System Center Operations Manager

Video Interview: Implementing SCOM in a large Belgium Hospital by Alexandre Verkinderen

Alexandre Verkinderen, System Center Operations Manager MVP, talks about the monitoring solution he implemented at AZ Sint Maarten, a large Belgium Hospital. Together with Sigurd Corluy, System Engineer from AZ Sint Maarten, who explains why they need a monitoring solution and why they chose for SCOM 2007. The hospital have several business critical applications, like patient registration or patient medical file etc that needed to be monitored and for which a custom made management pack was developed. In their NOC they use Savision LiveMaps to display diagrams about the datacenter and business processes resulting in an easy to understand graphical representation of the health of their racks and business applications.
Both are interviewed by Arlindo Alves, IT Pro evangelist from Microsoft.

Grtz,

Alexandre Verkinderen

New Connect site for the OM Community

Hello OM Community,

Today we launched a new connect portal that will allow YOU to provide feedback to the OM team as well as participate in surveys that have been traditionally reserved for our TAP programs.
All you need to do is be registered on connect and you'll be able to participate.
Check it out here, https://connect.microsoft.com/opsmgr

You can for example fill in the survey for the new SQL mp and give valuable feedback to the opsmgr product team.

Greetz,

Alexandre Verkinderne

Unique Opsmgr 2007 training event (Belgium) : Management Pack Development Course

Hi all,

I am very proud to be able to announce that we will be able to host a Unique Opsmgr 2007 training event in Belgium.

Is the average training not meeting the depth of technical content you need? Would you like the receive your training from someone that received the prestigious MVP Award? Wished you could receive training from someone that co-authored a book on the topic he is teaching? Are you looking for real 400 level training? Want training from a consultant with plenty of real-life experience? Ever wished you could receive training from the folks that gave those sessions at Teched (Us or Europe)? Here is your chance!

What is being delivered?

The  Management pack development course organized by Infront Consulting & RealDolmen

Description

This class is designed to provide attendees with the knowledge they require to create a custom Management Pack. The hands-on labs in this class will walk the attendees through the process of creating a custom Management Pack from the design and planning stages through to the creation of reports. This class will use a ‘popular’ application and step through the MP development process as an exercise that results in a production quality MP that can be used in a production environment. This class will use the Exchange Server 2007 MP developed by Microsoft as an example.

http://infrontconsulting.com/docs/SCOM2007-OpsMgr2007MPDevelopment.pdf

Who is delivering this?

Delivered by a very senior level MVP specializing in the System Center Suite of Products, experience gained with working with large enterprise customers giving them the ability to bring their real-life know-how to their training deliveries.

When will this take place?

This unique 4day training event will take place from Thuesday the 17th of November till Friday the 20th of November 2009 included.

Class will be from 9 AM till 5 PM, with a break before and after noon and a lunch at 12:00 AM.

Where Does it take place?

This event will take place at the training facilities of the "RealDolmen" http://www.realdolmen.com

RealDolmen
Industriezone Zenneveld
A. Vaucampslaan 42
1654 Huizingen

tel: +32 2 362 56 17
e-mail: education@realdolmen.com

What is it going to cost?

The course will cost 2150 € (Excl tva.) for the 4 day training including a lunch.

Where do I Sign up?

More info about the event, and details on how to signup for this event can be found here:

http://www.realdolmen.com/Commercial/Default.aspx?id=1776

Please be advised that seats are limited and that there are currently no plans for repeating this event!

Windows Server Operating System Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007

Microsoft just released an update for the windows server mp. They now support Windows 2008 R2 ! Another nice thing is that finaly you can also display the logical disk size in MB’s! It was so damn stupid of Microsoft to only dispplay  the size in Bytes.

You will need to persononalize the logical disk state view because it’s not enabled by default

 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3529D233-5E3E-4B51-8F66-5D6F27005EC3&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

The September 2009 release (version 6.0.6667.0) of the Windows Server Operating System Management Pack includes the following changes:

· Support for Windows Server 2008 R2, including new classes to represent Windows Server 2008 R2 systems specifically.

· The intervals for some discoveries have been changed to reduce CPU usage. For details, see Objects the Windows Server Operating System Management Pack Discovers.

· Added Logical Disk Fragmentation Level monitors for Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

· Disabled the following rules and monitors for Windows Server 2008 because the events needed are in Windows Server 2003 only.

· Duplicate computer name was detected

· Windows Activation State

· Disk Group Failed

· Disk Group Auto Import Failed

· Volume Not Started

· Run WMIAdap

· Fixed the summary details for the Performance History (Percent Processor Time) report to indicate that the object type is Windows Server 2003 operating system rather than Windows Server 2003 processor.

· Fixed the Performance History (Percent Interrupt Time) report to use a rule that targets the operating system rather than the processor.

· Changed the data source for discoveries from System.Scheduler to System.Discovery.Scheduler to avoid performance issues.

· Changed the Logical Disk Availability monitor to use a Run As profile with administrative privileges to enable it to run in a low-provilege environment.

· Modified logical disk discovery to exclude mount points, because numerous rules use performance counters that are not applicable to mount points.

· Fixed an issue in which an alert could be generated for Windows Activation too early.

· Addressed an issue that was causing some discoveries to not show up correctly in the authoring section of the console.

· Improved the product knowledge for the alert generated by the A Service is Misconfigured rule.

· Fixed issue in which logical disk health check could have performance problems when run against clustered servers.

· Fixed links to views in product knowledge articles.

· Added Active Alerts views for Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

· Added retry logic to the "Probe Module: Is Feature Installed" module to avoid failures due to periodic time-outs.

· Added a new integer property named "Size (MBytes) (Numeric)" to the Logical Disk class and updated the existing property "Size (Bytes) (String)" to clarify that it is a string. The new property can now be used in formulas and views as expected.

Thanks,

ALexandre Verkinderen

Windows Key Management Service MP for Operations Manager 2007

Microsoft just released a new KMS mp for opmsgr 2007. Be carefull when importing it via the catalog with the OpsMgr 2007 R2 console. Before importing the mp you will need to uninstall any previous version of the mp AND you will also need to run a sql Clean up query to delete the previous KMS tables, KMS grooming jobs and any other KMS mp related stored procedure! This SQL cleanup query is not available when importing the management pack with the console. You will need to download and install the KMS mp from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A330D876-C965-4433-AFDF-7C61A9126FB3&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

Changes in This Update

The 6.0.7234.0 version of the KMS Management Pack includes the following changes:

· Support for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2

· Decommissioning of KMS reports

· Support for non-Windows KMS applications

· Installation / un-installation changes

Supported Configurations

This management pack supports up to twenty KMS hosts. The following table details the supported configurations for the KMS Management Pack

Before you import the Key Management Service Management Pack, take the following actions:

· Remove any previous versions of the management pack at or below build # 6.0.6278.9

· If the previous version of the management pack utilized reports, follow these steps:

1. Open SQL Query Analyzer and select the OperationsManagerDW
2. From SQL Query analyzer, open the Uninstall.sql.txt (rename to uninstall.sql if desired) file attached with this management pack
3. Execute (F5)

Proliant Management pack RealtimeMonitors_SNMP.FailedComponent Auto Server Recovery 0

Just imported the HP Proliant management pack for SCOM 2007 and hade a lot of servers in warning state even if nothing was wrong in the Insight homepage.

So I opened the healthexplorer and found RealtimeMonitors_SNMP.FailedComponent Auto Server Recovery 0  in warning state.

After investigating I found that problem was that the ASR was not configured on some servers and needs to be enable.

Hope this helps,

Alexandre Verkinderen

Live maps V4 for OpsMgr 2007 R2 is available

Savision has just released a major now version of Live Maps designed specifically for System Center Operations Manager R2!

You can download it here http://savision.com/download 

Besides some issues fixes they also release a bunch of very cool features:

Thanks,

Alexandre Verkinderen

Cleaning the Localizedtext Table after SCOM upgrade to SCOM 2007 R2

After upgrading your OpsMgr 2007 components and upgrading your SQL environment to SQL Server 2008, you will need to run some post installation steps. These post installation steps are only needed if you have done an upgrade from OpsMgr 2007 to OpsMgr 2007 R2.

OpsMgr 2007 SP 1 had an issue with the localized text table continuing to grow. The main cause of this was converted MOM 2005 management packs running a lot of backwards-compatibility scripts, such as the converted Exchange 2007 management pack. The issue was that each event wrote additional data to the localized text table, which is not groomed. Over time, the Operational database continued to grow, which had a tremendous impact on OpsMgr performance. Kevin Holman writes about this at http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2008/10/13/does-your-opsdb-keep-growing-is-your-localizedtext-table-using-all-the-space.aspx; it is also documented on the SCUG.BE blog at http://scug.be/blogs/scom/archive/2009/05/28/optimizing-the-performance-of-your-opsmgr-console-and-reducing-db-size.aspx .

I’ve just did an upgrade at a customer site and after completing the post-installation steps as mentioned here http://technet.microsoft.com/nl-nl/library/dd789073(en-us).aspx and I was very surprised by the results!!

I checked the database size and the localizedtext table before running the cleanup script.

• Database size before the cleanup script

28 gig of space!

• 12.700.000 records in the localizedtext table before running the cleanup script.

In OpsMgr 2007 R2, the localizedtext table issue is gone. The table still exists but Microsoft has resolved the growing issue. Even if the issue is gone you will need to run the following SQL query once after the upgade to initially clean up the localizedtext and publishermessage tables. You can copy/paste the script from here http://technet.microsoft.com/nl-nl/library/dd789073(en-us).aspx 

The script has run for about 4 hours!

Now the results! :-)

Disk space after the clean up script:

7 gig of disk space; So that’s a gain of 20 gig of disk space! That’s amazing!

780.000 records found in the localizedtext table after running the clean up script !! So that’s about 12 million records lesser!!

For completing the post-upgrade steps I did a reindex of the database.

And now my console is running very fast and I’ve less data to backup! So after upgrading to SCOM 2007 R2 you will definitely have to run the clean up script!!

Greetings,
Alexandre Verkinderen

Export SQL reports in PDF landscape

I had to create some reports for a customer this week and the layout of the report didn’t satisfied my client. The reports are exported in portrait format and not in landscape format.

First part of the report

and on the second page I got the rest of my report.

Very ugly……….

How to export a scom report in pdf landscape format?

 Only solution here is to render the pdf in landscape format, so I start googling and found this blog http://www.bictt.com/blogs/bictt.php/2009/03/17/sql-reporting-services-render-pdf-in-a4-1  and also some information msdn http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms156281.aspx 

So to resolve our problem we have to add some code in the Rsreportserver.config file that you can find under “Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.5\Reporting Services\ReportServer\”

You can specify rendering extension parameters in the RSReportServer configuration file to override default report rendering behavior for reports that run on a Reporting Services report server. You can modify rendering extension parameters to achieve the following objectives:

• Change how the rendering extension name appears in the Export list of the report toolbar (for example, to change "Web archive" to "MHTML"), or localize the name to a different language.
• Create multiple instances of the same rendering extension to support different report presentation options (for example, a portrait and landscape mode version of the Image rendering extension).
• Change the default rendering extension parameters to use different values (for example, the Image rendering extension uses TIFF as the default output format; you can modify the extension parameters to use EMF instead).

Locate the render section in the rsreportserver.config file

We are going to add two extra entries to the export list.

Below the pdf entry paste the following code:

<Extension Name="PDF (A4 Landscape)" Type="Microsoft.ReportingServices.Rendering.ImageRenderer.PdfReport,Microsoft.ReportingServices.ImageRendering">

        <OverrideNames>

            <Name Language="en-US">PDF in A4 Landscape</Name>

        </OverrideNames>

        <Configuration>

            <DeviceInfo>

                <OutputFormat>PDF</OutputFormat>

                <PageHeight>8.27in</PageHeight>

                <PageWidth>11.69in</PageWidth>

            </DeviceInfo>

        </Configuration>

</Extension>

<Extension Name="PDF (A4 Portrait)" Type="Microsoft.ReportingServices.Rendering.ImageRenderer.PdfReport,Microsoft.ReportingServices.ImageRendering">

        <OverrideNames>

            <Name Language="en-US">PDF in A4 Portrait</Name>

        </OverrideNames>

        <Configuration>

            <DeviceInfo>

                <OutputFormat>PDF</OutputFormat>

                <PageHeight>11.69in</PageHeight>

                <PageWidth>8.27in</PageWidth>

            </DeviceInfo>

        </Configuration>

</Extension>

Save the file and close it. I also did a IIsreset and a restart of my sql reporting services just to be sure.

When I want to export a report I have two extra entries:

Now when I want to export a report in landscape format I just choose to export in pdf in A4 landscape format and this is the result:

Everything perfectly fits on one page and I have a happy client now :-) !!  Thanks to Bob Cornelissen for his blog.

Hope this helps,

Alexandre Verkinderen

Dell 4.0 hardware MP is released for Opsmgr 2007 SP1 and R2

Early this week Dell released a major update to their OpsMgr management pack with their 4.0 version.  I strongly encourage you to check out this MP as there are some significant improvements that are worth checking out.

http://support.us.dell.com/support/downloads/format.aspx?releaseid=R237719

Feature highlights of this Dell Server Management Pack Suite v4.0 (A00) :
- Improvements in scalability and performance over the previous releases by including:
        * Server Scalable MP (for managing large enterprise environments) 
        * Server Detailed MP (addon MP that provides detailed instance level monitoring)
- Performance and Power monitoring and OpenManage 6.1 support for Dell Server MPs
- DRAC and CMC MPs to monitor Dell Remote Access Controllers and Chassis Management Controllers
- Override utility to enable Informational alerts for managed Dell Servers
Additional details are available in the User Guide inside the download

Technet Events

In the comming weeks Microsoft Belgium is hosting some very interesting Technet events.

Full details can be found on the links below :

Dutch Live Meetings :

• Live Meeting – Secure Web Access with TMG – 8 september 2009
• Live Meeting – Transitioning from Exchange 2003-Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 – 17 september 2009
• Live Meeting – What’s new in System Center Configuration Manager SP2? – 29 september 2009
• Live Meeting – Unified Communications – 6 oktober 2009
• Live Meeting – What’s new in Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory – 20 oktober 2009
• Live Meeting – Data Integration using SQL Server 2008 Integration Services: Overview – 29 oktober 2009
• Live Meeting – What’s new in System Center Configuration Managers SP2? – 19 november 2009

French Live Meetings :

• Live Meeting – Transitioning from Exchange 2003-Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 – Septembre 17, 2009
• Live Meeting – What’s new in System Center Configuration Manager SP2? – Septembre 29, 2009
• Live Meeting – Unified Communications – Octobre 6, 2009
• Live Meeting – What’s new in Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory – Octobre 20, 2009
• Live Meeting – Data Integration using SQL Server 2008 Integration Services: Overview – Octobre 29, 2009
• Live Meeting – What’s new in System Center Configuration Managers SP2? – Novembre 19, 2009

Have Fun,

Alexandre Verkinderen