SCOM – Page 5 – Ob-v-us

SCOM 2007: Dump alerts to text file and mail

May 11, 2011 By Dieter WijckmansNo Comments

Just recently I had an issue at a client where there was a need to rethink the notification possibilities due to various issues. I’ve developed a powershell script to gain more control over the notification process. Case: My Client is using an in-house developed and maintained problem management system installed on a mainframe platform. The alerts which need escalation are detected in SCOM and then sent by mail to a Lotus Notes system. The data is then read through a connector between the mainframe system and the Lotus Notes dbase. The mail is scrubbed and through a series of scripts on the mainframe the key fields of the mail are detected and filled in in the ticket…. Problem: So far so good… BUT because of the use of different systems there was an issue with encoding. The mails were sent in UTF8 encoding and correctly decoded when viewing in the Lotus Notes Client but stayed encoded in the Lotus Notes Dbase and therefore the...

SCOM 2007: Setup Command Notification Channel + Subscriber

May 11, 2011 By Dieter Wijckmans2 Comments

Sometimes it’s necessary to launch a custom script or other action after an alert is detected. This can be all executable scripts or programs. In my particular case I’m using this to launch scripts when an alert is detected to properly escalate the alert and perform additional tasks on the alert. So how do you make sure that the script you intend to run will actually run when a predefined alert is raised? By creating a Command notification channel and subscription… Let’s start with setting up the command notification channel. Note: I’m using my script Create_Ticket.Ps1 as documented here. The parameters I’m passing are useful for this script but you can pass many more parameters according to your needs. First of all open the Notification Channels by opening the SCOM console > administration > Notifications > Channels Right click in the Right pane > choose New > Command… In the settings tab you need to fill in what you prefer to run: Full Path of the command file:...

SCOM 2007: Create custom Alert Resolution States

May 11, 2011 By Dieter WijckmansNo Comments

Sometimes it’s useful to make your own Custom Alert Resolution States to further classify your alerts in the console and use these states to trigger different actions using various scripts. I’ll be posting some scripts which are going to use this custom alert resolution state so therefore I’m documenting here how to configure them. Open your SCOM console, select the administration tab, settings and alerts. Click new… Type in the Resolution State display name and choose a uniqueID. Click OK. And we are done. Not much to it but it makes live a little easier when you want to classify different alerts. In the next series of blogs I’ll be frequently using this Custom Alert Resolution States to classify and report on different types of alerts....

SCOM 2007: installation bypassing the prerequisite checker

April 21, 2011 By Dieter WijckmansNo Comments

Most of the time the prerequisite checker when installing SCOM 2007 is right that there’s a prerequisite not met to install the specific role or specific item of SCOM 2007. However If you are 100% sure everything is there you can bypass the prerequisite checker by running the install with the following command: MSIEXEC /i <path>\MOM.msi /qn /l*v D:\logs\MOMUpgrade.log PREREQ_COMPLETED=1 This is however NOT supported by Microsoft. Note: in Windows Server 2008 always run commands in an elevated prompt. This should be your last resort to get things going. Most of the time there’s indeed a prerequisite not met and therefore the checker is right. If you want to double check your prerequisites you can find them here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb309428.aspx A known issue with the prerequisites is that ASP.Net is not correctly detected. More info here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934759...

SCOM: Moving the Opsdb Datawarehouse to another drive

April 13, 2011 By Dieter Wijckmans10 Comments

Recently I got a question of a customer to move the Opsdb Datawarehouse (DW) to another drive because the disk on which it was originally installed was not big enough. In fact they wanted to move the DW to an iscsi disk to boost performance. To verify whether there would be an issue or it would be a straight forward move I did some browsing on the biggest manual out there… The internet! However all that came up were actually moves from one server to another but not from one drive to another on the same server… I did some testing in my lab and thought I ‘d share the outcome with you. First of all this is your DW you are tempering about. Make sure you have proper backups of your db and read the entire blog before proceeding. Just to be on the safe side. It would be a shame that you lost...

Preparing SCOM for cross platform monitoring

April 8, 2011 By Dieter WijckmansNo Comments

Today at a customer I came across a problem with cross platform monitoring. They had several Linux servers running with RedHat distro. They installed the Linux monitoring pack for cross platform monitoring their Linux environment. They installed all the agents on the Linux servers but did not configure the proper action accounts to perform the discovery and monitoring. To give my client some documentation how to perform these actions I came across this article on the Microsoft website. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd788981.aspx The instructions however are outdated with SCOM 2007 R2 so I’ll document them below. First things first. If you notice these events in the Operations Manager Eventlog: Event Type: Error Event Source: HealthService Event Category: Health Service Event ID: 1107 Date: 11/24/2008 Time: 2:18:03 PM User: N/A Computer: RMS_SERVER Description: Account for RunAs profile in workflow "Microsoft.Linux.RedHat.Computer.Discovery", running for instance "Linux_server_name" with id"{384D2415-A49D-4002-768B-51D8D2EDBDD*}' is not defined. Workflow will not be loaded. Please associate an account with the profile. Management group "group_name" This most likely will indicate an issue with the...

SCOM: #Exchange 2010 SP1 MP is here

April 8, 2011 By Dieter WijckmansNo Comments

Today the updated management pack for Exchange 2010 with support for SP1 is published. It can be downloaded from the MS Download site: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=7150bfed-64a4-42a4-97a2-07048cca5d23 The new version is: 14.02.0071.0 Be sure to download also the explanatory doc which holds all the changes to this management pack. Some great info in there! Download the correct file from the site: Exchange2010ManagementPackForOpsMgr2007-EN-i386.msi Exchange2010ManagementPackForOpsMgr2007-EN-x64.msi This is not a standard straight forward management pack but requires to install a Exchange Correlation Engine. This Correlation engine is basically a windows service which uses the Operations Manager SDK to first retrieve the health model and then process the stat change events. The correlation engine is capable of checking the health status before raising an alert. This significantly reduces the alerts generated as the engine is logically looking at the relationship between the alerts and closing them when they are caused by other alerts which were caused by the underlying issue. The correlation engine is by default enabled. Be cautious when you are using helpdesk...

First insight into SCOM 2012: What’s up next…

April 8, 2011 By Dieter WijckmansNo Comments

There were actually quite some sessions which gave a good preview of the SCOM2012 version which is pre-beta now and will become RTM by the end of 2012. Until then more and more features will be communicated. One of the most interesting features actually is that SCOM 2012 will tackle one of the biggest nightmares of all SCOM admins: the SPOF which is called RMS. All SCOM admins will have to admit that at one point or another they faced problems with their RMS which was acting up funny. In SCOM 2007 you are only allowed to run one RMS which is actually a MS which has the Root MS role. The SDK service can only and exclusively run on this machine making it the hart of your SCOM environment. Your environment is highly impacted when your RMS is down. The consciences: You cannot perform any admin tasks All consoles (including web) connect to RMS and will not open Product connectors depend on RMS and...