SCOM 2012: Pass data to custom fields with monitors
During the “ask the experts” session on SystemCenterUniverse 2012 (which was the dress rehearsal for MMS2012) I had the privilege to ask a question about a many used feature at some of my clients: Fill in the custom fields when alerting in SCOM.
My question: “Will it be possible to update the custom fields using a monitor like you do with a rule?
Answer: “We know this is a many requested feature but unfortunately it will not be possible”
The issue is that the architecture to raise an alert is fundamentally different for rules and monitors. With rules it’s possible to pass parameters through the GenerateAlert module while for monitors this is not possible.
So there are 2 possibilities:
Either create an alerting rule for the monitor which passes the parameters to the alert. But this is from a manageability point of view very difficult.
The only thing I came up with is running the parameters through the notification channels:
So let’s play around in the console of SCOM 2012 to get us going.
I already created a rule and a monitor for event 900.
While creating the rule you can specify the custom fields at the alerting tab as shown below:
In my case if filled in the IP address and the computer name in the custom fields.
During the creation of the monitor there’s no option to pass data to the custom fields although the option is still available in the dbase there’s no way to fill them in using the GUI:
So when can this come in handy? I used it to pass my own data to the alert so I could use the alertID in the notification channel to read out the alert with the custom fields to escalate to a problem management tool which uses specific keywords to escalate problems.
This is the powershell I use to fill the custom fields via the notification channel associated with the monitor: