MMS 2013 registration open
On the 3th of December the registration for MMS2013 opened.
In spite of all the rumors and earlier announcements the venue is again held in Las Vegas from the 4th until the 12th of April.
More info + registration link here: http://www.2013mms.com/register
Early bird pricing saves you 300$ on the registration fee. Make sure to book early. Last year the venue sold out during early bird!
Check out my guide for MMS (which will be rebranded with extra tips for MMS 2013. http://scug.be/dieter/2012/03/06/a-travel-guide-how-to-survive-mms2012
I can’t wait for another week packed with System Center fun and meet peers.
SCOM: Event id 21406: file name or class not found
Yesterday I had an issue at one of my clients with a server which was unable to check the task scheduler eventlog.
The operations log was packed with different alerts but mostly with the infamous id 21406 which in fact can mean a lot of things.
The exact message: VBScript runtime error: File name or class name not found during Automation operation: "oAPI.CreateTypePropertyBag”
My standard course of action did not solve the issue:
- Clear the cache and restart the agent
- Check the management pack and see whether it gets delivered to the agent
- Remove the agent software and reinstall.
Again these steps did not solve the issue the Events kept coming in.
Eventually I started to dig deeper and started to register the differtent dll’s again on the machine and apparently registering the MOMScriptAPI.dll solved the issue.
Probably a bad registration / link during install or upgrade caused the issue.
Hope this helps someone out there in saving his valuable troubleshooting time 🙂
MMS 2013 in vegas next year teaser?
Hmmm who knows Microsoft has a sense of humor or the page has been hacked but MVP Kenny Buntinx pointed me to the page of mms2012… http://www.mms-2012.com/
After a lot of rumors that MMS2013 was going to happen in New Orleans in the beginning of June this came up on the website:
So if this is true MMS will stay loyal to the Vegas venue next year as well…
You don’t here me complaining. I can recycle my Las Vegas travel guide next year 
SCOM: How to change port of SCOM reporting
Recently I came across a customer who wanted to change the port of the Reporting server hosting the SCOM reporting services because they had no choice but to run the web console on port 80.
To do this you need to make the necessary changes to:
- Reporting services
- Firewall
- Scom
1. Change Reporting services.
If you are not sure which server is running your reporting services at the time go to Administration => Settings => reporting. In my case this shows up:
So in this case my server is VSERVER03 and it’s currently using port 8080 which I want to change to 808 in this case.
So connect to the reporting server and open the “Reporting Services Configuration Manager”
Connect to your reporting services install
NOTE: Never try to change the port in IIS itself but ALWAYS use the Reporting services config tool!
Open the web service url on the left and change the port to the desired port. In this case it’s 808
Click the advanced button
Change the port here as well by selecting the correct line and clicking edit
Change the port:
As soon as you click ok the url will be reserved on the new port and the old port reservation will be removed.
For safety also check the Report manager site identification url. Most of the time this is also at the default port 80 as shown below.
Click advanced and change the port to a desired port. In this case I use a different port: 809
Again when you click ok the reservation is made and the old reservation is being removed.
Firewall
Make sure to make the necessary changes to the firewall if there’s a firewall present between you Management servers and your reporting server. You need to open the port in both directions.
Configuring SCOM
If all went well your reporting instance is already moved to the new port but you need to let scom know that it’s on a different port. Open the Global management group settings – reporting tab by going to Administration => Settings => reporting.
Fill in the new port like shown below:
Now click ok and restart your scom console.
Try to open the reporting tab.
Note: Don’t be alarmed when it’s stuck at “loading” for a while. It will take some time to load the reports the first time.
If all went well you’ll see your shiny list of reports like shown below.
Stay tuned for more tips and tricks!
SCOM: Tips and tricks series
I’m starting a small series (or a large series who knows) of all tips and tricks while configuring and using SCOM. Some of them are very obvious for the somewhat more experienced scom admins but then again they can be useful for the people who are just getting to know the sheer power of scom.
I’ll be linking all the small tips and tricks back to this page so If you bookmark this page / RSS feed it you’ll get all the different tips and tricks right here at your fingertips.
Note: That most of these tricks are based on SCOM 2012 but will also be valuable for SCOM 2007.
SCOM: Monitoring Server 2012
With the recent release of the new Microsoft Windows Server 2012 many questions were raised on how to monitor the environment with your current System Center Operations Manager environment.
Well yesterday the official SCOM blog released a lot of answers to these questions in the community. Some were rather surprising others not really.
In chronological order:
System Center operations Manager 2007 R2: does not support monitoring Server 2012. There’s absolutely no way to monitor this environment with your current SCOM 2007R2 environment. The only temporary solution is to use a SCOM 2012 agent and multihome it to your SCOM 2007 environment. This however is just to get you going on the upgrade process but not really a long term solution
System Center operations manager 2012: Is supporting the monitoring of Server 2012 except from APM applications which run on IIS8.
HOWEVER: It’s not supported to install SCOM2012 components on a Server 2012 other than the agent. Also the console will not work on Win8.
System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1: Will support all the different components, monitoring and agents.
Management packs:
Management packs for monitoring Windows Server 2012 roles which are typically made available 60 to 90 post RTM of the Windows Server Role will start to be made available from mid-September and we expect most roles to have shipped their English language MPs by the end of September. Localized MPs will start to be delivered from October for most roles. (Localized MPs will be delivered in the 8 Languages that is supported by OM2012 to begin with.)
There are no plans to ship a Management Pack for monitoring Windows 8 client machines.
So another reason to start your upgrade process to the SCOM 2012 SP1 platform if you want to monitor your brand new Server 2012 environment!
Special thanks to Oskar Landman for the tip.
SCOM Speak PowerShell script
In my early days of monitoring we had a dedicated computer set up who read out all the critical alerts as for example a server was down. It was a fairly simple setup but had it’s flaws and it was not combined with System Center Operations Manager (which is already a big flaw).
The idea to create a PowerShell script for just doing that was already a significant time on my to do list but kind of made it to the top of my list due to a Facebook request I got last week.
Prerequisites
SCOM 2007 (will post the SCOM 2012 version shortly)
*UPDATE* The SCOM 2012 script is now available here: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/SCOM-2012-Speak-script-9f24b90c
The pc you want to read out the alert on needs to have:
WinRM needs to be enabled
At least .net framework 3.0 needs to be installed
PowerShell 2.0 needs to be installed
Speakers (pretty obvious no?)
Setup of the PC
First of all make sure that Computer has PowerShell 2.0 installed.
If this is not the case download and install it here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968930
Open PowerShell by browsing to Start > Accessories > Windows Powershell and open Powershell as administrator by right clicking and choosing run as admin:
Next thing on our list is to enable the ability remotely execute commands on the computer.
Run: “Enable-PSRemoting –Force” to enable the WinRM service on the computer. 
An alternative way is to use the command WinRM quickconfig in an elevated prompt.
Verify afterwards that the service was started:
Now test from the RMS that the server is reachable through WinRM by running the following command on the RMS:
Test-WsMan COMPUTER (replace COMPUTER with the name of the computer you want the alert to be played on)
The following should appear:
The PowerShell Script:
In this example I’m using this script to read out a warning when there’s a server down but you can easily change it to your specific needs of course.
The 2007 script can be downloaded here
The 2012 script can be downloaded here
Copy paste of the script for your reference
#=========================================================================
# AUTHOR: Dieter Wijckmans
# DATE: 07/08/2012
# Name: speak_scom2007.PS1
# Version: 1.0
# COMMENT: Let SCOM read an alert out loud on a remote computer to notify the operator
# CREDITS:
# Usage: .\speak_scom2007.ps1 -$severity -$text -$pc1 -$machine
#
#=========================================================================
###Prepare environment for run###
####
# Start Ops Mgr snapin, get RMS
###
###
#Get parameters from command line, Start Ops Mgr snapin
###
param ([string]$severity,[string]$stext,[string]$pc1,[string]$machine)
#param ([string]$text,[string]$pc1)
##Read out the RMS name
$objCompSys = Get-WmiObject win32_computersystem
$rootMS = $objCompSys.name
#If the RMS is installed on a cluster comment the above 2 lines, uncomment the line below and fill in the server below.
#$rootMS = “Your clustered RMS here”
#Initializing the Ops Mgr 2007 Powershell provider#
Add-PSSnapin “Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.Client” -ErrorVariable errSnapin ;
Set-Location “OperationsManagerMonitoring::” -ErrorVariable errSnapin ;
new-managementGroupConnection -ConnectionString:$rootMS -ErrorVariable errSnapin ;
Set-Location $rootMS -ErrorVariable e-severrrSnapin ;
#Set Culture Info# In this case Dutch Belgium
$cultureInfo = [System.Globalization.CultureInfo]’nl-BE’
#Error handling setup
$error.clear()
$erroractionpreference = “SilentlyContinue”
$thisScript = $myInvocation.MyCommand.Path
$scriptRoot = Split-Path(Resolve-Path $thisScript)
$errorLogFile = Join-Path $scriptRoot “error.log”
if (Test-Path $errorLogFile) {Remove-Item $errorLogFile -Force}
#create the text to read. You can change this section to read out a different phrase
#Notice the extra spaces in the string. These are used to slow down the reading and make it more comprehensive
$text = $severity + ” Alert on ” + $machine + ” ” + $stext
#execute script#
invoke-command -computer $pc1 -scriptblock {[Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(“System.Speech”)
$voice = New-Object System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer
$voice.Speak($args[0]) } -argumentlist $text
###
#Remove the Ops Mgr PSSnapin#
###
Remove-PSSnapin Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.Client
Note
You can change the actual change the sentence SCOM is speaking out loud in the highlighted section so let your imagination + creativity go wild on this…
Setup the notification channel
The last thing you have to do to let the computer read out the SCOM alerts is to make a subscription for the alert and pass the desired parameters.
For a full list of all the available parameters I would like to reference to a great post of Kevin Holman: http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2007/12/12/adding-custom-information-to-alert-descriptions-and-notifications.aspx
In my particular example I’m using the following parameters: Severity, Machine name, pc1 and text.
Severity: Alert severity
Machine name: machine which is down
Text: Free text you would like to read out loud.
Pc1: The machine where the text needs to be spoken.
Note
: You can send the command to multiple PC’s at the same time by adding a new variable to the command line and C/P the speak section in the script with the name of the new parameter.
The Notification Channel should look like this:
Full Path of the command file: C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\V1.0\Powershell.exe
Command Line Parameters:
C:\Scripts\speak_scom2007.ps1 -severity ‘$Data/Context/DataItem/Severity$’ -stext ‘Machine Down’ -pc1 ‘desktop1’ -machine ‘$Data/Context/DataItem/ManagedEntityDisplayName$’
Startup folder for the command line:
C:\scripts
Only thing left to do is link this channel to a subscriber and make an actual subscription for the machine down alerts.
Now just wait until SCOM will start talking to you 
SCOM: Update ACS: The curious case of the Invalid column name ‘DescHash’
Recently I came across an issue where there was not much info on the web so I thought I would write it on my only sketch book (yep this blog) for my reference and if you have found this post you’ll probably have the same issue so here comes my solution!
Case:
After upgrading SCOM2007R2 CU5 to CU6 level I noticed that my ACS reports were not working anymore.
I’ve checked the server and found out my Audit Collector service wasn’t running anymore on my Collector.
After carefully investigating the event log on my ACS Collector Server I found the following message popping up in the Operations Manager Log:
Event 4618: [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Invalid column name ‘DescHash’.
Followed by the message that the service was unable to start due to this error and was shutting down.
Hmmm apparently something went seriously wrong during the upgrade in the field of SQL.
Solution
Here’s how I fixed it eventually:
First we need to make sure that we detect the active partition in the ACS Database by running the query below:
Select PartitionId from dbo.dtPartition where status=0
Now running the following statement towards the active partition to add the DescHash to the partition.
Restart the Audit Collection Service on your Audit Collection server and recheck for errors. Normally the Service should keep running and you should see some data coming in if you have already ACS forwarders set up.
Special thanks to Daniele Grandini for pointing this out to me.
SCOM: The great error messages of scom2012: Common.UnknownServiceException.
Yesterday I launched my SCOM2012 environment in my lab to test some scripts to find the error message below when I started the management console:
No reason or indication is given for the error message. A quick search online showed that it had to do with the fact that my environment was still in eval instead of retail. Which is possible because I installed this version with the RTM bits and updated it to the retail version afterwards.
Consult KB 2699998 for this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2699998
So let’s get started.
If your eval is already expired your not able to connect to your management server anymore thus not able to set the new license key you’ll receive the message below when starting the PowerShell session:
The trick is to reset your servers date to a date within your eval period:
Hint: If you are running this machine in a Hyper-v environment make sure to temporarily disable the Time Synchronization integration service to prevent the server from reverting to the time of the Hyper-V host.
So now execute the instructions in the KB again to fill in your System Center 2012 product key (note that since System Center 2012 there are no separate product keys for the different products anymore but there’s 1 general key.
For copy purposes are these the commands to run:
import-module operationsmanager
New-SCOMManagementGroupConnection
Set-SCOMLicense “your licensekey”
To check the status: Get-SCOMManagementGroup | ft skuforlicense, version, timeofexpiration -a
The eval is still in there.
Now reboot your SCOM2012 management server and rerun the last command to double check your timeofexpiration:
Succes 
Last but not least: Don’t forget to reset your server clock to the correct time by either resetting it manually or enabling the Time synchronization service of Hyper-V again.
SCOM: The next generation of Authoring tools is finally here
Finally the next generation of authoring tools has arrived to make your authoring life easier and use a combination of the different tools to develop your management packs faster and easier.
Already showcased at MMS and now finally available for download.
Get them here:
Visio Management Pack Designer (VMPD): http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30170
Visual Studio Authoring Extensions (VSAE): http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30169
Make sure to check out the WIKI’s here:
More to come on this 2 secret weapons in the warfare of creating your management packs.