Gordon McKenna - System Center Operations Manager MVP - Inframon Ltd

Microsoft have moved the Management pack catalogue to the new Pinpoint format:

http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/systemcenter/managementpackcatalog

Its a little confusing at first, but I wanted to give you some tips for finding the MP you want in case you are struggling.

1. Click on the link above, or goto http://www.microsoft.com/opsmgr and click on the "Find Management Packs and Connectors" link half way down the right side of the page.

2. On the right hand side you will see a section entitled "System Center Catalogs by Product", choose the product you want such as "Operations Manager 2007 R2"

3. Finally type in the MP your after such as "Exchange 2010", and youy should find a list of everything that is available for the product i.e. Exchange, Forefront.

To be honest, the new catalogue has been met with mixed feedback from both customers and MVP's and Filip Lazar who has been working on the transition on the System Center product team fielded some early question's on it and had this to say explaining the move:

"Pinpoint is a team within Microsoft that is going to host solutions across numerous product groups.  It was introduced at PDC 09, and is the general direction for the catalogs of a lot of products. 

So why did we end up using this platform?

• Removing the need to manage the old custom MP catalog frees up dev and test resources for the System Center teams. This means that we can focus on our core competency, which is creating a better management products for you and working on MPs.

•  Web design is Pinpoint's core competence. The team is staffed to improve the site and has a good pipeline. It's this pipeline that will give the catalog a good future. Although I cannot discuss all aspects of this pipeline, you'll see new things appearing such as customer facing MP ratings, which are meant to add value to the community and address requests that we have received in the past.

• The new catalog removes Microsoft as a bottleneck and gives you direct control over listing MPs. While we still approve/deny MPs from showing up in the catalog, it a first step in opening up that black box that you encounter once you request an MP be listed, or if you are looking to find a market for MPs you have created.

• Pinpoint will offer us a way to start getting parity between what you see in the In-Product Catalog (R2 for now), and the web experience. This is something we're looking to leverage in the next version of the product as well.

The pinpoint change is needed to help us gain the benefits above, but we are aware that functionality has changed drastically, and some tasks can no longer be performed.  My goal is to work on improving the experience to make sure that the new site adds value. However, I do want to call out that the part of the site that is a paradigm shift (bing type search versus old excel list type search)  which does take some getting used to regardless."

If you have any thoughts on this new site or there is anything that you would like to see different then please let me know and I will pass your feedback along.

I’m pleased to announce the ENU release of R2 CU1 to the download center. The download center link is now live and the KB article should be published very shortly.

Please note the announcement below regarding the realease of the first cumulative hotfix update for Operations Manager 2007 R2, this is a rollup of all hotfixes to date for the R2 platform, a must for anyone runningt this version.....

"The release is of high importance to a number of customers, internal and external partners, especially Exchange 2010 customers eagerly awaiting the release in support of the 2010 management pack. This release also rounds off our Windows Server 2008 R2 support story (KB974722) nicely.

A big THANK YOU to everyone who contributed to our first Cumulative Update release."

External Resources

Download link  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=05d30779-2ddc-48dc-aa91-a23167ee2cad

CU1 KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974144

Exchange Server 2010 MP dependency on CU1 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee758051.aspx

I have had a brief week back in the UK after my Keynote presentation with Alison Watson at the  Worldwide Partner Conference and now I fly out to Redmond for my second visit of the year (this is getting a bit of a regular thing), this time to take part in one of Microsoft's biggest internal events TechReady.

For those who don’t know, TechReady is a semi-annual, 5-day internal technical conference for Microsoft employees from all over the globe who attend presentations by the various product groups about all the upcoming releases for the year. They also receive training on all of the currently released Microsoft products. The senior executives will also often present at TechReady, outlining their visions for the future, and taking questions from employees.

I actually have the very great honor of being the first OpsMgr MVP ever to present at this event (this is usually just internal speakers), and I will be repeating the two sessions that I did at MMS:

Data Center Management with System Center: Real World Scenarios

Running and Maintaining the Microsoft System Center Suite on Hyper-V

I am extremely excited about both visiting the mother ship once more, spending some more extremely useful time with the PG and in presenting to an internal Microsoft audience, which I am sure will be quite different to the normal WMUG or TechEd\MMS audiences.

Check out the new extended MPs from Microsoft Consulting Services, Microsoft IT and OpsMgr Product team here: (not officially supported by MS):

http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/2009/07/newly-released-mps-by-opsmanjam.html

Here’s a summary of what’s been added to each that I extracted from the included docs:

Extended Server 2003 IIS
Microsoft Extended Windows Server Internet Information Services 2003 Management Pack.

The Microsoft Extended Windows Server Internet Information Services 2003 Management Pack includes additional rules and knowledge for monitoring IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003 operating system.

 The rules in the Management Packs for IIS 2003 provide enable Operations Manager 2007 to monitor the following IIS object types:

·      IIS Server Role

·      IIS Web Sites

Extended Windows Server OS
Extended Windows Server Operating System Management Pack.

What's New

The following features are new in this release of the Extended Windows Server Operating System Management Pack:

·         Monitors for the demotion of a domain controller to a Windows member server and executes a cleanup script to remove the replication monitor objects in the directory service

·         Includes two Tasks to remotely shutdown and reboot of a domain controller from within the Operations Console

·         Includes three new alerts to notify when a Windows Server reboots from a bugcheck, performs a clean reboot, or a dirty shutdown was detected.

Extended ADMP
Extended Windows Server Operating System Management Pack.

What’s New in Version 6.0.6278.2

The following new features are new in this release of the Extended Active Directory Management Pack:

• Monitor the Active Directory Management Pack helper object (OOMADS) to verify it is installed and working correctly. 
• Monitor the FSMO role transfer between domain controllers.

What's New in Version 6.0.6278.1

The following features are new in this release of the Extended Active Directory Management Pack:

·      Monitor the Windows Time Service (W32Time) for time synchronization issues with authoritative time source

·      Monitor for clients not authenticating against a local domain controller, indicating site boundaries are not properly defined or scoped.

·      Monitor for expensive or inefficient LDAP queries performed against a DC

·      Monitor for FRS related events that affect the health and availability of the SYSVOL shared directory and its replication on a domain controller

·         Monitor for specific performance characteristics of a domain controller with respect to Free System Page Table Entries and Database Name Cache hit rate

·         Includes two Tasks to remotely shutdown and reboot a domain controller from within the Operations Console

SCCM OSD for OpsMgr 2007
System Center Configuration Manager 2007 OS Deployment Management Pack.

Well, I am currently in New Orleans at the Worldwide Partner Conference.

It is the first time I have attended this event as a partner, although this is one of the biggest events that Microsoft hold and I believe is the biggest partner conference in the world with an estaimated 6,000 partners in attendance.

The main and most exciting reason that I am here though is that I am actually taking part in the main Keynote this morning with Alison Watson, the Corporate VP of Worldwide Partners.

I have been selected along with three other partners around the world to represent not only the UK but Microsoft System Center from a service partner perspective which I have to say I feel very honoured and humbled by.

I will be talking about not only some of my customer enagements, but also some of the partner to partner stuff that I do for Microsoft around System Center.

Anyway, you can catch me here live, broadcast in stunning HD in about two hours time (dont worry if you miss it it will be hosted up ther for a while)

http://www.digitalwpc.com/

There is going to be some pretty major announcements too around my presentation so it will be well worth tuning in to find out whats in store.

So I am off to do some last minute nail biting before I get on stage, so I am going to tell myself to break a leg.....

Hey Folks,

I wanted to give you a heads up on an issue I ran into today with OpsMgr R2 and AEM.

I have been setting up OpsMgr today as part of a Client Monitoring project for a large customer, the engineer I am working with is not a domain admin but is a local admin on the OpsMgr boxes. After installing the DB's using the dbcreate wizard ( the customer did not want any unnecessary registry keys on the SQL box) and then the rest of the OpsMgr components, we went on to configure AEM by running the AEM wizard from a management server in administration, we went through all of the steps however when we clicked to create the share, the console just sat there and never completed.

When I looked under the covers, all of the shares were set up along with the user groups, but the wizard just never came to an end, more alarmingly though, when I cancelled the wizard and shut down the console , the Microsoft.MOM.UI.Console.exe process still remained running, and in fact after going through this process several more times I was left with multiple Microsoft.MOM.UI.Console.exe processes running despite not even having a console physically running. I took from this that whatever was happening to the AEM wizard was actually hanging the console process but without actually crashing the console.

Getting to the root cause of this problem was not easy, as there was nothing in the event logs on the console server or RMS, debug viewer drew a blank, then I came across the following in the SQL database server event log:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: MSSQLSERVER
Event Category: (2)
Event ID: 28005
Date: xx-xx-xxxx
Time: xx:xx:xx
User: N/A
Computer: BLA
Description:
An exception occurred while enqueueing a message in the target queue. Error: 15404, State: 19. Could not obtain information about Windows NT group/user 'DOMAIN\ACCOUNT', error code 0xea.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 65 6d 00 00 10 00 00 00 em......
0008: 08 00 00 00 53 00 43 00 ....x.x.
0010: 4f 00 4d 00 53 00 51 00 x.x.x.x.
0018: 4c 00 00 00 07 00 00 00 x.......
0020: 6d 00 61 00 73 00 74 00 m.a.s.t.
0028: 65 00 72 00 00 00 e.r...

This is commonly the result of having the OpsMgr DBOwner set to the name of the person installing it, which in our case was what we had done as we couldn't wait a day for the proper service accounts to be generated.

So I changed the db owner of the Ops DB to SA using the SQL query  "sp_changdbowner sa" (in case you're interested), and hey presto the wizard went through without a problem.

I have had this as an issue with discovering network devices in a number of cases, but this is the first time that I have seen it cause an issue with the AEM Wizard.

Moral of the story here is always log on with your SDK account when creating your DB......

Hey Folks,

The OpsMgr Community Team are trying out the forums experience for Cross Platform and Interop for OpsMgr 2007 R2, as a change to the standard newsgroup format.

Please let them know direct what you think about them and how your experience goes. 

You can file your direct feedback to our team here:

https://connect.microsoft.com/feedback/default.aspx?SiteID=446

System Center Operations Manager Cross Platform Extensions Forum

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/default.aspx?ForumGroupID=604&SiteID=17

System Center Operations Manager Interop Connectors Forum

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/default.aspx?ForumGroupID=605&SiteID=17

Gordo

www.inframon.com

Sorry to steal a title from a very well known OpsMgr book, but I can think of no better way to describe the new R2 beta release of everyones favourite monitoring tool.

I have just returned from the R2 TAP summit for Microsoft's latest revision of Operations Manager and I have to say that this is definietly looking like the release that is firmly going to put the product at the top of the management tree.

Being involved with the product all the way back to it's Sentry days when I was with Mission Critical Software, it has been an absolute delight to watch this platform progress through it's various versions.

I have to admit though that my love affair with this product hit a serious rocky patch with the release of OpsMgr 2007 RTM, and I, like many others of you out there went through some questioning times battling with some of the early issues with the build.

Well I am glad to say, that the product team also felt this pain too, and have had a long and hard look at the way they release their products and after the introduction of some very stringent new engineering criteria have finally produced a platform that is not only rock solid, but is also bristling with new features, new concepts and for once is bursting to get out of the traps.

The R2 beta finally went live on connect on Thursday of last week and I was one of a fortunate group of people who got to test drive it early and WOW what a ride.

The first thing that astounded me was the sheer all round performance of the product, "Yes I did actually say all round performance", being with 2007 since it's early beta, perfromance is a word that I have never used in the same sentence with OpsMgr, but this thing moves like Lewis Hamilton on the last lap of the Brazillian Grand Prix......I started things off by clicking the icon for the Operators Console and then sat back in my chair to wait the customary minute or so for the console to appear and POW ! up it came, with a very slick new looking splash graphic, and it didnt stop there, I can gracefully flick between panes, scroll through mountains of alerts without losing half of my screen and fire up tasks and views instantly without so much as a hesitation. I have to say, back in the day, when I first heard that they were combining all of the consoles from MOM 2005 into a single UI, I thought the cost would have to be a big hit to performance and nothing in RTM led me to believe I was wrong, but I think the guys have squirted some axle grease into the code as it now handles like its on rails.

Next I moved onto the management pack import wizard and if you, like me, go through all the frustration of having to connect to the catalogue to download the latest MP's every time you deploy the product (or for you admins every week), so you can get the latest and greatest additions to your MP family then your far flung prayers have now been answered as we now have a "check catalogue" button, that not only lets you pick your MP's straight from the online MS catalogue but will also check your existing ones for updates, and if this is not enough for you MP catalogue whores out there, then it actually brings them down, unpacks them and automatically deploys them OH MY GOD I LOVE YOU TOM........

Next is something that my very good friend, Oklahoma die hard (damn, by how much did your boys smash the Techs), and all round rock star Justin, has been working on under the covers, a brand new MP Template for process monitoring. Yes, just when you thought you may just never see another MP template again, the team come up with the Mother of all MP templates "The Process Monitor", got to be one of may all time biggest asks from customers, a quick and easy way of smashing the problem of managing those runaway processes. In just a few clicks you can be tracking down those unwanted, runaway, HPOV, CA or BMC agent processes, allowing you to do the only decent thing and terminate those mothers....Seriously though this is a cool little wizard that lets you not only look for and terminate unwanted processes, but lets you limit the number of certain processes starting as well as allowing you to gather information on how a number of processes that form a workload are performing, very, very cool (I know I need to get out more).

Next on my list of stuff to try (and I am getting very excited now), is the new update to the OLEDB MP template....I have to say that I was a left a little bit disapointed by the original rev of this, especially as I saw it fall completely short of products such as SiteScope in terms of functionality, but now we are talking, no more just connecting to a DB for this little tiger, now its full on SQL query time baby ! Just grab your favourite SQL query off those lovable rogues in the SQL DBA team and whallop, instant LOB application DB call simulation (calm down, I said simulation SQL jocks not stimulation). This was so seriously missing and now is there by default so you can not only fire those queries in but you can take results back and pass them to diagnostics, measure performance and availability from different levels (and locations) of your app and best of all you can slam them into into your Service Level Dashboard and show that gorgeous girl in marketing just what a cool and intereseing dude you really are (hey dont knock it till youve tried it boys).....

So next is onto a little new addition to the very sexy web console, da dah ! the all new, web based, "Health Explorer", now isn't this just the feature that you were so missing from this console that stopped you from using it all the time, and whats more its, slick, is launched exactly the same way as it is from the thick client, and makes sure that you never miss that awesome experience of watching your all those red blobs curl out of the tree, letting you know (on a Friday afternoon no doubt) that you have just trashed the company mail server.

Next I dived into reporting to see if the mad Jock Mr Savage has had time to unravel the time old OpsMgr mystery for us of what object goes with what report, and fair play to the haggis eating, wok loving Highlander, hes added an all new object picker for report parameters that allows you to find the right target for customising your report so you can easily work out how to get that Exchange availability report to the boss by 5pm to prove to him that you are not a complete numbwit (shouldnt be spending all your time flashing your new dashboard at the girl in marketing mate).

So as you can imagine I am getting OpsManagered right out by now, thinking to myself, surely there could not be any more surprises, but then I find out that I am merely tapping on the product teams window pane, and guess who is there to open it with a big smiling face and rather large penguin tattoo on his arm, but TechEd Europes Top talker himself (see you do have some mates), and the epitome of smoothness, Mr Barry Earthmover, and boy does he move the earth, not just cross platform monitoring that betters anything on the market today, but fully integrated, seemless, instantly deployable from the console cross platform monitoring. Now guys, I have to state in public, this new feature, extension, limb (whatever befits it)  ABSOLUTELY KICKS TOTAL ASS, you click on agent discovery as normal, but instead of the usual boring old windows only discovery you get a screen split into three, Windows, UNIX\Linux and network. Choose the middle one and in less clicks than I have had hot supermodels you have a fully deployed and monitored cross platform agent, and is this experience a good one, the agent is built in Open Source Pegasus, yes thats right Microsoft writing open source code, is that a pig I see above, and the cross plat team have even written the Base O/s MP's for you, and boy are these good, and dare I say better, yes better than some of the existing Windows MP's (I still love ya Tom), as well as a ton of flavours already there and more readied in time for release, I think that this is going to spank some some serious cheek when it hits the street. All we need now is a nice Penguin icon in the computers view and the story is complete, come on boys you know it makes sense...

Other cools things I sampled were th new maintenance mode which actually puts a server into maintenace mode properly before you reboot rather than embarrasing you with a heartbeat failure on startup, a new overrides summary view..... HORAY, no more reching for Boris's toolkit, a brand new Authoring console making it even easier to knock up that Management Pack for contolling your garage door, support for managing upto 1000 URL's (ideal for clicking on your blog to make your stats look impressive to your mates....hey it works for me), new subscribe mechanism for notifications (hey sounds like something of System Center Community, Pete ?) and last but very much not least the integration of something very special to me THE SERVICE LEVEL DASHBOARD (remember the girl from marketing), and not just the inclusion of the report that brought a little sexy back to your OpsMgr installation but the inclusion of a whole new addition to the Authoring experience, the ability to create and define Service Level Objectives on almost anything you monitor in OpsMgr so you can tell you boss that besides being a numbwit you can actually demonstrate 5 9's against his sandwich ordering app.....WHAYYYYYY!

A massive pat on the back to the whole product team from me anyway for a quality code release, delivered on time, with top new features and packed with almost everything I have ever heard from customers thats really needed in the product, keep it coming.................

Gordo Loves R2 x x x

www.inframon.com

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 the ReportModels folder in your Operations Manager install files: eg D:\SelectCDImage\ReportModels\.

3. Copy the folder "acs" locally to the C: drive: i.e. C:\acs

4. If using OpsMgr RTM or SP1 you will need to also copy the file “ReportingConfig.exe” from the SupportTools folder  to C:\acs.

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

6. Run the following command:

UploadAuditReports <database\instance> http://<yourReportingServerName>/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 (if not already checked) 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.