Gordon McKenna - System Center Operations Manager MVP - Inframon Ltd

I have to admit that personally this has been one of the most eagerly anticipated Management Pack releases for some time, not only because OCS is probably THE Hottest technologies coming out of Microsoft at the moment but also because the OCS team gained a couple of true Rock stars from the OpsMgr product teams some time ago in Management Pack specialist Peter Schmatz and Reporting legend Thomas Theiner, when I heard that these two guys had defected the first thing I asked them was "when are we going to see a new OCS MP", with these two guys behind it, this MP was always going to be a giant and these boys have not disappointed.

This is a brand new "native" MP, not a converted one from MOM 2005, which you may have expected from the first version and really does use lots of the new features in OpsMgr unlike many of the existing converted ones.

I questioned Thomas earlier this week on this milestone release.......

"What we did is take a working copy of the Wave 13 (OCS 2007 R2) MP and adapt it in our build tree for OCS 2007 RTM.

We got the starting of the type Infrastructures, the new views, way reduced noise, fixed bugs that nobody complained and found before, etc.

The Wave 13 MP will in some weeks contain some reports, will get synthetic transactions (ST) first for IM/Presence, Knowledge, Tasks, Health rollups based on the STs.

With the next generation MP this functionality will be extended to the entire product.

This is a Management Attack - targeted at getting one of the most complex products in Microsoft a breeze for Administrators to manage."

I have to say first impressions on the pack are extremely good, it has a slightly different, more streamlined look and feel in the monitoring pane, giving you a breakdown of each of the complex areas of the product, along with a very straightforward, no nonsense, alert and performance view rather than the normal deluge of State, diagram and dashboard type views.

Under the covers it does not disappoint either with a very accurate class structure and taking full advantage of many of the different monitor type's available in the product, and really does highlight just how seriously the OCS team is taking management of their very exciting and technology leading platform.

In my opinion this is a very credible first version and with much more promised with the R2 version including the all important reporting element (and as Thomas is the ex-reporting PM for MOM\OpsMgr you can bet these will be top draw), this is a good testament to Microsoft's and in particular Tom Mcleery's (head of the OpsMgr Management Pack team) committment to producing top quality Management Packs moving forward.

Test drive it now on your OCS 2007 implementation.....

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A1832431-54B7-4070-9B10-14EFB231FF0C&displaylang=en&displaylang=en     

Well although I hate to admit it being an OpsMgr guy, I have actually been getting my head around deployment planning for SCCM as of late as part of my ever expanding System Center role (no sarcastic comments please boys).

And I have to admit I have been finding it very interesting, and as I am a relative dummy when it comes to SCCM I thought I would start blogging about the stuff I am finding out, so you other SCCM dummys out there may possibly pick ups some tips (you never know maybe one of SCCM colleagues on WMUG may start doing the same with OpsMgr).

First of all I have been directed to some very good resources, first one being this guide from the deployment guys on rough sizing guidlines:

http://blogs.technet.com/deploymentguys/archive/2008/05/20/sccm-for-deployment-rough-sizing-guidelines.aspx#comments

Really good read.

Next, unlike OpsMgr which has guides that come in both downloadable word format as well as the readable online format, it appears that most SCCM content is ONLY available online, so I started off (after reading through the fundamentals), with the Configuration Manager Planning and Deployment Overview here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb693806.aspx

I have to say mind that I was a bit dissapointed I couldnt just download this lock stock (somebody point me in the right direction if I am missing the guide in Word format), as I do like to print a copy off to peruse on the train on my way into London.

Point for Microsoft, If you want people to start treating the System Center like a suite then get some consistency on TechNet across the product sets.....

I then began wondering which version I should be focusing on and as R2 is almost upon us I thought that I would concentrate on this version, you can check out supported configurations here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb680717.aspx

And finally, I wanted to know whether "out-of-the-stable" R2 would be supporting SQL 2008, and to my dissapointment the answer is no, check out this newsgroup thread here:

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?siteid=17&PostID=3732354

I will let you no in my next SCCM post how I got on with the docs,

many thanks to Firdous for the tips

A question that came up recently from one of my fellow MVP's was whether or not hotfixes destined for Management Servers need to be applied against Gateway Servers and the simple answer is yes.

Here is the official reply from Clive Eastwood OpsMgr Support guru (and fellow Brit) on the OpsMgr product team:

Yes a GWS is treated the same as an MS. Applying an Agent/Server hotfix to a GWS (e.g. applying a MOMModules.dll hotfix) will apply the updates to server DLL’s as well as copying the msp file to the appropriate platform folders of the AgentManagement folder for distribution to managed agents (current and future).

David posted earlier on the release of the new Dell Management Pack, this pack has had a number of issues some which were actually caused by problems in OpsMgr which have now been addressed in a hotfix.

Unfortunately, it is not that obvious in the documentation about some of the things you need to do to take full advantage of this release so I want to point out a really good blog post from Kevin Holman on the product team that talks about some of these things

http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2008/08/11/updated-dell-mp-released-3-1-a01.aspx

Hi Folks, a heads up, to stop you making the same mistake as me.

I have just spent the last three weeks finishing up an OpsMgr rollout for a large manufacturing company in the UK as part of a server re-location project, and as they have a pretty well deployed SCCM infrastructure, I opted for AD Integrated for Agent deployment with the agent being delivered by SCCM.

The target for the agent was all Windows Servers in the domain, which should have made the agent roll-out pretty simple, however, I forgot to instruct the SCCM engineer to make an exception for my RMS, two Management Servers and two ACS Collectors, and he managed to physically deploy and agent to each of these boxes, the result was pretty catastrophic, as the Health Service on the MS’s simply stopped working. The action you may think was most obvious here was to roll back the agent but this actually resulted in ripping the guts out of the MS’s with all services refusing to start (even after a repair).

Luckily, I managed to pretty much re-install all of the MS’s back to their previous states but obviously this has meant re-configuring things like ACS and has resulted in a pretty significant outage for the client.

Moral of the story, make sure you make an exception for your OM infrastructure servers if planning an agent deployment via SCCM

Note for Microsoft, please make the OpsMgr agent or SCCM intelligent enough to know that a server is running a Management Server component..........

Gordo.

I have been busy doing a fair number of ACS Installs recently and thought I would put together a step by step guide for reference purposes as the information to do this end to end  is not in the same place in the guides which can lead to missed steps

ACS Database and Collector Server Install

1. Log on to the Management Server  with an account that is a member of the OpsMgr administrators group

2. Click on the OpsMgr Setup executable which On the install splash page click install “Install Audit Collection Server” from the menu to start the install wizard.

3. On the Welcome screen click next

4. Check the button to accept the terms in the license Agreement and click next

5. On the “Database Installation Options” screen leave the create a new database option checked and click next

6. On the “Data Source” screen, leave the default data source name as “OpsMgrAC”

7. On the “Database” screen leave the Remote database server option checked and add the database server machine name, the database server instance name and leave the database name as the default, click next

8. On the “Database Authentication” screen leave Windows authentication checked and click next.

9. On the “Database Creation Options” screen, check specify directories and choose the following paths:
Database file location -,
Log file location –
and Click next

10. On the “Event Retention Schedule” screen either leave the following defaults:
Local hour of the day to perform daily database maintenance: 02:00AM
Number of days and event is retained in the database: 14
or change as appropiate
Click next

11. On the “ACS Stored Timestamp Format” Screen select either the local timestamp or the Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) checkbox and click next
 
12. Click next on the summary page to install

13. When the install is finished log onto the SQL server and verify that the OperationsManagerAC database is installed

14. On the local server: , open Computer Management and Services and Applications, select Services, and confirm that the Operations Manager Audit Collection Service is present, that it is started, and that the Startup Type is set to Automatic.

ACS Reports Install

Installing the ACS Reports

1. Log on to the Management Server  with an account that is a member of the OpsMgr administrators group

2. Open explorer and navigate to D:\Software\OpsMgrRTMSP1\SelectCDImage\ReportModels\acs.

3. Copy the folder locally to the C: drive

4. Copy the file “ReportingConfig.exe” from D:\Software\OpsMgrRTMSP1\SelectCDImage \SupportTools to C:\acs.

5. Open a Command Window and navigate to the folder c:\acs

6. Run the following command:

UploadAuditReports <database\instance> http://<management server>/ReportServer C:\acs

note: you may see some warning errors as below on uploading the reports, these are expected and can be ignored

Finally, here is the bit that everyone misses

Configuring SRS

1. Open Internet Explorer and enter the following address to view the SQL Reporting Services Home page. http://<yourReportingServerName>/Reports$<InstanceName>

2. Click Audit Reports in the body of the page and then click Show Details in the upper right part of the page.

3. Click the Db Audit data source.
In the Connect Using section, select Windows Integrated Security and click Apply.

I quite often have to carry out a split install of SRS for my OpsMgr deployments, this is normally down to the fact that most SQL admins wont allow IIS to be installed on their SQL boxes.

In these situations I typically have a large database server with the Ops and sometimes Datawarehouse DB's on, and one server with my RMS role. As I normally install the Webconsole on the RMS server to avoid any double hop issues, it always makes sense to me to also install the SRS front end here too, especially as the reporting is now accessible through the console which requires a connection to the RMS anyway.

The tricky part for a lot of people I talk to is getting the SRS split install to work, so I thought I would blog about how you do this step by step:

Installing A SQL Server Reporting Services Split Install

1. Make sure IIS is installed locally on the server.

2. Locate the SQL Install media and click on setup.exe

3. Click next on the “Registration Information” page

4. On the components to install page check the Reporting Services box and click next

5. On the “Instance Name” tab choose the default instance

6. On the “Service Account” tab choose Use a domain user account that has full access to the Data Warehouse (I usually use the SDK or data reader\writer account), make sure the start Reporting Services at the end of setup tab is checked and click next

7. On the “Report Server Installation Options” and “Error and Usage Report Settings” tabs click

8. On the “Ready To Install” tab click install to finish

9. When the install completes please run Service Pack 2 to update the components to the necessary service pack level

Configuring SRS

The next step is to configure SRS so it installs the report DB’s on the remote SQL Server

1. Go to Start, All Programs, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Configuration Tools, Reporting Services Configuration

2. On the “Configure Report Server” screen click connect to access your local SRS instance

3. Click on the “Database Setup” tab on the left hand side, click Connect, in the “SQL Server Connection Dialog” screen specify the SQL Instance that the SRS DB’s will be installed too, leave Current User – Integrated Security selected as the credentials type and click OK
 
4. Next click the “New” button and leave the defaults but make sure “Create the report server database in SharePoint Integrated Mode” is unchecked, next click OK to create the new DB’s
 
5. Next, go to the “Report Server Virtual Directory” tab and check the box “Apply default settings” next to the New Button, the click apply

6. Go to the “Report Manager Virtual Directory” tab and check the box “Apply default settings” next to the New Button, the click apply

7. Go to the “Web Service Identity” tab and click apply

8. Click on the “Database Setup” tab again and on the left hand side and click the Connect button, in the “SQL Server Connection Dialog” screen specify the SQL Instance that the SRS DB’s are now installed too, leave Current User – Integrated Security selected as the credentials type and click OK to connect, now choose ReportServer in the database name pull down box and click apply

9. Finally, to test that the above steps have been carried out correctly, open up a browser and navigate to http:\\localhost\reports, if everything has been successful then you should see the reporting services home page.

The MSMQ MP has been officially released by Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1d2b4398-8bc2-4a43-850c-852ebb0d983b&DisplayLang=en

 Overview

Message Queuing (also known as MSMQ) is a server application that enables applications to communicate across heterogeneous networks and systems that may be temporarily offline or otherwise inaccessible. Instead of an application communicating with a service on another computer, it sends its information to Message Queuing, which sends the information to a Message Queuing service on the target computer where it is made available to the other application. Message Queuing provides guaranteed delivery, efficient routing, security, and priority based messaging.
Feature Summary
The Message Queuing Management Pack provides monitoring for the following:

• MSMQ Servers
• MSMQ Triggers
• MSMQ Queues
• Dependant Clients

A big post SP1 hotfix rollup has now been released which fixes the following problems that have been identified with a number of System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1 management packs:

·    Unable to discover CSDVersion on Windows Vista machines

·    Unable to discover operating system properties on Windows 2000 SP4

·    Agent HandleCountThreshold monitor does not restart Health service on exchange agent if HandleCountThreshold is exceeded

·    ACS Collection rule references a wrong EventID

·    Performance collection raises erroneous alerts for disabled services due to unavailable perf counters

·    A script bug prevents cluster discovery where Virtual Server Name is a subset of the Physical Server Name.

It is available through CSS and the KB article is KB951979

 If you are seeing the following error in your OpsMgr sp1 event log on some servers where the DELL MP is running?

Event Type: Error

Event Source: HealthService

Event Category: Health Service

Event ID: 4000

Date: 4/22/2008

Time: 1:32:13PM

User: N/A

Computer: OPSMGRSRV1

Description:

A monitoring host is unresponsive or has crashed. The status code for the host

failure was 2164195371.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Problem signature:

  Problem Event Name:           APPCRASH

  Application Name:    MonitoringHost.exe

  Application Version: 6.0.6278.0

  Application Timestamp:        47b71437

  Fault Module Name: HealthServiceRuntime.dll

  Fault Module Version:          6.0.6278.0

  Fault Module Timestamp:     47b71433

  Exception Code:       c0000005

  Exception Offset:     00003d9d

  OS Version:  6.0.6001.2.1.0.16.7

  Locale ID:     1033

This is being caused by a discovery rule that uses the SNMP Discovery Module, and the good news is that there is a new hotfix out that corrects the problem.

It is available currently through  CSS just ask for KB951526.

 Hi Folks,

I just wanted to let you know that I will be delivering a System Center Operations Manager 2007 Training Course in London, July 1-4th 2008 where I will be sharing some of my many experiences in architecting, installing, configuring and troubleshooting the product.

The training is structured into two separate 2-day courses which can be taken individually or as a complete series and has been written (as well as being delivered by) System Operations Manager MVP's so it is packed with "Real World" tips and advice.

The first two days looks at installation and configuration and the final two days focuses on Ops Manager fundamentals (including all of the new features in SP1). The course is real value to anyone just starting with OpsMgr or those who are later down the line with the product as each module comes with a complete set of hands on labs, meaning you get to walk away with real skills that will get you flying with OpsMgr in any size environment.

The training is the only "Real World" training currently available on Operations Manager 2007 and is based on experiences gained by industry experts bringing their real life know how to the whole training delivery.

The cost of the training is £900, per person for each 2 Day course, a total of £1,800, for the full 4 days training. 

The seats are filling up fast so if you are serious about Ops Mgr then get some serious training this July.........

I have attached the course run down and registration form for anyone interested, or alternatively mail me direct.

For anyone out there in the community who will be attending MMS in Vegas, dont forget to check my session out, I will be doing a very special talk around some of the work I have been doing with my OpsMgr customers in the area of SLA Scorecarding. This has been a growing request amongst the businesses that I have been involved with over the years, "My boss complains that he has no visibility in what we do", " He doesnt appreciate all the hard work I do", are common threads that I hear. Well, I am planning on changing all that with a new offering that my company (inframon.com) has around providing Executive reporting from your OpsMgr Datawarehouse, so make sure you check it out, and drop me a line if this something that intersts you. Session: SO33 SharePoint 2007 Scorecarding with Operations Manager 2007 Friday, May 2 11:30 AM - 12:45 PM, Titian 2201B Speaker(s): Gordon McKenna Track(s): Operations Management Session Type(s): Breakout Products(s): Microsoft SQL Server, Operations Manager 2007, SharePoint Server In this session you will learn how to create CIO scorecards in SharePoint 2007 for Operations Manager 2007 using SQL 2005 Reporting Services and other technologies such as Dundas (soon to be featured in SQL Server 2008). The session will look at why these types of views are important within many companies, what impact this can have on your business, and what simple steps you can take to achieve very effective, high-level executive views of performance and availability of your key LOB services and applications. The scorecards can show whether important KPI's are being achieved and whether your IT department is meeting the day to day needs of the business. The key demos in this session will take you through the steps needed to implement effective business scorecarding in Sharepoint 2007 using metrics collected in the Operations Manager 2007 Datawarehouse based on "real-world" experiences gained inthe field. After attending this presentation you will have a good insight into how CIO Scorecards can really help add value to Operations Manager deployments, providing real value to IT executives.

The Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 has been released and is available from -

Verion 03.6.1404.0000

Overview

Three different Microsoft® Operations Manager 2005 (MOM 2005) management packs are included in this download.

• MicrosoftBizTalkServer2006R2.akm is the management pack for monitoring computers running Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2006 and BizTalk Server 2006 R2.

• MicrosoftEnterpriseSingleSignOn.akm is the management pack for the Microsoft Enterprise Single Sign-On component included with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2. You should deploy it with the BizTalk Server Management Pack for monitoring a BizTalk group.

• MicrosoftBiztalkRFID.akm is required for monitoring RFID functionality in BizTalk Server 2006 R2.
The Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Management Pack is designed to monitor BizTalk Server events, collect BizTalk Server-specific performance counters in one central location, and raise alerts for operator intervention as necessary.

The Microsoft Enterprise Single Sign-On Management Pack is designed to be used for monitoring Enterprise Single Sign-On events and performance counters. The Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Management Pack should be deployed before deploying Microsoft Enterprise Single Sign-On Management Pack. You must associate the Microsoft Enterprise Single Sign-On MOM rule group with the BizTalk Server 2006 MOM computer group that is created as a result of deploying the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Management Pack.
The Microsoft BizTalk RFID Management Pack for MOM 2005 provides for both proactive and reactive monitoring of BizTalk RFID. The BizTalk RFID Management Pack provides for comprehensive monitoring of important BizTalk RFID events and performance counters to provide a centralized management and monitoring experience for a BizTalk RFID installation.

For detailed information about these management packs, please refer to product documentation.
Feature Bullet Summary:

This MOM pack for BizTalk Server 2006 R2 incorporates the following features:

1. Monitor the health and availability of the BizTalk Server components.
2. Collect key performance data for BizTalk Server.
3. Start common tasks in context of MOM alerts.
4. Monitor overall health through state view for BizTalk server computers.
5. Support for RFID features of the BizTalk Server 2006 R2

Windows 2000/2003 updated from 6.0.5000.0 to 6.0.5000.25 -

• Monitor "Network Adapter Connection Health" is non-functional, looking for attribute that could be truncated: network adapter description is too large, multiple network adapters have the same description, enhanced monitoring of network adapter
• Localizaton Issues: script or executable failed to run on the agent machine with Hungarian local, script or executable failed to run on the agent machine with French local

DHCP 2000/2003 MP updated from 6.0.5000.0 to 6.0.5000.33 -

• Backward Compatibility Script Error in ‘DHCP Server 2000 Scope Monitoring’ VBScript

Live Communications Server 2005 (6.0.5000.0) -

Compute Cluster 2003 (6.0.5000.0) -

Active Directory Federation Services 2003 (ADFS) (6.0.5000.0) -