Source: Internal As you might know I was not able to fly to MMS 2010 in Las Vegas due to the recent eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland :-( So I’ve time for other things and today I stumbled on the next screencast, which might be handy for implementing OpsMgr Crossplatform monitoring. Check out this screencast on Screencast.com.  

Maybe you missed this news being busy at Tech Ed Berlin ;-) But Microsoft and Novell announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft products work better together. The two companies also announced an agreement to provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012. Under this new model, customers will realize unprecedented choice and flexibility through improved interoperability and manageability between Windows and Linux. The two companies will create a joint research facility at which Microsoft and Novell technical experts will architect and test new software solutions and work with customers and the community to build and support these technologies. The agreement between Microsoft and Novell focuses on three technical areas that provide important value and choice to the market: Virtualization. Virtualization is one of the most important trends in the industry. Customers tell Microsoft that virtualization is one way they can consolidate and more easily manage rapidly growing server workloads and their large set of server applications. Microsoft and Novell will jointly develop a compelling virtualization offering for Linux and Windows. Web services for managing physical and virtual servers. Web services and service-oriented architectures continue to be one of the defining ways software companies can deliver greater value to customers. Microsoft and Novell will undertake work to make it easier for customers to manage mixed Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise environments and to make it easier for customers to federate Microsoft Active Directory with Novell eDirectory. Document format compatibility. Microsoft and Novell have been focusing on ways to improve interoperability between office productivity applications. The two companies will now work together on ways for OpenOffice and Microsoft Office system users to best share documents, and both will take steps to make translators available to improve interoperability between Open XML and OpenDocument formats. “As a result of this collaboration, customers will now be able to run virtualized Linux on Windows or virtualized Windows on Linux,” You can read the full story here.

Today I created a video demonstrating monitoring your Unix and Linux servers with OpsMgr 2007 R2 for the Dutch LinuxWorld expo next week. I created this video so I can also have a moment to look around at the LinuxWorld Expo ;-) It’s part of a rolling presentation so I didn’t added any sound to it, but I thought it would be nice to upload the video anyway. In the video you can see that I’m monitoring two Linux servers, one Redhat and one Suse Novell machine in my demo environment. To demo the health of the Suse server I stopped the powersaved service on the machine and with the help of a geographical map created with the latest version of Savision Live Maps you can see that the Suse server is going from healthy to unhealthy and to healthy again after restarting the service.   See you at the LinuxWorld expo next week!

I just downloaded and installed the latest version of Savision Live Maps in my demo environment and started creating a new List View for my Linux servers.

The new release of Live Maps 4.1 for Operations Manager R2 contains, besides some fixes and performance improvements, a number of new features that have been added based on customer feedback. Some of the new features are highlighted in this article, a complete overview can be found in the release notes. You can read more about the new features on their weblog. The new release can be downloaded here. You may ask why are you creating a List View for your Linux Servers? I’m preparing a demo for next week’s Dutch LinuxWorld event in Utrecht. You can visit us at booth D072 of our partner Ictivity. You can also take a look at the website http://www.metopenvizier.nl/. [Dutch]

I’m currently busy with learning more about Crossplatform monitoring with OpsMgr 2007 R2 and stumbled on Logging on the Unix Agent for troubleshooting issues. As you may know on the Linux agent you can troubleshoot, manage and manually control the agent by using the scxadmin tool. /opt/microsoft/scx/bin/tools/scxadmin -stop [all|cimom|provider] /opt/microsoft/scx/bin/tools/scxadmin -start [all|cimom|provider /opt/microsoft/scx/bin/tools/scxadmin -restart [all|cimom|provider] You can view the running status by executing: /opt/microsoft/scx/bin/tools/scxadmin -status [all|cimom|provider] And you can view the agent version by executing: /opt/microsoft/scx/bin/tools/scxadmin –version   You can enable debug level logging on all 3 components - wsman, cimom (openPegasus) and the providers. The following command creates the necessary entries in the agent configuration for logging: /opt/microsoft/scx/bin/tools/scxadmin -log-set [all|cimom|provider] {verbose | intermediate | errors} The following logs are created in /var/opt/microsoft/scx/log: scx.log scxcimd.log cimserver.trc cimserver.trc.SCXCoreProviderModule.root   The initial Linux Logging setting shows this: As you can see no logging is currently configured. When we change the logging level to verbose for all components the logging level changes to TraceLevel 4. Let’s have a look at the log files first to see what’s happening now. You can see the log file size is growing fast ;-) Ok, after you have found what you are looking for you want to stop the Linux Agent logging. But how do you stop the Linux Agent Logging? According to the scxadmin  --help you can stop the logging with the next commando: scxadmin –log-reset Let’s run that command now and check the new settings. Huh? Even though we did a –log-reset according to the –log-list the traceLevel is still 1. If we look at the log files for info if there is still logging going on we see that no logging is taking place after the –log-reset. The reason why the –log-list command still shows a tracelevel of 1 is due to explicit config files (/etc/opt/microsoft/scx/conf/cimserver_current.conf). So you can ignore the tracelevel=1 in the –log-list of scxadmin after enabling and resetting logging on a Linux Agent. Have fun with OpsMgr and Crossplatform monitoring.

How cool is this? Coretech has created a coffee monitor MP. This management packs can be used to keep track of the level of coffee in left in the pot. With this management pack, you will never run dry of, what we all know, is the most important part of a productive environment! This is mostly made as a proof of concept, as this technique can be transferred to other monitor types. It could be expanded with other types of sensors, like a weight to check the level of coffee instead of a camera, or a thermometer to check the temperature of the coffee. This is the very first version. It has been tested in test environments. By default, it will trigger a warning when under 50% is left, and a Critical Alert when under 20% is left. Please do not hesitate to report any bugs and please send suggestions for the next version you might have. This was developed by Jakob Gottlieb Svendsen with the help of Kåre Rude Andersen Guys great work! Loving it.

Source: @dehaaspeter Microsoft has launched a new website Interoperability @ Microsoft. The Interoperability Bridges and Labs Center is dedicated to technical collaborative work between Microsoft, customers, partners and open sources communities to improve interoperability between Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies. The Center is run by the Microsoft Interoperability Strategy Group working with many other teams at Microsoft, with customers input and with the community at large to build technical bridges, labs and solutions to improve interoperability in mixed IT environments. In this site, you will find a live directory of these technical and freely downloadable interoperability Bridges with related content such as demos, technical articles, helpful best practices from the projects leads and sharing technical guidance. You will also find Labs, which contain technical guidance explaining how to best achieve interoperability in specific product scenarios. The vast majority of the projects are run as Open Source projects with third party and community members and released under a broad BSD license, or other licenses such as MS-PL or Apache, so that our customers, partners and the community can use them in many open and broad reaching scenarios.