Gordon McKenna - System Center Operations Manager MVP - Inframon Ltd

AEM wizard never finishes in OpsMgr R2

GordoDaMom — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:12:00 GMT

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......

New OpsMgr Cross Plat & Interop Forums

GordoDaMom — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 02:34:00 GMT

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

Operations Manager R2 Totally Unleashed !

GordoDaMom — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:36:00 GMT

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

Office Communications Server 2007 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 Is Now Released !

GordoDaMom — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:32:00 GMT

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

SCCM Planning for Dummys Part 1!

GordoDaMom — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 06:30:00 GMT

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

(OpsMgr07) Do Management Server Hotfixes Apply to Gateway Servers?

GordoDaMom — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 06:24:00 GMT

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).

Problems with Dell Management Pack That Are Addressed in New Release

GordoDaMom — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:36:00 GMT

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

Warning SCCM can be hazardous to your Health Service !

GordoDaMom — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:07:00 GMT

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.

ACS Database, Collector and Reports Install Step by Step Guide

GordoDaMom — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 22:53:00 GMT

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.

Implementing a split SRS install for OpsMgr

GordoDaMom — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 22:30:00 GMT

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

The Root Management Server will contain the front-end SRS reporting function for OpsMgr with the back-end SRS Report and Report temp DB’s being hosted on the same SQL Cluster as the Operations and Data Warehouse DB’s.
To enable this functionality a split install of SRS needs to be implemented.
The following steps must be taken on the Root Management Server to install the SRS front end component

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.

Message Queuing Management Pack (MSMQ) for Operations Manager 2007 Released (6.0.6278.23)

GordoDaMom — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:51:00 GMT

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

OpsMgr SP1 MP Discovery Issues, Health service Stops on exchange agent if HandleCountThreshold is exceeded, ACS Collection rule ref wrong EventID, Performance collection raises erroneous alerts.

GordoDaMom — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:24:00 GMT

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

OpsMgr sp1 & Dell MP- A monitoring host is unresponsive or has crashed. The status code for the host failure was 2164195371.

GordoDaMom — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:12:00 GMT

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.

NEW Operations Manager 2007 Training Course

GordoDaMom — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:56:00 GMT

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.

My Session at MMS 2008

GordoDaMom — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 17:21:00 GMT

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.