Category: OpsMgr 2007

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.

Parameter Replacement in AlertName

…and why you should not use it A Disclaimer I have had serious doubts about actually writing this article for almost a year now for reasons that I will explain further on. But as others have discovered this “feature” as well–maybe “hack” would be a better name for it–I feel the need to explain how it works and also why you should not use it. Knowledge is power, and even if I advice against using this technique it is also a good way to understand how SCOM uses display-strings in management packs. The Good News Yes, you can use parameter replacement in you AlertName. With “parameter replacement” i mean using some kind of substitute text, or mnemonic if you like, that at run-time get translated into something useful. If you have written any kind of alert generating rules or monitors, you most like included something like Data/Context/Property[@Name=′SomeDataFromAPropertyBag′]Data/Context/Property[@Name='SomeDataFromAPropertyBag']Data/Context/Property[@Name=′SomeDataFromAPropertyBag′] into your alert description. In this dialog, you also have the possibility to set the Alert Name. And if you are lazy, like I am, you probably also noticed that it is impossible to insert any kind of dynamic data into that field as well. This is especially annoying when you are writing a management pack that needs to look different in the Alert Views in the console, and you want to monitor 50 different Events or Performance counters or Log entries that are pretty much the same apart from a Name or ID. Of course I could not refrain from copy-pasting a Data/Context...Data/Context...Data/Context... into the alert name only to realize that it simply is not being parsed and translated into the value of the specified parameter. Over time I have settled for a stand-point that it’s probably a performance issue and I have also used that as an argument for this apparent lack of simplicity that some of my customers have been questioning. Two, maybe three, years later. Microsoft releases an update to the core agent monitoring packs. Much to my surprise, one performance monitor suddenly generated alerts with a dynamic performance value in the Alert Name. You know, that field that is not gettingt parsed I was mentioning in the earlier paragraph. It actually looked pretty bad and made it very much impossible to practice any kind of alert supression, but still. It actually had a parsed value in the Alert Name. As the lack of this feature had me irked before, I exported the core MP and started reading through the XML to find out how they did it. To my surprise, it was actually pretty simple if you ditched the Authoring Console and used your trusty text-editor instead. How To Do It In simple terms, if you know your SCOM XML out-side-in, you add the parameters to your “Alert” and modify your DisplayString, the one under LanguagePacks, to call that parameter by it’s relative ID.

OpsMgr 2007 R2 Documentation

Here a link to the System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Documentation for those of you out there who keeps asking of its whereabouts and then tell me to not tell you to google for it. So now I can direct you to my site, tell you to click on “OpsMgr 2007” to the left and browse through my posts instead of wasting precious time on googling and pretend being more helpful. To the rest of the world, sorry for wasting your time! Happy now, eh?

Bulk disable ACS Forwarders (with wildcards)

Here’s a little something-something for the wicked. Me and my apprentice is currently decommissioning an entire Management Group with a thousand (-ish) agents. Long story short, we got a new Management Group, migrated all the agents, added a couple of hundreds more, deployed a bunch of gateways and now we are shutting down the old one. Now, uninstalling the old Management Group from all the agents is a breeze using SCCM and handling the few 20-ish servers that are left is not a biggie either. Shutting down ACS, however, is a different matter. Although you do configure your forwarders using Operations Manager, removing the management group you were running ACS in does not mean the agents will shut down and disable the AdtAgent service or stop trying to forward audit events to your collector. Now, selecting 10 agents at the time and running the “Disable Audit Collection” task–in case you did not know, there’s a limitation on how many agents you can run a task on in the Operations Console–is not my idea of a jolly good day and since Powershell is a bucket of joy in comparison; here’s a script for you all! DisableACSForwarders It is zipped to avoid security alerts, but as with any script found on the internet I implore to to read the code before actually running it. Anyway, you can use it in a couple of ways. To run it interactively, just go to the directory where you unpacked it and run it. You will be requested to enter the FQDN of you Root Management Server and a wildcard search for ACS Forwarders. For example: C:\..\Scripts> .\DisableACSForwarders.ps1Root Management Server: rms.teknoglot.localACS Forwarder name (wildcard): *.teknoglot.local

OpsMgr 2007 Connectivity Map

I’ve had this little visio drawing lying around on my desktop for a while now and I thought that it might be a nice thing to share. It is nothing ground breaking at all and all the information is available at the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Supported Configurations page on Technet, but I find the visual map easier to read and I use it personally to quickly look up all port openings for the most common components in Operations Manager. It is missing a few components like ACS, AEM and XPlat, but I usually just look them up when needed. Have fun!

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

Change Gateway Powershell Script

This script has pretty much already been covered in my previous post about Changing or Replacing an Operations Manager Gateway Server. This time I’ve basically put parameter support in it to make it easier to use. Here’s the script anyway. Param($OldGW,$NewGW)$OldMS= Get-ManagementServer | where {$_.Name -eq $OldGW}$NewMS = Get-ManagementServer | where {$_.Name -eq $NewGW}$agents = Get-Agent | where {$_.PrimaryManagementServerName -eq $OldGW}$agents = $agents"Moving " + $agents.count + " agents from " + $OldMS.Name + " to " + $NewMS.NameStart-Sleep -m 200Set-ManagementServer -AgentManagedComputer: $agents -PrimaryManagementServer: $NewMS -FailoverServer: $OldMS To use it, create a textfile called ChangeGW.ps1 and paste the code into it. Save the file somewhere neat (maybe C:Scripts) for easy access. If you don’t feel like copy/pasting, you can download the script here. To use it, open the Operations Manager Command Shell and type: C:\ScriptsChangeGW.ps1 <old.gatewayserver.dns.name> <new.gatewayserver.dns.name> For example: C:\ScriptsChangeGW.ps1 gwserver01.domainname.local gwserver02.domainname.local

ESENT Error When Modifying OpsMgr Agent

Getting ESENT Kerys are required to install this application when you are trying to modify/change an agent installation? This seems to be  most common on Windows 2008 and i guess it’s because of the UAC and the fact that opening the Control Panel isn’t running in administrative mode. To work around this you need to run the msiexec command on the correct installation GUID from an administrative command prompt. Besides running through the registry to find the GUID, one of the easier ways is this: Open an administrative command prompt. run wmic product Locate your product by its name, the GUID (looks a bit like this {25097770-2B1F-49F6-AB9D-1C708B96262A}) directly after that is the one you want. Copy it. run msiexec /i <PASTEYOURGUIDHERE> Modify the agent as pleased That’s pretty much it. Good luck.

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.