Source: MOM Team The Operations Manager product group is looking for feedback on how you author custom Management Packs for System Center Operations Manager 2007, as well as areas where we can improve. Please take this survey to help guide future authoring investments. The survey is anonymous and should take about 10 minutes to fill out. Go to the MOM Team blog and fill in the survey please.

Sources: Steve Rachui’s Manageability blog – ConfigMgr/OpsMgr and                Savision Live Maps Blog Is this a coincidence or what? I’ve been asked to take a look at some new blog articles from Savision about adding a ‘location’ attribute to the Windows Server class. And you can now read their first blog article How-To: Import Computer Location Information Into OpsMgr (Part 1-3) in a series of three. Savision explains how this can be achieved in three steps: Create a management pack that adds a ‘location’ attribute to the Windows Server class Write a connector that reads asset information from a CSV file and updates OpsMgr Configure Live Maps to create dynamic location aware maps Steve Rachui also extends in his blog article the class attributes from a flat file. But he uses a discovery vbscript to read the flat file instead of the connector being used/explained (in later blog posts) by Savision. It’s up to you what you choose to use. Have fun extending class attributes!

I just created my first PowerGUI PowerPack which you can use together with the MP Authoring Console. Just like I blogged previously in my MP Authoring Helper PowerShell script here. Here a teaser screenshot of the PowerGUI PowerPack.   It’s just a first version I created and I would like to have it tested a little more before posting it on the PowerGUI PowerPack library. So if anybody is creating MP’s using the MP Authoring Console and wants to try to use the MP Authoring PowerPack within PowerGUI to help creating MP’s let me know via Twitter via a DM or use the contact form on my weblog and I’ll email my PowerPack for testing.

Source: Contoso.se Two weeks ago I had an System Center Service Manager training in the UK together with some Microsoft Partners. Maarten Goet from Inovativ held an small System Center Service Manager competition for the best System Center Service Manager extension. Although I was not on the same class as Anders Bengtsson and Patrik Sundqvist I also entered the competition with a PowerShell script that exported the Classes and Properties of the System Center Management Packs to a Visio Diagram. Kind like the OpsMgr Authoring Console Tool Visio MP Diagram Generator ;-)

But Patrik and Anders showed an Asset Management extension for Service Manager and they won fair and square. More info on their extension can be found here.

Source: Nexus SC: The System Center Team Blog Sacha Dawes: “One of the more common requests we receive from you regarding management pack availability is to communicate when new and updated releases become available.  While we are looking to improve such an announcement capability in Pinpoint (the site of our new System Center Catalog – see my earlier blog for more information) the product team recently created a Twitter hashtag, #mpreleases, to help communicate of new and updated management packs.  Of course, given the open nature of Twitter it’s not just for Microsoft to leverage.  Our partners, such as members of the System Center Alliance, MVPs, and more, can also leverage Twitter to announce and post links to more information about their management pack releases. For more information on Twitter, check out http://www.twitter.com.  Details on hashtags can be found here.” I checked the #hashtag but no releases yet via the #mpreleases hashtag. Only the announcement :-)

I helped a customer creating a OpsMgr Monitor for checking if the there has been a SQL Full or Differential Backup within a specified number of hours. David Scheltens created the SQL query. Remark: Please read information on System Center Central for more info on this article. This is how you could create this kind of monitor in your own environment. Steps:

Create a Timed Script Two State Monitor. Save Monitor in other MP than Default MP. Give the Monitor a Name, like “Custom – SQL Full or Differential Backup Check”. Target the Monitor to SQL Database. Select a suitable Parent Monitor like Availability. Disable Monitor (enable by an Override later). Configure how often this Monitor should run (default is 15 mins, but you could change this depending on the time your SQL backups run) Copy script from here. The script uses three parameters (or arguments) - Param 0: The SQL connection string for the server - Param 1: The Database to use - Param 2: The threshold (in hours) to use Configure the Parameters.    Configure Unhealthy Expression. Property[@Name='NumHours'] Greater Than 1 (threshold when your backup should have been run)
Configure Healthy Expression Property[@Name='NumHours'] Less than or equal to 1 (threshold when your backup should have been run)
Configure Health.
Configure Alerting I used the Reason, BackupType and Number of Hours in the Alert Description.
Open the MP XML file and change the data type in the xml configuration from string to integer. Since making this change, the alerts and state changes seems to occur when at the correct time.More info here: (thanks to Daniele Grandini)<ErrorExpression>             <SimpleExpression>               <ValueExpression>                 <XPathQuery Type="Integer">Property[@Name='NumHours'] </XPathQuery>               </ValueExpression>               <Operator>Greater</Operator>               <ValueExpression>                 <Value Type="Integer">20</Value>               </ValueExpression>             </SimpleExpression>           </ErrorExpression>           <SuccessExpression>             <SimpleExpression>               <ValueExpression>                 <XPathQuery Type="Integer">Property[@Name='NumHours'] </XPathQuery>               </ValueExpression>               <Operator>LessEqual</Operator>               <ValueExpression>                 <Value Type="Integer">20</Value>               </ValueExpression>             </SimpleExpression>           </SuccessExpression> 15. Enable the Monitor via an Override. Remark: You may need to Use a Run As Account with the right permission for this Monitor. Result:

Some time ago I created a Tutorial How to Associate a Run As Account to a Monitor.  

In Operations Manager 2007, Run As Profiles and Run As Accounts are used to select users with the privileges needed for running rules, tasks, and monitors. Management Pack authors create a rule, task, or monitor, and then associate it with a Run As Profile. The named Run As Profile is imported along with the Management Pack into Operations Manager 2007. The Operations Manager 2007 administrator creates a named Run As Account and specifies users and groups. The administrator then adds the Run As Account to the Run As Profile and specifies the target computers that the account should run on. The goal in this short tutorial is to create a Timed Script Two State Monitor and associate a run as account to this monitor and save it all in a Management Pack. The Timed Script Two State Monitor is a vbscript that uses WMI to check if BizTalk orchestrations are not started. I’ve got some great help from Jakub Oleksy (http://blogs.msdn.com/jakuboleksy/default.aspx) and Steve Wilson (http://www.authormps.com/dnn/) You can download the tutorial here.

As you all know the old MP Catalog site website is replaced by the new PinPoint website. And not everybody is used to the new way of searching for Management Packs yet ;-) And today I got a question about finding an overview of the latest Management Packs ordered by release date. As I was not able to create such a view on the new PinPoint MP Catalog website I turned to our good old Microsoft Download website. WARNING: Today I found out that my previous search on the Microsoft Download site not returned all expected results. I changed some of the search options and this is the best search result I can get at the moment. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/results.aspx?freetext=management+pack&sortCriteria=Date&sortOrder=Descending&stype=ss_rr&displaylang=en&nr=10 Disclamer: please use your own search strings also, to check if the above search is returning all your MP searches!

It’s still not completely the same experience as our old MP Catalog website (no third-party MP's as you can imagine) but you can easily order by release date. Because this is something that’s missing on the PinPoint Website. Remark: I know you can find the latest Plugin’s on the PinPoint Website, but you still not see the release date immediately. I created an easy to remember URL for your good old Microsoft Download website: http://tinyurl.com/oldmpcatalog Please use this search as a starting point for your MP searches: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/results.aspx?freetext=management+pack&sortCriteria=Date&sortOrder=Descending&stype=ss_rr&displaylang=en&nr=50 Have fun searching for your Management Packs!

As you all know the old MP Catalog site website is replaced by the new PinPoint website. And not everybody is used to the new way of searching for Management Packs yet ;-) And today I got a question about finding an overview of the latest Management Packs ordered by release date. As I was not able to create such a view on the new PinPoint MP Catalog website I turned to our good old Microsoft Download website. It’s still not completely the same experience as our old MP Catalog website but you can easily order by release date. Because this is something that’s missing on the PinPoint Website. Remark: I know you can find the latest Plugin’s on the PinPoint Website, but you still not see the release date immediately. I created an easy to remember URL for your good old Microsoft Download website: http://tinyurl.com/oldmpcatalog   Have fun searching for your Management Packs!

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.

Now the System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Authoring Resource Kit has been released you may want to know more about Authoring in OpsMgr 2007 R2. Did you know you can find all that info on Microsoft TechNet? Check them out!

So you finally created that super cool custom report in OpsMgr and you want to add all the info necessary to run the report correctly. But how do you do that? If you use the MP Authoring Tool you have the option to add a Description. If you open the MP xml file you can see the above Description is added to the DisplayStrings section of the MP. This is the Result: To do more advanced stuff you need to add a KnowledgeArticles section to your XML.   So if you add the next section to the KnowledgeArticles Section: <KnowledgeArticle ElementID="My.Custom.Reporting.Report" Visible="true">           <MamlContent>             <maml:section xmlns:maml="http://schemas.microsoft.com/maml/2004/10">               <maml:title>Summary</maml:title>               <maml:para>                 <maml:ui>How does this report work?</maml:ui>               </maml:para>               <maml:para>This report shows the next items:</maml:para>               <maml:list>                 <maml:listItem>                   <maml:para>Item 1</maml:para>                 </maml:listItem>               </maml:list>               <maml:para />               <maml:para>The report finds data if the objects supplied are of type</maml:para>               <maml:para>Exampe type</maml:para>               <maml:para>Search for objects on blabla</maml:para>               <maml:para />               <maml:para>The report displays for every selected object a separate chart. Data is aggregated to days of a month.</maml:para>               <maml:para>                 <maml:ui>How to use this report?</maml:ui>               </maml:para>               <maml:para>When run from the Reporting space:</maml:para>               <maml:para>The second column in the search results shows of which type the displayed objects are. Make sure you select objects of type blabla.</maml:para>               <maml:para />               <maml:para>When run from the Monitoring space:</maml:para>               <maml:para>Create a state view or performance view by choosing the blabla type.</maml:para>               <maml:para />               <maml:para>                 <maml:ui>What Parameters are offered?</maml:ui>               </maml:para>               <maml:para>Date/Time selection: Allows selecting a relative or fixed date and time range and time zone.</maml:para>               <maml:para>Object: Allows adding objects to run this report for</maml:para>               <maml:para />             </maml:section>           </MamlContent>         </KnowledgeArticle>   This will be the result in the OpsMgr Console Report Description:

So you finally created that super cool custom report in OpsMgr and you want to add all the info necessary to run the report correctly. But how do you do that? If you use the MP Authoring Tool you have the option to add a Description. If you open the MP xml file you can see the above Description is added to the DisplayStrings section of the MP. This is the Result: To do more advanced stuff you need to add a KnowledgeArticles section to your XML.   So if you add the next section to the KnowledgeArticles Section: <KnowledgeArticle ElementID="My.Custom.Reporting.Report" Visible="true">           <MamlContent>             <maml:section xmlns:maml="http://schemas.microsoft.com/maml/2004/10">               <maml:title>Summary</maml:title>               <maml:para>                 <maml:ui>How does this report work?</maml:ui>               </maml:para>               <maml:para>This report shows the next items:</maml:para>               <maml:list>                 <maml:listItem>                   <maml:para>Item 1</maml:para>                 </maml:listItem>               </maml:list>               <maml:para />               <maml:para>The report finds data if the objects supplied are of type</maml:para>               <maml:para>Exampe type</maml:para>               <maml:para>Search for objects on blabla</maml:para>               <maml:para />               <maml:para>The report displays for every selected object a separate chart. Data is aggregated to days of a month.</maml:para>               <maml:para>                 <maml:ui>How to use this report?</maml:ui>               </maml:para>               <maml:para>When run from the Reporting space:</maml:para>               <maml:para>The second column in the search results shows of which type the displayed objects are. Make sure you select objects of type blabla.</maml:para>               <maml:para />               <maml:para>When run from the Monitoring space:</maml:para>               <maml:para>Create a state view or performance view by choosing the blabla type.</maml:para>               <maml:para />               <maml:para>                 <maml:ui>What Parameters are offered?</maml:ui>               </maml:para>               <maml:para>Date/Time selection: Allows selecting a relative or fixed date and time range and time zone.</maml:para>               <maml:para>Object: Allows adding objects to run this report for</maml:para>               <maml:para />             </maml:section>           </MamlContent>         </KnowledgeArticle>   This will be the result in the OpsMgr Console Report Description:

Source: OpsManJam This time in “Tech Talk”: “Managing noise with your management pack. A frequent complaint heard regarding management packs is that once it is deployed in an environment, it is too noisy! In this article, we cover all aspects of “noise” – what noise is, some common sources of noise, and how to make sure that your management pack is not noisy.” Read more here.

Source: OpsManJam This time in “Tech Talk”: “Managing noise with your management pack. A frequent complaint heard regarding management packs is that once it is deployed in an environment, it is too noisy! In this article, we cover all aspects of “noise” – what noise is, some common sources of noise, and how to make sure that your management pack is not noisy.” Read more here.

Source: MOMTeam Maybe you have missed the blog post from Chris Fox about The Partner Pack Newsletter on the MOMTeam blog. What is  The Partner Pack?  The Partner Pack is a bi-weekly newsletter that  focuses on topical subjects related to Management Pack best practices.   Started by the System Center Operations  Manager team at Microsoft, this newsletter has been a way of building awareness of and interest  in management packs across many teams at Microsoft. It is part of a much larger effort across  the company to bring focus to the concepts of manageability and management packs. What  initially started out as a relatively small operation has rapidly grown into a wealth of knowledge  available company-wide about the topic of MP authoring through technical guidance, best  practices, one-on-one consulting, training sessions, and more.   As measures of the momentum that this program  is gaining, we are excited to take what we have learned with internal MP development, and  engage with our partner teams with the mission of growing our MP community as a whole to  develop management packs that are beneficial for customers. This newsletter provides a  glimpse into the world of management packs by  providing in-depth technical content, happenings and highlights in the MP world, and more! Take a look at the OpsManJam website for the latest Partner Pack Newsletters.

Source: Gerben’s Blog On Virtualization “Veeam released a new version of it’s plug-in (Management Pack [StS]) for Operations Manager monitoring products from HP or Microsoft. The plug-in (Management Pack [StS]) is a significant add-on to the monitoring products in order to keep in touch with what happens in your virtual environment within a single monitoring solution. What’s new in version 5: nworks management center a new component that allows centralized configuration, load balancing and high availability for multiple nworks collectors Full (native) support for VMware vSphere 4 a business approach (reports) for the new vSphere features like DPM, Host profiles and Fault Tolerance Veeam released a short video at http://www.veeam.com/go/nworks5/ and offers a free trial for it’s new management pack. When would this be interesting for your organization? You have or plan to have a virtual environment You are a current user of MOM/SCOM or HP Operations Manager It completely integrates with the existing monitoring solution so no new or extra monitoring solutions which require additional training etc.. Especially in large organizations with critical 24/7 business applications the response to failures in the underlying infrastructure is a critical issue regarding service levels that have to be met. These organizations depend heavily on their monitoring solutions, not having to introduce new monitoring helps in reducing complexity for maintenance etc. Even smaller companies can profit from the plugin if they use the Service Center Essentials package from Microsoft, if not other products are in scope like Veeam Monitor (or the special SMB-package), but vFoglight from Quest/Vizioncore and vWire from Tripwire are serious candidates as well.” Read more at source.

Source: MOMTeam Maybe you have missed the blog post from Chris Fox about The Partner Pack Newsletter on the MOMTeam blog. What is  The Partner Pack?  The Partner Pack is a bi-weekly newsletter that  focuses on topical subjects related to Management Pack best practices.   Started by the System Center Operations  Manager team at Microsoft, this newsletter has been a way of building awareness of and interest  in management packs across many teams at Microsoft. It is part of a much larger effort across  the company to bring focus to the concepts of manageability and management packs. What  initially started out as a relatively small operation has rapidly grown into a wealth of knowledge  available company-wide about the topic of MP authoring through technical guidance, best  practices, one-on-one consulting, training sessions, and more.   As measures of the momentum that this program  is gaining, we are excited to take what we have learned with internal MP development, and  engage with our partner teams with the mission of growing our MP community as a whole to  develop management packs that are beneficial for customers. This newsletter provides a  glimpse into the world of management packs by  providing in-depth technical content, happenings and highlights in the MP world, and more! Take a look at the OpsManJam website for the latest Partner Pack Newsletters.

Source: Gerben’s Blog On Virtualization “Veeam released a new version of it’s plug-in (Management Pack [StS]) for Operations Manager monitoring products from HP or Microsoft. The plug-in (Management Pack [StS]) is a significant add-on to the monitoring products in order to keep in touch with what happens in your virtual environment within a single monitoring solution. What’s new in version 5: nworks management center a new component that allows centralized configuration, load balancing and high availability for multiple nworks collectors Full (native) support for VMware vSphere 4 a business approach (reports) for the new vSphere features like DPM, Host profiles and Fault Tolerance Veeam released a short video at http://www.veeam.com/go/nworks5/ and offers a free trial for it’s new management pack. When would this be interesting for your organization? You have or plan to have a virtual environment You are a current user of MOM/SCOM or HP Operations Manager It completely integrates with the existing monitoring solution so no new or extra monitoring solutions which require additional training etc.. Especially in large organizations with critical 24/7 business applications the response to failures in the underlying infrastructure is a critical issue regarding service levels that have to be met. These organizations depend heavily on their monitoring solutions, not having to introduce new monitoring helps in reducing complexity for maintenance etc. Even smaller companies can profit from the plugin if they use the Service Center Essentials package from Microsoft, if not other products are in scope like Veeam Monitor (or the special SMB-package), but vFoglight from Quest/Vizioncore and vWire from Tripwire are serious candidates as well.” Read more at source.

Source: System Center Virtual Machine Manager Alan Goodman: “Since the introduction of this feature we have gotten several questions/comments about integrating this new VMM feature with maintenance mode in System Center Operations Manager.   Well check out the attached MP.  This MP will monitor the VMM server and track when hosts are put into maintenance mode and then call into Operations Manager and put the respective host object into maintenance mode and vice versa, watch for hosts being removed from maintenance mode in VMM and then taking the respective host object in OpsMgr out of maintenance mode.” For those of you familiar with management packs, you can see with a pretty simple and straight forward MP you can easily tie together the states of your hosts.  While the MP has not been extensively tested it should give you a good idea on how to accomplish the task at hand. Installation Note:  This management pack is intended for use with Operations Manager 2007 or Operations Manager 2007 R2 with Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, and requires at least the beta version or later or the VMM 2008 R2 management pack. Read more and get MP from source.

Jeanie Decker Vlad Jonaovic have put together a mp template and guide for creating MP guides. Use this information to develop mp guides like Microsoft does.   Go to the OpsManJam website to download this guide.