The Real World Is Messy

Essentials 2007 and Windows Essential Business Server

2008-05-19T16:29:00Z

Microsoft has conducted a tremendous amount of research on IT practices in mid-sized businesses. Hundreds of customer visits, focus groups, establishment of customer and partner advisory boards, and more to gather detailed input on how a product can help mid-market customers simplify processes, improve reliability and generally shift their role from "reactive firefighter" to a more strategic and proactive asset to the business. Essential Business Server combines Windows Server 2008, Exchange...(read more)

Dell Management Pack available for Essentials 2007

2008-05-15T16:34:00Z

The Dell Management Pack enables System Center Essentials 2007 to discover and monitor the status of Dell systems and printers on a defined network segment. This improved representation, which includes the receipt of failure and pre-failure alerts, allows Dell customers to assess, respond to, and validate the availability of Dell systems and printers monitored. In addition to improved availability, the Management Pack enhances the ability to monitor and manage the hardware in a single management...(read more)

Essentials 2007 SP1 Improves performance, usability and supportability

2008-05-12T17:53:00Z

Essentials 2007 SP1 supports more SNMP protocols, allows cross platform archectures of managed clients and servers and has improved management pack and reporting functionality. What does this mean to you as an IT Generalist? Improve monitoring and troubleshooting diagnostics for your Windows-based servers, Windows-based clients, applications and network devices New updates of management packs for Microsoft and third-party applications and devices Support for Office 2007 and Windows Server 2008 Integrated...(read more)

Windows Server 2008 is a supported platform for the Essentials 2007 SP1 Server, Console and Agent

2008-05-08T17:50:00Z

Essentials 2007 SP1 management server, console and agent on computers running Windows Server 2008 will be fully supported by CYQ208. Management packs for Windows Server 2008 and it's role will be available as well in the same timeframe. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 is the next generation of the Windows Server operating system and provides significant improvements to the base operating system over Windows Server 2003. Notable improvements include those in networking, advanced security features...(read more)

Essentials 2007 SP1 Improves management pack quality

2008-05-05T17:52:00Z

Essentials 2007 SP1 supported Managment Packs follow these guidelines, simplifying IT management: Rules which generate alerts are directly actionable. No alert is generated that is not directly actionable or does not require user attention. Alerts automatically resolve the problem wherever technically possible. In the event that automatic resolution is not possible, tasks should be provided for assisting in diagnosis. Performance Collection rules are optimized for the IT Generalist and only 1 counter...(read more)

Essentials 2007 One Year Ago Today

2008-05-02T18:43:00Z

Happy Birthday Essentials 2007!

http://blogs.technet.com/aralves/archive/2007/05/06/system-center-essentials-rtm.aspx

http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/socal/archive/2007/05/06/system-center-essentials-goes-rtm.aspx

SP1 Improves Support for Remote SQL Servers

2008-04-28T17:50:00Z

Essentials 2007 SP1 supports using a remote SQL Server 2005 instance on a computer with a different architecture (x86 or x64) than the computer running the Essentials 2007 management server Optimized for the Intel Itanium processor, SQL Server (64-bit) takes advantage of advanced memory addressing capabilities for essential resources such as buffer pools, caches, and sort heaps, reducing the need to perform multiple I/O operations to bring data in and out of memory from disk. Greater processing capacity...(read more)

Deploying Office 2007 with System Center Essentials 2007

2008-04-28T16:33:00Z

Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 is a solution designed for IT administrators in midsized organizations that include up to 30 servers and 500 client computers. Administrators can use the System Center Essentials 2007 to secure, update, monitor, and track their IT environment. With System Center Essentials, you can perform the following tasks: Use the inventory feature to collect and examine computer hardware and software inventory. Use the software deployment feature to centrally deploy software...(read more)

Intel Active Management Technology Management Pack for Essentials 2007

2008-04-28T16:33:00Z

The Intel® Active Management Technology Management Pack for Essentials provides support for Intel AMT Technology version 2.0 and later. The Intel AMT MP gives Essentials 2007 the capability to discover and remotely manage Intel AMT supported systems. This MP extends the Essentials menus to include Intel AMT functionality. TDuring the discovery process, the MP retrieves asset information from the AMT subsystem. Discovery needs to be performed before you can perform any other Intel® AMT-related tasks...(read more)

Create a Simple Event Detection Monitor in Essentials 2007

2008-04-16T19:50:00Z

How to Create a Simple Log File Event Detection Monitor in Essentials 2007 A simple log file event monitor queries a log file for specific text and sets the health state based on the match. You can specify two pattern matches in the log file: one to set the health state to either warning or error, and the other to set the health state to success. To create the monitor: Log on to the computer with an account that is a member of either Operations Manager Administrators or Operations Manager Authors...(read more)

Now you can Monitor SNMPv1 devices with Essentials 2007 SP1

2008-04-16T17:48:00Z

A real improvement of Essentials 2007 SP1 is to the Computer and Device Management Wizard with the ability to now support discovering SNMPv1 devices. The discovery process configures the Essentials 2007 Server as a proxy agent for any SNMP-enabled network devices you discover, and subsequently do the device polling via SNMP GETs. If you have upgraded your existing installation of Essentials 2007, you will want to re-run the Computer and Device Management Wizard to be sure you can now manage your...(read more)

HP ProLiant Management Pack for Essentials 2007

2008-04-16T16:35:00Z

HP Proliant Management Pack v1.1 The HP Server Management Packs for Operations Manager 2007 and Essentials 2007 support the following features: User Defined Custom Data Icons for Console Diagram View Streamlined Base Hardware event rules in the HP Integrity Management Pack Streamlined procedure for HP Server Management Packs for installation Improved management of events by eliminating multiple alerts in Rules Fully scripted installation that imports management pack data into the Essentials 2007...(read more)

May's Technet Magazine Features Essentials 2007

2008-04-16T16:22:00Z

May's TechNet Magazine features a folded poster insert on System Center Essentials SP1. The poster provides a architecture diagram on how Essentials works on each of the key feature areas: Monitoring, Inventory, Software Distribution & Updates. It also includes a section on what is new with Service Pack 1. It's definitively cool poster I'll be hanging in my office!...(read more)

Reporting in Essentials 2007

2008-03-31T15:17:00Z

Reporting in Essentials 2007 provides a very simple method to generate a report. SQL Server 2005 Express as well as other higher editions of Yukon are supported. Reports can contain data from the following sources:

WSUS
Operations Manager
AEM

The reporting feature in Essentials 2007 is available immediately after installation without performing any additional steps.

There are four reports that are generated directly from WSUS datasources, summarizing hardware and software inventory.

Computer Hardware Inventory Report
This report shows the details of all hardware found for the selected computer(s). Each computer’s inventory is shown in a new report section.
Hardware Group Summary Report
This report provides a summary of your hardware components along with drill-down capability to view computers which match the selected criteria.
Computer Software Inventory Report
This report shows the details of all software installed on the selected computer.
Softwater Inventory Summary report
This report provides a summary of your software assets along the drill-down capability to view computers which match the selected criteria

Essentials 2007 and Remote Operations Manager 2007

2008-03-28T22:18:00Z

Remote Operations Manager 2007 is a partner solution to provide remote managed services to small and midsize customers. ROM 2007 simplifies the monitoring of distributed systems, enabling IT service providers to respond immediately to issues that affect the organization's IT environment. Easy-to-follow configuration documentation and support is available from Microsoft. At the service provider site: Install Remote Operations Manager on central server(s) Install Microsoft System Center Essentials...(read more)

Essentials 2007 and SQL

2008-03-27T22:50:00Z

SQL Server is a very sophisticated technology that requires expert tuning, maintenance and monitoring. SQL Server is used by many applications and services and must be stable or its dependant products will be unreliable. Very large IT infrastructures have dedicated teams for each element of the infrastructure. In smaller companies a dedicated DBA is rarely an option. Dedicated tools are needed to aid the generalist administrator.

SQL server offers:

End-to-end visibility into mission critical applications
Faster problem resolution using SQL Server knowledge
Increased DBA productivity
Automate routine management tasks
Consolidated view of distributed servers and applications

Essentials 2007 helps prevent outages and ease the tasks associated with running an environment dependent on SQL Server. Essentials gives intuitive access to common actions specific to SQL Server available via context sensitive action options as well as simple wizard based tools for tasks such as deployment of software and patches. SQL support in Essentials 2007 includes:

Patch Management of Operating System Updates to SQL Server and clients
Deploy SQL Server specific product updates
Inventory of software and hardware
Centralized Error collection
Complete monitoring of the SQL Server Infrastructure including the SQL Server host OS, the SQL Server service and any services SQL depends on, for example directory services
10 SQL Specific reports in addition to more general Windows reports
Automated daily health report

The SQL Server management pack provides rules for detecting and alerting critical events in SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005. The management pack’s goal is to reduce or prevent SQL Server outages by proactively managing SQL Server instances in the areas of configuration, performance, and security.This management pack can alert on many types of SQL Server critical conditions including, deadlock problems, blocking issues, and SQL Server becoming unavailable. Included in the alert is guidance for resolving the issue with configuration advice or likely problem resolution information based on the type of alert. Additionally, the most commonly monitored performance statistics for SQL Server with predefined thresholds are also defined in the management pack as performance rules. These default thresholds can be modified, but they are a good starting point for monitoring performance on a SQL Server instance. It is also possible to add more performance thresholds if there are additional metrics that are important and need to be monitored closely.

The SQL management pack has a very rich application model of the SQL elements including instances, databases, file groups, files, agent jobs and SQL Roles which the discovery component of the management pack inspects and actually looks for specific objects within the SQL environment. The aspects you choose to monitor and the actions to perform are fully customizable to your requirements. The Management Pack event analysis monitors all the key aspects of the SQL Server environment, for example clustering, log shipping, backup, SQL Server Agent and as we mentioned earlier the SQL roles are discovered and so any roles the SQL Server is running are fully monitored, for example replication. In addition to the overall views of the SQL health in-depth views of database, database engine, reporting services, integration services etc are all available.

Monitoring is based around:

Availability – Synthetic transaction connects confirming service available along with 400 SQL events that affect availability status
Performance – Items such as caching ratio, user connections, processor utilization per instance, database and log size/growth
Configuration – Analyzes the SQL Best Practices and identifies where configuration does not match

Another very useful feature that will appeal to both SQL novice users and experience DBA’s are the new ways to access functions to aid in running SQL. If the Database engine is selected in the Actions pane of the MMC the actions related to the database are displayed. Not only does Essentials reveal what is happening, it gives actions for the component that has focus in the tool. This applies to everything, if we select a just a computer and not a component we get options to list active sessions, processes etc. This is very much a management solution and not just monitoring.

Don't Upload WSUS 3.0 SP1 from Windows Update! It's already in Essentials SP1

2008-03-24T17:10:00Z

WSUS 3.0 SP1 will soon be available from Windows Update. But Essentials 2007 users should not download the update from Windows Update.

Hopefuly you have already heard that for planning purposes, WSUS 3.0 SP1 should not be applied to Essentials 2007 directly. Additionally, System Center Essentials 2007 RTM will not be upgraded to WSUS 3.0 SP1. Essentials 2007 SP1 includes WSUS 3.0 SP1. These are the same bits as what will be available through Windows Update.

3rd party update support, hotfixes and drivers from Microsoft Update catalog is not available through the WSUS UI, but available through System Center Essentials 2007 SP1 API's and SQL views.

Essentials 2007 SP1 topics at MMS 2008

2008-03-21T17:44:00Z

Time to start thinking about attending Microsoft Management Summit 2008 from April 28 to May 2 in Las Vegas, Nevada. IT professionals interested in learning more about WSUS 3.0 SP1 and how it interacts Essentials 2007 SP1 will have a chance to have their questions answered during two sessions on the topic, Partners can attend a session and learn more about Remote Operations Manager 2007 and how it integrates with Essentials 2007. Essentials 2007 SP1 will be highligted in several different sessions...(read more)

More N-able and Microsoft Essentials 2007 in the news.

2008-03-20T17:40:00Z

I spotted a couple more articles on the partnership with N-able and Essentials 2007, First, in the New York Times Small Business section, N - Able Technologies, Microsoft to Market Managed Services . Then in the Ottawa Blog: Microsoft Integration . N-able Technologies is based out of Ottawa, so it's more of a 'local boy makes good' story....(read more)

Discount Registration for TechEd 2008

2008-03-20T17:30:00Z

Just a reminder that TechEd 2008 for IT Professionals will be this June 10-13, 2008 in Orlando Florida. Register by Friday, April 4, 2008, to receive the discounted rate of just $1,795—that's $200 off the regular rate of $1,995. Registering now will also give you a better selection of room choices. Here is you chance to speak with experts on the newly released Essentials 2007 SP1. Technical tracks include a new IT Manager track, which explores the complexities of managing IT departments, possible...(read more)

How to Install Essentials 2007 Agent on ISA Server 2006/ISA Server 2004

2008-03-20T01:07:00Z

It is possible to install a Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 agent on a computer that is running Microsoft Internet Server Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006 or Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004. Back to the top To configure an ISA Firewall configuration with a System Center Essentials 2007 agent, you must manually install the agent. Then, you must create access rules for the agent in the ISA Server. The basic sequence of tasks are: Step 1: Configure System Center...(read more)

Do You Have Something to say to Microsoft about IT Management in your Midsize Organization?

2008-03-18T20:51:00Z

Here is a great opportunity to have your voice heard and influence future versions of software. Microsoft User Research is looking for IT professionals to participate in a user research study. The purpose is to learn from those who perform IT services for their company; such as routine server maintenance tasks, various levels of troubleshooting, daily server, network or desktop management, and the planning and implementation of technology. Someone from the research team will meet with you at your...(read more)

N-able partnership with Essentials 2007 in the news

2008-03-18T19:28:00Z

I spotted a couple articles further dicussing the new partnership between N-able, a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, and System Center Essentials 2007. N-able Technologies(R) to Deliver Next Level of Interoperability to Managed Service Providers Worldwide N-able inks interoperability deal with Microsoft In case you missed it, yesterday's post was an inteview with N-able's VP of R&D, August Wehrmann...(read more)

N-able Technologies to Partner with Essentials 2007

2008-03-17T17:35:00Z

N-able (pronounced en-able ) announced today that they will be partnering with System Center Essentials 2007 to provide a remote management solution for midsized businesses. Here is an interview with August Wehrmann, Vice President of Research & Development at N-able Technologies to help explain this new product. Who is N-able? N-able Technologies is a global supplier of remote management technology designed exclusively for the SMB market. With our N-central 6.5 software, IT service providers...(read more)

Error when you install the Essentials 2007 reporting feature: "SRS Server Validation Error"

2008-03-14T13:57:00Z

ISSUE: When you install the Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 reporting feature, the installation may be unsuccessful. Additionally, you may receive an error message that resembles the following: SRS Server Validation Error CAUSE The Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) computer that is running SQL Server Reporting Services has the default Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) port for the Web site configured and SSL is not configured for reporting. The installation process of the reporting feature...(read more)

New KB: Essentials 2007 generates errors in setup wizard and/or in report deployment due to winsock

2008-03-13T19:36:00Z

Essentials 2007 generates errors in setup wizard and/or in report deployment You may experience one of the following problems in Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007: Problem 1 You cannot install server roles or reporting components for System Center Essentials 2007. The following error message is returned by Windows Installer: The setup wizard was interrupted before System Center Operations Manager 2007 could be installed. Problem 2 If the reporting feature that is required for System Center...(read more)

Upgrade a Remote Essentials 2007 Console to SP1

2008-03-13T19:22:00Z

I've been watching the forums and two questions seem to be cropping up repeatedly. One is on using the SP1 feature that allows managing workgroup servers. I must have intuited this question since yesterday's post was on this very topic. The second question has to do with applying SP1 to a system. You will need to update your agents on all systems and you will need to upgrade your remote consoles. To upgrade a remote Essentials 2007 console execute this procedure on the computer that the console...(read more)

Managing workgroup-joined computers in Essentials 2007 SP1

2008-03-12T19:27:00Z

Management of workgroup-joined computers is now supported in Essentials 2007 SP1. Supporting the management of workgroup-joined computers requires additional configuration on the Essentials 2007 management server, as well as additional preparation on the managed computers. For detailed instructions on preparing the management server to manage workgroup-joined computers in Essentials 2007 see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc308758.aspx For more information on how to install agents on...(read more)

Monitoring MySQL using Essentials 2007

2008-03-12T18:45:00Z

I just ran across a great post by Tom Swanson on how he monitors MySQL using Essentials 2007 . Check it out! In his post, Tom describes the steps he took to create custom monitors and how to work around monitoring ODBC drivers. The steps include: Make a custom monitor that checks all the MySQL services are running OK Watch for the particular ports used by MySQL to make sure they are live from outside the monitored box Attach to the MySQL databases of interest using OLEDB...(read more)

It's Here! It's Here! Essentials 2007 SP1 now available!

2008-03-10T17:00:00Z

I just received word from the Product Manager for Essentials 2007, Rene Garcia. Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 SP1 has just been announced at Microsoft Convergence in Orlando, Florida. You can download the product at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sce/cc304525.aspx Several new enhancements have been added to Service Pack – all of them have been requests from users of Essentials. · Support for managing workgroup-joined computers · Support for monitoring SNMPv1 network devices · Support...(read more)