Thursday, April 15, 2010

nWorks VMware Management Pack DONT'S

Last week i was focussing on optimizing the nWorks VMware Management Pack. (version 5.0.3.248)

Running the query below, showed that this MP is really a data dumper:
SELECT TOP 50 AlertStringName, AlertStringDescription, AlertParams, Name, SUM(1) AS
AlertCount, SUM(RepeatCount+1) AS AlertCountWithRepeatCount
FROM Alertview WITH (NOLOCK)
GROUP BY AlertStringName, AlertParams, Name
ORDER BY AlertCount DESC

You could also use the new report, Data Volume by Management Pack, available through the new SCOM R2 management pack,System Center Core Monitoring, version 6.1.7599.0. (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=61365290-3c38-4004-b717-e90bb0f6c148&displaylang=en)

I disabled any VM monitoring activities from nWorks, because the VM's were already monitored through a SCOM Agent. This can be configured through the nWorks Management Console. It's just a mather of deselect the checkboxes for VM's. As this screenshot shows:



But still, the nWorks MP was spitting out a lot of alerts coming from Virtual Machines', like CPU and MEM thresholds.

Disabling discoveries for VM's, or not?

Seeing this, i thought disabling the discovery for any VM based object would do the trick.
So i disabled the discovery 'SV100 first stage discovery' for the class 'nWorks Collector' and the class 'VM'.
Hhm yeah right.

After doing this i lost ALL nWorks discovered objects. It apeared this discovery is linked to all discovered objects and not just the VM/Virtual Machine object. :(
So this is really a NO NO. The 'SV100 first stage discovery' discoveres all objects and relationships.

Deleting and Re-importing the nWorks VMware MP

I decided a reimport would be best.
I made a backup of the customizations Management Pack linked to the nWorks VMware MP and deleted it.
Then i deleted the nWorks VMware MP itself.

And then. Nothing.... Nothing?? Well, deleting this specific Management Pack deletes all MP related objects from the database. This resulted in locking the OperationsManagerDB for 40 minutes.
So beware of this.

After this i gave the OperationsManagerDB the necessary days to groom itself and then reimported the nWorks VMware MP and the customizations Management Pack.

Why the MP still monitors the VM's, even this is disabled through the nWorks Management Console, that's the question. I will follow up on this one.

Thought this info could be handy for some situations.