taking our Operations Manager Boot Camp where we have included a module on Savision.

Making Windows Live Applications work on Server 2008

After rebuilding my laptop back to Server 2008 32bit I wanted to install Windows Live applications (just Live Writer and Messenger). However the installer for these applications fails on the OS Check, stating the OS is not supported. I tried running the installer in compatibility mode however that didn't work either. After a little research I found a few posts saying that Messenger 8.1 worked on Server, so I went and downloaded it from here and installed it. It works like a charm.

Live Writer was a different story. There is not standalone installer for Writer as there is for Messenger. In my former life (many years ago) I was a support engineer so I started thinking about ways to get this app installed (I like it for Blogging). I run a Windows Home Server and had a backup from the an older system that was successfully running Writer. The first thing I wanted to do was look at what was in the program folders, so I did a restore of the %Program files%\Windows Live\Writer to the same path on my new system. Just out of curiosity, once the restore was complete I ran the .exe for writer and it launched with no problem. I did no installation (as it failed) I simply copied the program files from one machine onto another and launched the application.

64 bit Server 2008

As a colleague recently wrote in his blog 64bit Woes not Wows! I wanted to add my two cents.

I rebuilt my laptop (Dell XPS M1710, with 4 gigs of RAM) to run Server 2008 x64 sometime around mid summer. I did this for two reasons; 1. I wanted to use Hyper-V to run VMs for client demos and 2. I find it the best way to learn a new OS. Well after months of trying to make it work I finally rebuilt this last weekend back to 32bit. The lack of Driver and software support drove this decision.

The lack of driver support drove me crazy (no Bluetooth (well one that worked well), no scanner support, webcam etc). But the thing that drove me over the edge was lack of Microsoft Groove Support (among other pieces of SW I couldn't get running Live Writer, DVD playback SW etc). I understand why there's no 64bit Office applications (yet) although they run a 32bit version in a 64bit OS. Groove wouldn't install it simply threw an error saying that 64bit is not a supported OS... really? No 32bit emulation in a 64bit OS like the rest of Office?

Also I found that with all the 32bit processes running; the whole system seem to run very slow and was constantly crashing WMI. I know, there are a lot of reasons this could have been happening, but since reverting back to 32bit I haven't experienced any of these problems. I like the idea of running a 64bit OS on my laptop and perhaps one of these days the drivers and software will catch up.

URL Monitoring in SCOM

One of our clients is a medium sized company that needed to do some pretty intense web application monitoring (or URL monitoring) in SCOM.

A little background first:

1. We were running around 500+ Web Applications/URL monitors divided among roughly 10-14 MPs.

2. We were running a majority virtual environment with the RMS and DB server being the only physical (and very beefed up pieces of hardware).

Some initial thoughts and observations:

1. We had the URLs spread between 9 watcher nodes (all virtual) to distribute the load.
2. There were some URLs that had to run every 5 seconds (instead of the default 60 seconds). We isolated those URLs to two watchers as we weren't sure what type of performance hit that would cause. Those two watchers did run a little higher performance wise.
3. ***UPDATE**** The default runtime for the URL monitoring is 30 seconds. You can go in to the XML and change the time however it will cause problems and cause the Watchers performance to spike, so your best bet is to leave them at 30 second (or more if needed)*********
4. All of the above watchers reported back to 2 Gateway servers, which then reported back to a Management Server
5. The Gateway's performance was much better than we expected. The efficiently at which it processed the data, compressed it and sent it over the wire was very good. The Gateway's CPU was under 10% and the Available Megs of RAM was in the 80%-90% range.
6. The Management Server ran a little higher (performance wise), simply due to all the applets we had running on it (the HP Blade, StorageWorks and Proliant applets), but was still well within "Normal" limits.

***UPDATE*** We ended up adding another 2 GWs, due some performance problems.

Now for the tricky part...

As with most URL monitoring; you may be interested in polling the URL with and without images (if you are using a caching service you want to know if the problem is on your end or the caching service's end). In MOM 2005 you could go in to the Web Application and turn off images (but does that really not download the images, or just not report on them?). In SCOM there are no references to "images" at all. In doing some reading and research turns out that in SCOM images are referred to as "Resources". You can edit this setting by:

1. Highlighting your Web Application and select "Edit web application settings" from the Actions Pane

2. The click on Configure Settings in the Web Request Action pane

3. Go to the Performance Counter Tab and scroll down to where you see Resources

What you see here is the Base Page performance counters, Resources Performance Counters, Links etc.

We know that if you uncheck the Resources check box, SCOM will NOT follow the tags in the HTML to download the images. Zolan and Maco (two of the Engineers we are working with) did a packet sniff of this operation to verify what was happening and according to their results, SCOM will only download the images if you have selected any box in the Resources sections of the Performance tab. A BIG THANK YOU TO THEM FOR DOING THE RESEARCH.

What this means is that SCOM will only report on the Base Page metrics. If you are interested in testing the Caching service you could simply reverse this and uncheck Base Page and only check Resources.

If you are interested in technical classroom training, take a look at our Operations Manager courses at http://www.infrontconsulting.com/events.htm.

Alert Descriptions

Another handy tip to keep in the back pocket during your install.... The Alert description will accept HTML tags. So that means when you are creating your own MP, Rules or Monitors you can format the description to look how you want. You can add certain lines of HTML code to do things for you (i.e. open a file share via a link using the creds of the user that is working the alert etc).

An example of this might be something like (thanks Zolan)...

<table border="0"><tr><td align="right"><b>Host Name:</b></td><td> $Data/EventData/DataItem/HostName$ </td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Time Stamp:</b></td><td> $Data/EventData/DataItem/TimeStamp$ </td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Severity:</b></td><td> $Data/EventData/DataItem/Severity$ </td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Priority:</b></td><td> $Data/EventData/DataItem/Priority$ </td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Priority Name:</b></td><td> $Data/EventData/DataItem/PriorityName$ </td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Facility:</b></td><td> $Data/EventData/DataItem/Facility$ </td></tr><tr><td align="right"><b>Message:</b></td><td> $Data/EventData/DataItem/Message$ </td></tr></table>

Which will format your description to be in a table format, with no border and adds justification.

One thing to note here is this type formatting will only appear in the Monitoring pane of the Ops Console. When you double click on the alert to open or view it, you will see the raw HTML (as above).