sysctr – Ob-v-us

SCOM: Monitor the monitor part 1: PowerShell

December 3, 2014 By Dieter WijckmansNo Comments

Recently I got a question of an engineer during a community event why SCOM didn’t notify him when SCOM was down. My first response was very similar to the response of my favorite captain below: But this got me thinking actually because the engineer made a good point. That to have a full monitoring you should have another mechanism in place to monitor the monitoring system. Most companies still have a legacy monitoring system in place that can be leveraged to monitor the servers of SCOM but let’s face it: keeping another monitoring system alive just to monitor the SCOM servers only adds complexity to your environment for a small benefit. That’s why I started building a small independent check with PowerShell. In part 1 of this series I’ll go over how to monitor whether your management servers are still up and running. To do this we need to make sure that we have a watcher node which is able to ping the...

ExpertsLive Free ticket giveaway

October 9, 2014 By Dieter WijckmansNo Comments

After last years successful edition Expertslive is back on 18/11/2014! Identified as one of the most Microsoft centric events organized by the community in Holland this event will be packed with sessions regarding the Microsoft stack. Sessions will span the entire product group inlcuding Azure, System Center, Hyper-v, SQL Server, Windows Server, PowerShell and Office365. All these session will be provided by top notch speakers in their respective field. Numerous international speakers will bring you the best to get you up to speed as quick as possible. It will be a not to miss event! I’ll be hosting a session about monitoring everything with SCOM to become the one tool to monitor it all. A not to miss session… For more info check out : http://www.expertslive.nl Now the fun part! Because Scugbe is supporting this event we are entitled to give away 15 free tickets for the event! All you have to do is follow @scugbe on twitter and tweet: @scugbe I would love to go to @expertslive! I...

SCOM: Connect management groups between on-prem and Azure

August 21, 2014 By Dieter WijckmansNo Comments

During a recent project I explored the benefits on hosting a 2 legged SCOM environment for both on-prem and cloud services. Although this is possible with just one management group and site to site VPN to the cloud they opted for a 2 management group approach to keep a certain sort of divider between the on-prem and the cloud. In this blog post (who knows it could become a series) I’ll show you how to connect the management groups to each other so they can exchange alerts and use 1 console but benefit from presence of a management group on both platforms. In this scenario I’m going to use connected management groups. As explained here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh230698.aspx Connecting management groups in SCOM 2012 gives you a couple of benefits. The biggest one in my opinion is the fact you can have multiple management groups with different settings but use 1 console to get all...

Social Update: A manner of speaking…

May 9, 2014 By Dieter WijckmansNo Comments

A lot of exciting things are happening in the System Center community these days. Different new releases; new features are already delivered or are on the brink of being delivered shortly. TechED NA is right around the corner and other events are being planned as well. I always enjoy being part of these events and meet old and new friends all with the same interest: System Center products. This blog post will be my (and your) one place to keep track of all sessions which I’m presenting and events I’ll be attending both national and International. Hope you will attend one of my sessions and if you do, make sure to take the time to meet up! If you have any suggestions or question about this list please sure to drop me a line on twitter or send me a mail Event Date Location Session URL SCU Network 22/05/2014 1PM CET Online Webinar Exploring monitoring beyond the borders of Microsoft: Part 1 Linux monitoring http://www.systemcenteruniverse.com/scunetwork.htm SCU Network 27/05/2014 1PM CET Online Webinar Exploring monitoring beyond the borders of Microsoft: Part...

Home automation: Putting a child lock on my Nest thermostat using SCOM

April 24, 2014 By Dieter WijckmansNo Comments

This post is part of a series on how I demonstrate how to use SCOM to basically monitor everything. The other parts can be found here: Part 1: How did I get data Part 2: Get data into SCOM from MySQL Part 3: Create the MP Part 4: Seeing it in action After I have successfully been able to get data into SCOM from my Nest Thermostat and my Flukso energy meter it’s time to do some cool stuff with it. More devices are in the pipeline to get data into SCOM to create the ultimate Domotics controller or should I say “SCOMotics”… One problem I have in real life is the fact that it’s very hard to explain to my wife and kids the process off radiant floors. It takes some time to heat up but it stays warm a long time so there’s no point in setting the thermostat to a higher point to get instant heat because it takes approx 1 hour to...

SCOM: Creating a PowerShell script monitor with Silect MPAuthor

April 24, 2014 By Dieter WijckmansNo Comments

Sometimes it’s necessary to create a monitor to monitor something which is not included in the standard management packs. Unfortunately it’s not possible in SCOM to use PowerShell to crerate a script monitor in the scom console. Although it’s not a good idea to start authoring in the operations console it sometimes can be a quick and easy way to create a monitor. Recently Silect Sofftware released a free version of MPAuthor to create your management packs. I’m using this to create my script monitors to collect and monitor the data which I use in my monitoring my home series: http://scug.be/dieter/2014/02/19/monitor-your-home-with-scom/ Download the tool here: http://www.silect.com/mp-author Below is an example of how I monitor the target temperature set on my Nest Thermostat. So open the tool and create a new management pack => Create New Script Monitor… Name the script (if you have the script somewhere as a PS1 file it will load the script body automatically. This is the script I’m using: [xml] param([int]$maxtarget) [void][system.reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom(“C:\Program Files (x86)\MySQL\MySQL Connector...

System Center 2012 R2 Update Rollup 2 Released

April 23, 2014 By Dieter WijckmansNo Comments

Just a quick note that System Center 2012 R2 Update Rollup 2 was released last night. For a full view of the different updates included head over to the official KB which is located here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2932881 A lot of features and fixes. Below you can find the links to the different fixes. Data Protection Manager (KB2958100) (6 fixes in total) 2958100 System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager R2 Update Rollup 2 Download the Data Protection Manager package now. Operations Manager (KB2929891) (9 fixes in total) 2929891 System Center 2012 Operations Manager R2 Update Rollup 2 Download the Operations Manager package now. Operations Manager - UNIX and Linux Monitoring (Management Pack Update KB2929891) (1 fix in total) 2929891 System Center 2012 Operations Manager R2 Update Rollup 2 Orchestrator (KB2904689) (3 fixes in total)...

System Center Universe 2014 Houston session video online

February 18, 2014 By Dieter WijckmansNo Comments

Wow I can’t believe it has been already 3 weeks ago that I was able to speak at System Center universe 2014 in Houston. The topic of my session was all about connecting both your on premise SCOM environment with your Azure cloud. The event was a cool experience and a great chance to catch up with a lot of people and meet new ones while we are at it. Had some great talks about our beloved technology and how we see it developing in the next year. My Session video is available here: System Center Universe 2014 Dieter Wijckmans In addition to the video above I’m including some links to articles with more info on how to connect your on prem with your Azure cloud: Introduction and install of a Scom Azure Gateway server (Cameron Fuller): http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/cfuller/archive/2013/12/04/operations-manager-and-azure-better-together-introducing-the-azure-monitoring-gateway-[sysctr-scom-azure].aspx Configure Site to site vpn: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-create-site-to-site-cross-premises-connectivity/ Configure point to site vpn: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dn133792.aspx Configure the Scom Azure management pack: http://blogs.technet.com/b/cbernier/archive/2013/10/23/monitoring-windows-azure-with-system-center-operations-manager-2012-get-me-started.aspx...

SCOM: System Center Data Access Service stops (event 26380 , 33333)

January 16, 2014 By Dieter WijckmansNo Comments

When I started to review a SCOM 2012 R2 environment recently I came across an interesting issue I didn’t witness before… Time to blog the solution! Problem The System Center Data Access Service started successfully but stopped within the minute. After investigating I found out that there were at least 2 events logged during the time when the service crashes that could give us a clue on what is going on. Event 26380: The System Center Data Access Service failed due to an unhandled exception… Cannot be added to the container… Event 33333: Data access layer rejected: An entity of type service cannot be owned by a role, a group, or by principals mapped to certificates or asymmetric keys. Strange… This worked the day before. What was going on? After my search on the web I found this article of Travis Wright who had a similar problem with...

Scom: Batch reset monitors through PowerShell

October 23, 2013 By Dieter Wijckmans2 Comments

Monitors are a very useful addition to SCOM since SCOM 2007 came out back in the days. However for a lot of fresh SCOM administrators the alerts generated by monitors sometimes can create headaches. An alert is raised when a state is changed and closed when the state changes back to the health condition. This is the really short version… If you speak to advanced SCOM admins they can all agree that the management of the monitor generated alerts can be tricky from time to time if you work with operators. If at one point they close an alert in the console which was generated by a monitor but the condition is not changed for the monitor it will remain in unhealthy state until a force reset is done on the monitor itself. We all know how many monitors are floating around in our environment so it’s just a disaster waiting to happen. Therefore it is...