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Flukso Energy Meter Monitoring Pack: Part 4: Seeing it all in action

This blog post is part of a series check out the other posts in this series:

So after all this hard work. To get the data into my MySQL dbase and into SCOM. What can I actually do with it?

This is the second part of  a far greater monitoring project I’m building to basically monitor my house but now I have control over the temperature and heating in my house using the Nest Thermostat monitoring pack AND can check on my power consumption and basically control my electrical bill.

I’ve created the views in the flukso monitoring view for electricity:

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Nothing much we can do with this view as this is actually giving me a good reading. It’s in fact what we can do with the data which get into SCOM. Because this data is now into SCOM we can use this data to generate alerts when sudden peaks occur.

A cool one I have setup is the peak right around supper. We have an electrical furnace so when someone starts cooking at around 18h (6PM) I now get an alert becaus the total power consumption is above 4000 watt at that time…

So I know now perfectly well when I need to rush home to get in on time for dinner…

Now that I have this data in I can move forward and build a cool demo to show the added value of having this data in.

This is the second part of the puzzle of monitoring my house. In fact this process can also be used when having a solar power installation to see the generated energy on the graph.

In short notice I will be adding Water readings to the graph as well and have another few things I would like to add to the management pack to be able to patrol my house but more on that later.

Event 20052 Certificate subjectname does not match local computer name

 

Well… One of the things which really divides the SCOM admins from the normal SCOM users is in my believe installing a gateway server. A lot of things can go wrong when installing one and even if you have done a couple of installs still it sometimes goes haywire. It’s basically a one shot or start all over again in my opinion. I’ve spoken about the Azure gateway management server install at SystemCenterUniverse 2014 in Houston and got a lot of feedback after my session that indeed this is the case.

During a recent install at a customers site I came across another great event id:

Event 20052

The full description of the alert (for search engine purposes)

“The specified certificate could not be loaded because the Subject name on the certificate does not match the local computer name

Certificate Subject name: servername.domain.local

Computer name: servername”

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So the certificate was created for the full fqdn name but in fact our gateway server is not part of the domain.

Solution

By adding the DNS suffix to the computer name the certificate can be configured.

Open the computer properties of the server by right clicking ‘this pc’ and opening properties:

Selecct Change settings:

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Click Change on the computer name tab:

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Click the button More…

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Fill in the domain FQDN which was documented in the event in the primary DNS suffix and reboot the machine.

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This solved my issue and the alert did not return.

Any other suggestions are welcome of course…

System Center 2012 SP1 UR1 released

This morning the System Center community is once more buzzing with excitement.

System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 is live since a couple of weeks and already Microsoft has released the first Update Rollup (UR1) for it.

This show great dedication of Microsoft to keep this product up to date and regularly release updates. The good thing these Update Rollups are all cumulative so no need to perform a series of updates.

Although you need to install SP1 first to install the UR1 of course.

More info on the updates is found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2785682

Note: Pay special attention to the “how to install” section as the correct version of the file needed according to your CPU architecture and local  is identified:

Example for SCOM:

SNAG-0004 

So if you have an agent on X86 machine you will need to run the file with F2 at the end and not the 5A.

LiveMeeting 22/11/2012: System Center Products better together…

 

On the 22th of November I’m hosting a LiveMeeting on how to integrate the different System Center products.

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We’ll go over the different steps to integrate the different System Center products to get past the standard “just monitor it” scenario with SCOM but truly integrate the different products together.

All the products will be positioned within the System Center stack and integrations will be showcased.

If you are looking for a session to convince your boss to install more system center products or just want to convince yourself of the force of system center products brought together…

Look no further this is your session.

Register here:https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032533093&Culture=en-us&community=0

SCOM: Cannot locate resource ‘momr2db.xaml’

 

This afternoon my colleague Alex Smits asked for pointers on a strange problem he faced when he wanted to install a SCOM 2012 reporting server on a previous SCOM 2007 reporting server for a side by side migration.

As soon as he clicked the install button on the Scom 2012 install screen the following error message appeared and the install was aborted:

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There was no log written to the machine because in fact the install just did not kick off yet . There were also no indications in the event viewer so we were completely troubleshooting blind on this one.

After some time Alex managed to get the reporting server installed on the machine after taking a backup of the old reporting dbase and then completely removing the SCOM 2007 reporting server dbase components of this server.

After this the install passed the error message and installed perfectly.

I hope we save you some valuable troubleshooting time by finding this out…

SCOM: Failed to deploy Data Warehouse Component

 

During a recent health check at a customer site I found that the RMS in a SCOM2007 install was in critical state. During my health check this is basically the first thing I check because in SCOM2007 this is still the heart of your environment.

Check of  the health explorer revealed the following rather odd message:

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The Data Warehouse Database Component Deployment Recovery State – (Data Warehouse Synchronization Server) is in critical error.

First step of my troubleshoot is to check the event log of the RMS server for errors indicating this issue.

The following message was reported which caused this monitor to go to critical state:

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Full message:

Event ID:       31565

Description:

Failed to deploy Data Warehouse component. The operation will be retried.Exception ‘DeploymentException’: Failed to perform Data Warehouse component deployment operation: Install; Component: Script, Id: ‘3a49a530-26a2-c525-35fe-69df5898f150’, Management Pack Version-dependent Id: ‘c9942f8c-3e77-e09d-1864-16db528bc3d2’; Target: Database, Server name: “Dbaseserver”, Database name: ‘OperationsManagerDW’. Batch ordinal: 1; Exception: Incorrect syntax near the keyword ‘with’. If this statement is a common table expression or an xmlnamespaces clause, the previous statement must be terminated with a semicolon.

Incorrect syntax near ‘,’.

Incorrect syntax near ‘,’.

Incorrect syntax near ‘,’.

Incorrect syntax near ‘,’.

Incorrect syntax near the keyword ‘ELSE’.

After troubleshooting the issue once more I found out that it happened right after I have implemented the new version of Windows Server Operating System Management Pack (6.0.6972.0) more specific the “Windows Server Operating System Reports” Management Pack which is a part of the management pack.

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After carefully investigating I found in the Management pack guide (which can be downloaded here) following statement in the previous version which was not installed yet on the environment (page 8):

“The Microsoft.Windows.Server.Reports Management Pack will only import on systems that use SQL Server 2008 as the Database and is not currently supported on SQL Server 2005.”

As the customer is still on SQL 2005 dbase this was the cause. After removing the management pack from the environment the error disappeared and the RMS came back healthy again.

Lesson Learned here: Always check the management pack history fully and not just the latest changes.

Enough talk, let’s build
Something together.