SCCM: Using Cmdlets from SCCM PowerShell Module

If you want to use PowerShell with SCCM, you can do two things.

• Load the PowerShell through the SCCM Console (left top corner: Connect via Windows PowerShell)
• Load the PowerShell module manually

When you use the manual method, the SCCM PS drive should be loaded automatically.

import-module($Env:SMS_ADMIN_UI_PATH.Substring(0,$Env:SMS_ADMIN_UI_PATH.Length-5) + '\ConfigurationManager.psd1')

You can verify this with the command Get-PSDrive command

Get-PSDrive -PSProvider CMSite

When the CMSite PowerShell Drive is not available, you can create it yourself and connect to the SCCM site. The only parameter you need is the name of the Site Server which hosts the SMS Provider. This is usually the Primary Site Server.
How to add the CMSite PSDrive manually:

New-PSDrive -Name "SCCM" -PSProvider CMSite -Root "<SCCM_SERVER>"
cd SCCM:

Of course you can use whatever name you want.

More info:
http://www.hasmug.com/2016/04/25/easily-document-configmgr-client-settings-with-powershell/ (thanks for the csv function!)
http://www.verboon.info/2013/05/powershell-script-to-retrieve-sccm-2012-client-settings/
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2013/03/27/powershell-connecting-to-configuration-manager/

SCOM: View Folder Path hierarchy (PowerShell)

So we're six years older and still there was a small thing that I still had not fixed. It concerned the full view folder path of a SCOM Monitoring View.

In the past I wrote numerous PowerShell scripts which involved the views. Now I finally found some time to create a function to get the folder hierarchy of a given View by it's ID (guid).
Why I never thought about solving it like this, i don't know, but it appeared to be not that hard. It's a simple recursive function.

In the future I'll update the existing scripts concerning the User Scopes and will also upload a nice script which shows a complete report about all the dependancies between Management Packs and their objects used in User Roles and Notifications. This comes in handy, when you want to phase out management packs but don't know whether there are User Roles and Notification Subscriptions involved.

Enjoy.

• $computerName should have a name of a valid Management Server
• $viewId needs to have a valid guid of an existing view in your SCOM environment.

New-SCOMManagementGroupConnection -ComputerName $computerName
$mg = Get-SCOMManagementGroup

function GetFolderHierarchy($folderId,$folderpath) {

    $parentfolderid = $null
    $tmpfolder = $mg.GetMonitoringFolder($folderId)   
    $tmpfolderdisplayname = $tmpfolder.DisplayName

    if ($folderpath -eq "" -Or $folderpath -eq $null) {
        $folderpath = $tmpfolderdisplayname
    } else {
        $folderpath = $tmpfolderdisplayname + "\" + $folderpath
    }

    $parentfolderid = $tmpfolder.ParentFolder.id.Guid

    if ($parentfolderid -ne "" -And $parentfolderid -ne $null -And $tmpfolder.name -ne "Microsoft.SystemCenter.Monitoring.ViewFolder.Root") {
        GetFolderHierarchy $parentfolderid $folderpath
    } else { 
        return $folderpath
    }

}

function GetViewHierarchy($viewId) { 

    $tmpview = $mg.GetMonitoringView($viewId)
    $parentfolderid = $tmpview.ParentFolderIds.Guid | Select -First 1
    if($parentfolderid -ne "" -And $parentfolderid -ne $null) {
        $fullpath = GetFolderHierarchy $parentfolderid
        return $fullpath + "\" + $tmpview.DisplayName
    }    
}

GetViewHierarchy $viewId

SCOM: Compare MP's between Management Groups with PowerShell

A short blog post about comparing management packs between SCOM environments I know there are tools available to compare management packs, but that's no fun. Creating this compare script with PowerShell to accomplish the same didn't cost me that much time. And of course, doing it yourself with PowerShell is just more fun. So here it is.

This script gives you a gridview with the differences, as well as an CSV output file.

#Compares unsealed/sealed MP's between two management groups
#Author: Michiel Wouters
#Date: 23-03-2016

[CmdletBinding()]
Param(
   [Parameter(Mandatory=$False)]
   [string]$ms1="server1", # A management server of the source environment, default value
   
   [Parameter(Mandatory=$False)]
   [string]$ms2="server2", # A management server of the target environment, default value

   [Parameter(Mandatory=$False)]
   [boolean]$Sealed=$True
  
)

New-SCOMManagementGroupConnection -ComputerName $ms1
$mmgtgrpconn1 = Get-SCOMManagementGroupConnection -ComputerName $ms1

New-SCOMManagementGroupConnection -ComputerName $ms2
$mmgtgrpconn2 = Get-SCOMManagementGroupConnection -ComputerName $ms2

Set-SCOMManagementGroupConnection -Connection $mmgtgrpconn1
$mgmtgrp1mps = Get-SCOMManagementPack | ? {$_.Sealed -eq $Sealed} | Select DisplayName, Name, Version | Sort DisplayName

Set-SCOMManagementGroupConnection -Connection $mmgtgrpconn2
$mgmtgrp2mps = Get-SCOMManagementPack | ? {$_.Sealed -eq $Sealed} | Select DisplayName, Name, Version | Sort DisplayName


#set SynWindow for compare object
if($mgmtgrp2mps.Count -gt $mgmtgrp1mps.count) { 
    $SyncWindow = [math]::Ceiling($mgmtgrp2mps.Count/2)
}  else { 
    $SyncWindow = [math]::Ceiling($mgmtgrp1mps.Count/2)
}

$comparison = Compare-Object -ReferenceObject $mgmtgrp1mps -DifferenceObject $mgmtgrp2mps -Property DisplayName, Name, Version -SyncWindow $SyncWindow | Sort DisplayName
#output to screen
$comparison | Out-GridView
#output to csv file
$comparison | Export-CSV -Path .\SCOM_MPDiff_$(Get-Date -Format "yyyyMMdd_HHmm").csv -NoTypeInformation -Delimiter ";"

Screenshots:

SCOM: SCOM 2016 Monitoring Wishes

I noticed on the System Center: Operations Monitoring Engineering Blog that there's a request for which monitoring workloads you would like to see in SCOM 2016.

So this is your chance:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2016/01/22/what-new-workloads-would-you-like-scom-2016-to-monitor.aspx

For myself, I really would like to see more effort to let end-users do more Authoring for themselves, instead of being fully dependant on the Authoring team within organizations.

As for workloads: Enhanced user experience monitoring would be nice and also more functional monitoring workloads would be a nice addon (like querying specific data in a DB) and write that data back for performance history and reporting.