SCOM: Operations Manager 2007 R2 Documentation

As I was browsing the Microsoft Technet site (most recent downloads) I came across a renewed documentation package for Operations Manager 2007 R2.

In this package you'll find everything you need for administering and authoring your OpsMgr environment, including XPlat! Also an easy way to complete your documentation library if it's not already up-to-date.

Here's a list with the contents:

• Linked.Reporting.MP.xml
• OM2007_AuthGuideXplat.exe
• OM2007_ReportAuthoringGuide.docx
• OM2007R2_CrossPlatformMPAuthoringGuide.docx
• OM2007R2_CrossPlatformMPAuthoringGuide_Samples.zip
• OM2007R2_DeploymentGuide.docx
• OM2007R2_DesignGuide.docx
• OM2007R2_MigrationGuide.docx
• OM2007R2_MPAuthoringGuide.docx
• OM2007R2_MPModuleReference.docx
• OM2007R2_OperationsAdministratorsGuide.docx
• OM2007R2_OperationsUsersGuide.docx
• OM2007R2_SecurityGuide.docx
• OM2007R2_UpgradeGuide.docx

If you want it all, just use the last download link

• System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Documentation.zip

Microsoft's technet site: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=19BD0EB5-7CA0-41BE-8C0F-2D95FE7EC636&displaylang=en

Even for the more experienced people there's a change already known documents are updated since the last time they were used in the field. So check it out.

SCOM: System Center Operations Manager R2 Unleashed - Review - A GREAT Supplement

A few weeks ago I got my copy of the supplement to the book 'System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed', called 'System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Unleashed'.

I love the 'Unleashed' books for SCCM and SCOM and couldn't wait to get my hands on this one. As I blogged a while ago, this book contains a lot of updates compared to the first book. This blogpost is a my personal review about the contents and as far as I know my first public book review.

This book is writen by the same authors as it's big brother. Along with many other SCOM specialists they managed to create a very useful and practical technical add-on. It's really loaded with in-depth information.

Why I think you should get this book:

• A lot of best practices & examples
• A convenient and clear summary of updates/changes on SCOM since its introduction
• A great chapter about X-plat/Cross-platform monitoring, including a walkthrough and examples with 3rd party management packs!
• All you need to know about Windows 2008 and System Center Operations Manager R2, it's there
• Nice writing about upgrading SQL 2005 to SQL 2008
• Everything you need/wanted to know about the OpsMgr PowerShell Extensions
  Including: practical documentation, examples and performance enhancements
• A virtualization update about managing virtual infrastructures
• Nice chapter about MP Authoring. I think this can help a lot of SCOM admins with creating management packs.

Pros:

• Many best-practices SCOM admins can find on the web are finally grabbed together in this "fat pocket guide"
• Nice examples (SQL queries & Powershell)
• Cross-platform in a nutshell
• It's clearly visible the authors worked together with the known MVP's and other specialists. The MP cook down practices are a great example of this.
• The book has answers to most of the questions that can arise with managing SCOM, like performance, scaling, backup & recovery.
• Nice appendix with more up-to-date MP tuning tips (compilation of ops-mgr.spaces.live.com which moved to http://systemcentercentral.com/byexample)

Small ;) Cons:

• VMM promo. The virtualization chapter takes the reader along the features of VMM integration with OpsMgr. It's a nice promo & walkthrough, but it would be nice to also see more of Bridgeway's of Veeam's MP. I must say the authors did a great job showing some features of the VMM MP, of which you could benefit when you use VMware virtualization technology without vCenter. (I think this could be an item of the pros list ;) )
• The pages could use some chapter - paragraph header info. Because of the information load, it's nice to know where you're at :D (like the original book)
• I think adding extra in-depth information about creating and using Reports is the last item that's missing for a SCOM admin to be fully equiped. This book contains a paragraph about the R2 enhancements and using a linked report in the Authoring Console. It would be nice to add some best-practices/guides about getting more from the Reporting feature like they did in the chapter about the PowerShell Extensions chapter. More examples like in the previous book would be nice!
• On page 13 it states the R2 version of the Windows Service Management Pack template enables wildcard entry to select multiple, similarly named services. I'm still searching for this, but haven't been able to use wildcards with this template besides using the WmiProviderWithClassSnapshotDataMapper.

Book 'Rollup': Very Healthy

Great book for every SCOM admin and author. I think this is a piece of equipment every SCOM admin should have in his/her toolbox. Along with the 'System Center Operations 2007 Unleashed' book of course.

New Core MP for SCOM R2

Just came across two very interesting and detailed blogs by Marnix Wolf about the core MP update for SCOM R2.
Marnix really did a great job showing all what's new!

Part 1 - Core Monitoring Reports
http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/2010/02/newest-core-mp-for-scom-r2-new-road.html
Part 2 - Agent Management (nice!)
http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/2010/02/newest-core-mp-for-scom-r2-new-road_26.html

SCOM: System Center Operations Manager R2 Unleashed - status update

The authors of SCOM 2007 Unleashed have posted an update for the release of the book System Center Operations Manager R2 Unleashed.

The 'Unleashed' books have always been a favorite of mine. Let's hope that this upcoming release is as good as its predecessors.

A copy from their Space:

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Unleashed - a supplement to the earlier System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed - is announced for availability mid-March 2010. As a supplement, the R2 ebook includes 9 chapters of new material covering OpsMgr 2007 R2 and additional topics not in the first book. Here's the chapter lineup:

1. Introduction and What's New
2. Unix/Linux Management: Cross Platform Extensions
3. Operations Manager 2007 R2 and Windows Server 2008
4. Using SQL Server 2008 in OpsMgr 2007 R2
5. PowerShell Extensions for Operations Manager 2007
6. Management Solutions for Small and Midsize Business
7. Operations Manager and Virtualization
8. Management Pack Authoring
9. Unleashing Operations Manager 2007

Appendix A. OpsMgr R2 by Example

Appendix B. Reference URLs

Appendix C. Available Online

Chapter 9 includes a "deep dive" into managing distributed environments, high availability, business continuity, the new Visio add-in, going beyond the basics of ACS, network monitoring using distributed applications, and targeting.

SCOM: Cumulative Update 1 for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2

 Microsoft released Cumulative Update 1 for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. Many things have been fixed with this update.

Here the list as posted on the Microsoft website:

• The Product Knowledge tab is displayed as the Company Knowledge tab after you import a language pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.
• An agent cannot be removed successfully from a Windows Cluster service node.
• The Heathservice.exe process on a Windows Cluster service passive node may have excessive CPU utilization.
• The Healthservice.exe process may crash when it uses the OLE DB module.
• The workflows that use the OLE DB data source may unload themselves if the underlying provider returns a null string or an empty string.
• An instance of the MonitoringHost.exe process may cause a memory leak in nonpaged pool memory.
• The notification subscriptions do not work if they are configured to parse a CustomField field or an AlertOwner field.
• The Operations console loses the status as the current object that is in focus when a search filter is applied.
• The SRSUpdateTool.exe process returns an error that states “Failed while updating registry entry for reporting code MSI component” when you try to upgrade SQL Reporting Services 2005 to SQL Reporting Services 2008.
• The Operations Manager UI may crash when the Connector column and the Forwarding Status column are added to an Alert view.
• The agents may re-process old Windows event log entries and then incorrectly generate alerts for these events that are not new.
• Health state reliability fixes and improvements.
• The Operations Manager Audit Collection Service (ADTServer.exe) does not start on an ACS Collector if the operating system is upgraded to Windows Server 2008 R2.
• In a performance report that is exported, the list of object instances is not displayed.

Official Microsoft KB: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974144

Kevin Holman (Microsoft) has done extensive research. See his blog for an upgrade plan & and what other users are experiencing: http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2010/01/17/opsmgr-2007-r2-cu1-rollup-hotfix-ships-and-my-experience-installing-it.aspx

SCOM: Registry discovery on 64 bit OS

When you're running 32 bit applications on 64 bit servers with a 64 bit SCOM Agent, you really should read this post. Same goes for people who wonder why their discovery does work on 32 bit servers and not on 64 bit servers.

32 bit Application on 64 bit OS

When a 32 bit application is installed on a 32 bit Windows OS, the registry keys are usually writen to :
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\YourVendor\ApplicationName.

This changes when the OS is a 64 bit version.
Then a 32 bit installation sets its registry keys in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\YourVendor\AppicationName

Attribute Discovery
This is tricky when you don't know if one or both of these scenarios exists in your environment. There is more than one solution for your attribute discovery. (SCOM 2007 R2 is required for solution #2).

1. Copy the right child keys from the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\ to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\
2. Add an extra XML element to the Registry Discovery in your MP to make a '32 bit discovery' work on a 64 bit Agent.
3. Use a VBScript for the discovery in which you have multiple ways of checking for CPU Archicture en reading registry keys
   

I will show you how to use solution 2. If you also would like to see how to work with solution 3.

Enable the Discovery using the 32 bit part of 64 bit registry

• Open your Management Pack with a text editor, e.g. notepad.exe
• Go to Discoveries section
• Search for the Discovery in which you want to enable 32 bit discovery
• Within the section , add the following XML element
• <registryview>32bit</registryview>
• Save your Management Pack
• Done!
  

In XML it will probably will look like this:

<RegistryAttributeDefinition>
  <AttributeName>AppExists</AttributeName>
  <Path>SOFTWARE\YourVendor\ApplicationName\Value</Path>
  <PathType>1</PathType>
  <AttributeType>1</AttributeType>
  <RegistryView>32bit</RegistryView>
</RegistryAttributeDefinition>

As other users have already noticed: If you make a change to the attribute from the Operations Console or Authoring console, the RegistryView element is deleted. So watch out for that!

See also: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/operationsmanagermgmtpacks/thread/bf566244-1164-4bf7-b08c-558bc7bc2363

SCOM R2: New OpsMgr R2 MP released (6.1.7553.0)

Just a few days ago Microsoft released an updated version of the OpsMgr 2007 R2 Management Pack.
If you have SCOM R2 you can benefit from this release right-away. This MP package (Version 6.1.7553.0) is specific to OpsMgr 2007 R2 and will not import on product versions prior to that. You can find it in the MP Catalog.

A similar update for OpsMgr 2007 SP1 will be released in the coming weeks. It will be announced on http://blogs.technet.com/momteam

Some highlights:

• Better threshold adjustments which results in less false positives
• Updated knowledge base and display strings
• Disabled some non-actionable rules & monitors
• Extra performance counters

Read the updated MP guide for more information.

These updates are based on Community, Customer, and internal feedback.
See Kevin Holman's blog about SCOM agents continuously rebooting after reaching a memory threshold. This is one of the things fixed in this newly released Management Pack.

SCOM: Upgrading to SCOM 2007 R2

Last week i was busy upgrading multiple SCOM 2007 SP1 environments to R2.

The upgrade process to R2 is actually very straigt forward. That is, if your environment is also straight forward.

A collegue of my was presented with an upgrade error when he tried to upgrade the Reporting Server and the Data Warehouse Database in the background.

Eventually it was caused because the user account the SCOM Reporting Server upgrade was started with, was configured as a user on the database without SQL roles.

This takes some time to figure out, especially when you have to work with different teams. A team for SCOM, a team for SQL and for example a team for IIS.

That's why here is a R2 upgrade info list for your convenience:

• What's new in SCOM R2
• R2 Webcasts
• SCOM R2 Product Documentation

But most important:

• SCOM 2007 Upgrade Guide (Notice the Improving Upgrade Performance article)
• SCOM 2007 Deployment Scenarios

And remember, always create a backup of your database before installing a upgrade.