SCOM: Reserved Custom Attributes?

Today I came accross a post of Daniele Grandini in which he writes that the Exchange 2010 MP uses the Custom Attributes of alerts for it's internal Alert Correlation engine.

Why is this important to know? Custom Attributes can be used for notification purposes to send extra information.

I realised I know more Management Packs which also use these Custom Attributes. So here's a short list of the MP's:

• Microsoft Biztalk Server MP 6.0.6703.0: Custom Field 1


• Microsoft Group Policy 2003 MP (Converted): Custom Field 6


• Microsoft SCCM MP 6.0.6000.2: Custom Field 1 and 6


• nWorks VMware VEM MP 5.0.3.248: Custom Field 1 to 6 and 9, 10

This is what I came accross. It's possible these MP's use more custom attributes. Let me know when you want to add something to this list.

You can check this quickly by creating an alert view (MyWorkspace also possible), and show all alerts with a filter on custom attribute 1 to 10 with text '%'.

SCOM: Find Notification Subscriptions for Subscriber

What to do when you want to delete a subscriber in SCOM, but you can't because get an error like this:

The notification recipient is subscribed to at least one notification subscription.
Please remove it from all notification subscriptions before deleting it.
.....cannot be deleted as its currently in use.

To solve this you would have to browse manually through all your notification subscriptions. But how much time would that take.
With this PowerShell script it takes 2 seconds!

Get-NotificationSubscription | foreach {
 $ns = $_.DisplayName
 $_.ToRecipients | foreach { 
  If ($_.Name -match "John") {
   Write-Host $ns
  }
 }
}