Tag: Management Pack

Quick Demo - Add Windows Performance Collection Rule [#opsmgr, #mpauthoring]

By request, I uploaded a short clip demonstrating how you would add a windows performance counter to a performance collection rule using the Authoring Console. It is a fairly simple task to complete but does require the Authoring Console, obviously, and a better target class than what I use in the demo. The demo also assumes that this counter exist on all the targeted servers in your environment. It would be wise, when making your management pack, to check that it’s there on all targeted operating systems, and that’s what I use Performance Monitor for. (just search for perfmon in your start menu or run perfmon.exe) Enjoy.

Introduction to TG WinAutoSvc v1

Background For quite some time now I’ve had this idea spinning around in my head to write a couple of blog-posts about some of the more useful techniques available when building management packs. Many of these techniques are already described on MSDN and Technet- or other blogs as well as on various forums, but often no more than small bits and pieces of them and I have yet to see some humanly readable information about how to tie them together into a useful management pack. I say “humanly readable” because the information you do find online so far may be clear and somewhat easy to understand for someone with a system development background and a pretty good idea of how object oriented development models tend to work. But the real life System Center Operations Manager engineer–you know the one who get those “do you think we could monitor our …-system too?” questions a couple of times a week, you know… you (most likely, being here)–tend to have a completely different background. Yet as their OpsMgr environment grows, so does the demand for custom monitoring and all of a sudden the former server engineer are now also a developer. A developer who has never before had the need to grasp such abstract concepts as classes, instances, inheritance and who probably never before have had any reason whatsoever to write any XML code. Purpose My idea for this series of posts is to shed some light into the world of the authoring console and modules and cookdown and so forth. I am by no means an accredited author, but I will do my best to stay human in this venture and in plain english try to explain why and how you do certain things when going from Management Pack templates, rules, monitors and the safe haven that is authoring in the Operations Console into making your scripts resuable, easy to extend and prime for cookdown using the Authoring Console and XML. The TG WinAutoSvc Management Pack To give the series some kind of context and at the same time not only be a matter of examples I will base them on a fully functional management pack that discovers and monitors all Windows services that are set to automatic startup. I know there is other similar management packs out there but I haven’t fancied any one of them yet, and since I had the idea of writing this series I decided that building a new one would be a good way to go. Some of the interesting features with this management pack is: You will get an instance of the service classes for each and every service. It uses different classes for Own Process services and Shared Process services (svchost for example). Every service have a health state (you can use them in distributed applications). The service state monitors are inherited from their base classes, no coding neccesary. There is only one discovery script for all kinds of windows services. Extending the discovery to include different kinds of windows services, like kernel processes, is a matter of filtering. It is Open Source and licensed under the Eclipse Public License v1. Most of these features will be described thoroughly in later posts in the series and as development of it progresses I will document what I do, how I do it and why I do it in certain ways. Hopefully you will learn something new through this and get closer to becoming that MP Dev the organization asks for. In the mean time, feel free to download, look at the source code (which it by no means perfect) and try it out. The TG WinAutoSvc monitoring management pack is available for download here: http://code.google.com/p/tg-winautosvc/downloads/detail?name=TG.WinAutoSvc.xml The latest revision of the source code is located here: http://code.google.com/p/tg-winautosvc/source/browse/trunk/TG.WinAutoSvc.xml

SNMP GET Errors in OpsMgr EventLog

I’ve been building a little SNMP Management Pack in the past few days to discover and monitor a bunch of PowerWare UPS’s, which turned out to take quite a lot more energy and time than expected. Mostly due to the facts that I am really bad with SNMP and how it works, I’ve never really looked into the inner working of building an SNMP management pack and also because we ran into a couple of errors preventing the discovery process to work alright. To make it clear right away, this is not going to be a “Building an SNMP Management Pack Tutorial” since there’s plentiful good ones out there already, and to be extra helpful I’m gonna include a few links right away: SNMP Setup and Simple Custom SNMP Discovery - Pretty much the basics SNMP Management Pack Example: NetApp Management Pack - Part 4 actually, but has the links to the other parts Creating SNMP Probe Based Monitors - No custom discovery, but a good and simple guide to SNMP Probes It’s the second, the NetApp one, I’ve used as a guide to building the UPS management pack since it goes through the process of building your own filtered discovery using SystemOID to identify your hardware-classes and then building the monitors on top of those. Let’s get to it When building the discovery of my hardware classes I ran into problems. The discovery simply did not work. At first I got some strange errors about “invalid queries”, something that turned out to be related to me reading two guides–seriously though, pick one guide that is closest to what you want to achieve and stick to it–and mixing up the XPathQuery variables. Silly me. I got those errors to go away and I was able to get a few objects to my base-class, but none of the hardware classes who was populated through the return value of an SNMP OID got discovered. The only error I got this time was the following: Log Name: Operations ManagerSource: Health Service ModulesDate: 2010-09-02 11:19:12Event ID: 11001Task Category: NoneLevel: ErrorKeywords: ClassicUser: N/AComputer: CENSOREDDescription:Error sending an SNMP GET message to IP Address XX.XX.XX.XX, Community String:=CENSORED, Status 0x6c.One or more workflows were affected by this.Workflow name: CENSORED.MP.CLASS.DISCOVERYInstance name: CENSORED_DEVICENAMEInstance ID: {5C7EFB30-D885-8843-0DD7-EA86B4FD2311}Management group: CENSORED I went through all the other logical steps of troubleshooting an error like that which include double-checking firewall settings, OIDs, IP-addresses, allowed hosts and so forth. It wasn’t until I loaded the PowerMIB into a MIB Browser installed on the proxy machine (in this case a Management Server) I realized that there was no problem sending an SNMP GET to the UPS from that server. I launched Wireshark and had it listen to SNMP traffic between the UPS and the Management Server. The thing that struck me right-away was the fact that I could see the a bunch of “SNMP Get-Request” but no “SNMP Get-Response” which means that Operations Manager did send an SNMP GET but there was no response. After a bit of intense staring i noticed what you see in the screenshot.

MSMQ 4 and MSMQ 5 MP for OpsMgr Released! (finally)

After a long wait (definitely more than 90 days) the management packs for MSMQ 4 (Windows 2008) and MSMQ 5 (Windows 2008 R2) are finally released. Both seem to be fully Cluster aware and pretty much holds the same monitoring as the the latest MSMQ 3 MP. Message Queuing 4.0 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 > **Quick Details** Version: 6.0.6700.83 Date Published: 4/5/2010 Language: English Download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cfc103b8-7185-4721-8098-110885fe9e9e&displaylang=en Message Queuing 5.0 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 Quick Details Version: 6.0.6700.88 Date Published: 4/5/2010 Language: English Download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=28349b78-8329-44aa-8a1f-81f4e3f84d0c&displaylang=en

Updated MSMQ Management Pack v6.0.6615.0!

Microsoft has released an update to the MSMQ (version 3) management pack. System Center Pack for: Message Queuing 3.0Version: 6.0.6615.0Released on: 12/14/2009Message Queuing (also known as MSMQ) is a server application that enables applications to communicate across heterogeneous networks and systems that may be temporarily offline or otherwise inaccessible. Instead of an application communicating with a service on another computer, it sends its information to Message Queuing, which sends the information to a Message Queuing service on the target computer where it is made available to the other application. Message Queuing provides guaranteed delivery, efficient routing, security, and priority based messaging. Now, what’s really interesting is what you will find in the MP Guide under “Supported Configurations”. The Message Queuing Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 is designed to monitor Message Queuing version 3 only. The Message Queuing Management Pack supports the following platforms: Windows Server 2003 Windows XP The Message Queuing Management Pack also supports monitoring clustered MSMQ components Emphasis by me. Finally, MSMQ monitoring seems to be cluster aware, which might mean that the home-made pack i did to have those (numerous) queues covered could be passed on to the scrap-heap. This is also confirmed under “Changes in This Update”. The December 2009 update to this management pack includes the following change: Fixed a problem when working with an instance of MSMQ in a Cluster. The MP is now able to discover and monitor public and private queues in a cluster. Fixed a problem when discovering the local and cluster instance of MSMQ. The MP is now able to discover and monitor both instances.

Updated: MP for System Center Configurations Manager 2007 SP2 on x64

Microsoft has released an updated MP for SCCM SP2 (v6.0.6000.2, released on 10/28/2009) for OpsMgr R2. The update basically contains support for x64 that was missing in the previous release. The Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 Management Pack adds support for monitoring Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 in a 64-bit environment with Operations Manager 2007 R2 or Operations Manager 2007 SP1 with hotfix (KB971541) installed. This enables the Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 Management Pack to work with either the 32-bit or the 64-bit Operations Manager 2007 agent. Except for the 64-bit support, the other features and guidance for Configuration Manager 2007 Management Packs remain intact. Emphasis is mine. Read more and download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a8443173-46c2-4581-b3b8-ce67160f627b

Microsoft Adds support for SUSE 11 in OpsMgr R2

This update hasn’t showed up in the MP Catalog yet, but the System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cross Platform Update can be downloaded here. Besides SUSE 11 support, here’s the short overview. The System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cross Platform Update adds fixes for a defunct process issue on Unix/Linux Servers, as well as, adds support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions) and Solaris Zone support. Feature Summary: The System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cross Platform Update supports the monitoring of Unix/Linux Servers including: Monitoring of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 servers (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions)* Support of Solaris Zones* Fix for defunct Process issue* The Cross Platform Agent may not discover soft partitions on Solaris systems. Therefore, the disk provider may be unloaded, and the Cross Platform Agent may stop collecting information from the system disks.* The Cross Platform Agent may not restart after the AIX server reboots. The latest versions of all the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Unix/Linux agents are included in this update. Perfect timing, I must say, since I really need this today. 😄 Update: This is no small MP-update, which probably is the reason that we do not find it in the MP Catalog, but a ~250MB OpsMgr R2 Software Update. You need to run this on all Operations Manager Servers (RMS/MS, GW?) since it actually updates many of the agent Cross Platform binaries. It does add a new MP för SUSE 11 that you have to import from disk if you need it. So, the installation goes somewhat like this: Install the Software Update (pick the right Architecture) on all OpsMgr R2 Servers Import the SUSE 11 MP if necessary Re-discover your Unix/Linux machines. Files updated in this update for R2:

Health Rollup not working in Exchange Management Pack

I’ve wrestled a bit with a critical status on one of the Organization States at a clients site that wont go back to green despite all the underlying monitors have gone back to green. And apparently I am not alone on this one. Others, like me, has read and re-read the MP-guide i search for a monitor/rule/discovery for overrides forgotten, and I don’t know how many times I’ve made a small change and tried resetting the health once again. Anyhow. Marius Sutara posted an answer on TechNet forums last week with a “fix” (-ish), or rather the acknowledgement that the problem is not a 40c. The problem might be related to other MP as well, but I’ve only seen it on the new Exchange MP so far. In that same post, Pete Zerger provided some links to two nifty little tools that will help you reset the health of the monitor. In case you wonder why on earth I post when there’s allready a “solution” out there; Pagerank, baby! Not for me, but for the forum post making it show up earlier on google.

Updated: Operations Manager 2007 R2 Management Pack

Microsoft released an updated MP (v6.1.7533.0, released on 10/8/2009) for monitoring the health the Operations Manager components. Most significant updates, according to me, would seem to be: Fixed an issue that was previously preventing all rules related to agentless exception monitoring from generating alerts. Added the rule “Collects Opsmgr SDK ServiceClient Connections” to collect the number of connected clients for a given management group. This data is shown in the view “Console and SDK Connection Count” under the folder “Operations ManagerManagement Server Performance”. Updated a number of monitors and rules to ensure that data is reported to the correct management group for multihomed agents. Fixed the configuration of the rule “IIS Discovery Probe Module Execution Failure” to so that the parameter replacement will now work correctly for alert suppression and generating the details of the alert’s description. The rest is mostly polishing, fine-tuning and complementary updates. Nothing really ground-breaking here, but still a welcome update. Download at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=61365290-3c38-4004-b717-e90bb0f6c148

SQL ManagementPack Survey – Make your voice heard

According to the OpsMgr Team blog, Microsoft wants to know what you think about their SQL Server MP. It’s really hard to come by a better opportunity to express your feelings and desires about monitoring SQL Server, so don’t miss this one out. http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2009/09/25/sql-management-pack-survey-live-on-connect.aspx