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 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]

Today I got a friendly email from Markus Schneider about the general availability of OpenUMR on CodePlex. I was interested in this project but it was not open for public yet. But now it is and it looks very cool. OpenUMR (Open Universal Message Receiver)OpenUMR offers the capability to integrate agentless all kinds of monitoring solutions into Operations Manager 2007 R2 in a very easy way.A cross-platform script interface gives the flexibility to discover monitoring objects and to send event/performance data from remote. Basic IdeaThe basic idea behind OpenUMR is to combine the power of Open Source with the strength of Operations Manager 2007 R2. Open Sourcegives us the flexibility we need to handle the complexity that is caused by the individual needs of an enterprise IT environment. Life means diversity! - So we think the most efficient way to build up an effective enterprise Monitoring is to integrate existing System Management solutions instead of replacing them. In our opinion that's the most practical and successful approach. With OpenUMR we wantto develop a powerful interface that makes it easy for you to create a "Focal Point of IT-Control" with Operations Manager 2007 R2especially for non Windows-Components. Our wish is that OpenUMR grows by a strong community that improves the code, creates a lot of different management packs and eventmessage senders (OpenUMS) in all kinds of languages (Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP, PowerShell, Groovy etc...) Please, never forget - OpenUMR is only one more way to do things. Features10 Good reasons for using OpenUMR

 Native Integration  Decentral Administration  Remote Discovery  Event/Alert Management  Performance Data Collection  High Availability  Agentless Architecture  Fast and Simple  Open Source Free of Charge So take an look and let Markus know what you think about this new cool project.

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: 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: The Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog Visio MVP David Parker recently developed visViewer as a shareware program to encourage the use of the Visio document format with non-Visio users. Key Benefits Stand alone application for viewing Visio files without Visio Advanced search of shape data (custom properties) Create lists of data from diagrams and export to other applications Copy or print of any part of a diagram simply Purchasing visViewer is free for personal, non-commercial use.  If you should like the product, then we invite you to donate just $19 / copy.  This will ensure that the product is developed further, and encourage us to provide more tools to you. The following prerequisites are required: Windows Installer 3.1 .NET Framework 3.0 (x86) Microsoft Visual Basic PowerPack 1.2 Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Report Viewer If you do not have Microsoft Outlook 2007, then you will need these: Microsoft Office Visio Viewer 2007 Microsoft Office Visio Viewer 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1)

Source: Gerben’s Blog On Virtualization Veeam released version 4.5 of it’s nworks monitoring management pack and plugin for Microsoft Operations Manager (SCOM2007 and MOM2005) and HP Operations Manager respectively. The key improvements in this release are: support for larger VMware environments (more hosts & virtual machines) less vcenter processing requirements improvement on reliability, and better monitoring of critical events officially certified as VMware Ready Optimized focus on business, segmentation into line of business area’s by using custom attributes of vCenter in order to monitor SLA’s More info on Veeam.

Today I got an email from Mark Wolzak with the question if I could give some exposure to his newly created Maintenance Mode GUI based on PowerShell and Windows Forms. At his company there are several people who have to perform maintenance tasks in the monitored environment. Not all of them are familiar with powershell or the operationsmanager console. And there will be probably more people who have the same issues at their company ;-) That’s why he combined the agent maintenance mode script and the group maintenance mode scripts in a graphical UI so that people no longer need to be familiar with powershell or the operations manager console. And now he is giving his solution to the community. So if you are interested. Take  a look at his website and download this new Maintenance Mode GUI based on PowerShell. And in case you want to create a Shortcut to this script you can take a look at the Windows Scripting Guys how to do that.

Source: PRWeb “Savision B.V., the leader in Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager visualization, today announced the availability of a free version of Live Maps for Microsoft Operations Manager 2007. Microsoft Operations Manager administrators everywhere can now benefit from the extraordinary visualization capabilities of Live Maps v3. The free version is fully functional and allows IT organizations to create three maps of any type.” The free version of Live Maps may be downloaded at http://www.savision.com/free.

Source: Kevin Holman’s OpsMgr Blog Kevin blogged about ways to find the differences between different versions of a MP. After converting the MP’s to XML files he showed you could use XML Notepad or Beyond Compare to show the differences between the two MP’s. He ends with the question if you have some better/cooler XML diff tools to let him know. I found another ways of finding the differences but I don’t think these are any better, because they still doe not provide the summary in the context of OpsMgr. Ok, how could you find the differences between a MP? First you could PowerShell. PowerShell has a Cmdlet called Compare-Object. This Cmdlet takes two resultsets and automatically analyzes them. It then outputs only those items present in either one of the result sets. Steps: Export the MP’s to XML files Get the contents of the to XML converted MP files Run Compare-Object Cmdlet Complete PowerShell script $version1 = get-content C:\temp\Compare\version1\System.Mom.BackwardCompatibility.Library.xml $version2 = get-content C:\Temp\Compare\Version2\System.Mom.BackwardCompatibility.Library.XML Compare-Object $version1 $version2 But as said before I don’t think this would really be an improvement above the ways Kevin mentions. The second method is using Compare Sheets in Excel. First export the MP’s to Excel with the MPViewer tool from Boris and doing the comparison within Excel. I’ve found some great Excel tools from JMT Excel Consulting which have a Compare Sheets macro you could use to do the comparison. Only problem with this Macro is you have to select each Worksheet manually before you can do the comparison. So the question still remains do you better ways of finding the differences between MP’s with some OpsMgr context?

Source: System Center Forum Today I was watching the latest recording of the January 2009 SCUG Meeting and to my surprise I was seeing some info about Debugging Scripts which I blogged about some time ago.    So if you didn’t had time to join the livemeeting go download the recording. Below are the starting times in the video for each speaker so you can fast forward to whatever you like. 1:05 - Savision Live Maps v3 Demo (Dennis Rietvink) 51:46 - Custom Scripting and Script Debugging in OpsMgr 2007 (Pete Zerger) 1:19:45 - Top MS Support Issues for Operations Manager 2007 (Steve Rachui) 

Source: Everything System Center Operations Manager 2007 Subscription Tool is a simple GUI based tool that lets you enable and disable all notification subscriptions. This tool is useful if you need to do some major maintenance such as patches, upgrading hardware, redoing AD integration roles, or fixing a major problem. The real power of the tool is when you want to re-enable the subscriptions.  The tool will automatically re-enable all subscriptions using “Send notifications for alerts Generated after the subscription is enabled”. This will save you from sending out huge alert storms your notification subscriptions.   Read more on source.

SQL Nexus is a tool that helps you identify the root cause of SQL Server performance issues. It loads and analyzes performance data collected by SQLDiag and PSSDiag. It can dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend manually analyzing data. With the RML Utilities you can answer questions such as the following:

Which application, database or login is consuming the most resources, and which queries are responsible for that. Whether there were any plan changes for a batch during the time when the trace was captured and how each of those plans performed. What queries are running slower in today's data as compared to a previous set of data. If you think you have OpsMgr SQL Server performance issues maybe SQL Nexus together with SQLDiag and RML Utilities can help with performance tuning and analysis. Steps:

Download SQLNexus , RML Utilities for SQL Server, Microsoft Report Viewer 2008 Redistributable and PerfStatsScript from websites. Install Microsoft Report Viewer 2008 Redistributable
Install RML Utilities for SQL Server.
Install\Run SQLNexus by running sqlnexus.exe in folder where you extracted the zipfile. Connect to SQL server
After starting SQLNexus a new database sqlnexus is created.
Create a folder SQLDiag and Unzip SQLDiag script.zip file to folder. Open StartSQLDiagTrace.cmd and change configuration as needed.
Give SQL server service account full control on D:\SQLDIAG folder if you aren’t using the local system account. Start D:\SQLDiag\StartSQLDiagTrace.cmd. This script registers sqldiag as a service and starts the service with a template (both profiler and perfmon trace) Output is being dumped in D:\SQLDiag\SQLDiagOutput folder Remark: On a busy system quite some data can be collected!!!!. Watch your freespace carefully! Customer experience on opsmgr environment with 2500 agents 20GB of data is collected in 10 minutes. Have it running for 10 mins and then stop the SQLDiag service. Stop SQLDiag with StopSQLDiagTrace.cmd script.
Importing trace data by selecting File\Import in SQLNexus tool. Select Options and select BLG Blaster on Enabled and Drop Current DB before Importing.   Remark: If you are getting the Message PerfStatsAnalysis.sql doesn’t exist message. Just copy the PerfStatsAnalyis.sql file to the requested folder.
The Next Reports are available:

Via SQLNexus

Bottleneck Analysis Blocking and Resource Wait Statistics Performance Overview with subreports

Resource Consumption Unique Batch TopN Interesting Events

I want to thank David Scheltens for showing me how to use SQL Nexus and creating the PerfStatsScripts. References: SQLNexus http://www.codeplex.com/sqlnexus SQLDiag (installed default with SQL2005 and SQL2008) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms162833(SQL.90).aspx PSSDiag (to use with SQL2000) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa175399(SQL.80).aspx RML Utilities http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2007/12/18/rml-utilities-for-microsoft-sql-server-released.aspx

Source: System Center Forum Stefan Koell has released v1 of LogSmith for Operations Manager. LogSmith connects to your RMS and allows you to filter and sort events in the Operations Manager Event Log with ease - very nice for slicing and dicing the log quickly in large environments. I’ve updated my OpsMgr toolbox page with this latest tool. Read more on source. Haven’t tested it yet but it looks great! Update: Tested it and it's really great for OpsMgr Event log analyzing.

Source: Secure Vantage Weblog Secure Vantage has released an update to the ACS Resource Kit for the community. The ACS Resource Kit now includes a revised version of the ACS Disk Planning Calculator originally posted on System Center Forum, new database utilities for ad-hoc queries and advanced grooming, plus the ACS Visio Stencils previously posted on our blog. For more information and to download the latest version of the ACS Resource Kit please visit http://www.securevantage.com/Products/ACSResourceKit.aspx ACS Resource Kit v1.1, Contents ACS Administrators Quick Reference – ACS newbie cheat sheet of common commands and configurations ACS Database and Disk Planning Calculator – preplan online, offline and archive storage needs plus disk requirements for the online audit database ACS Database Event Analysis ACS Summary Stats - XLS you can connect to ACS DB for event load analysis Query Active Partition for Event Counts Query Active Partition for Specific Events Windows Security Auditing Reference List – List of windows security events, settings and common configuration items for Windows XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003 & 2008 ACS Database Utilities Groom Specific Events from Audit Historical Database ACS Noise Filtering ACS Noise Filter Guide My Generic Filter – Sample noise filter Filter Setup Kit – Auto apply generic filter sets after ACS installation ACS Security Event Creation Testing – Scripts to create events for over 50 audit scenarios ACS Visio Stencils – Microsoft Office Visio Stencils of common ACS components

I just stumbled on this video from Marie-Pierre Belanger about EMC Smarts and OpsMgr 2007 integrated solution. Benefits: Fills in network blindspot Discover Manage non-Microsoft Applications Extend Microsoft deployment managing other technology beyond basic IP Key Technology ingredients: Rich Discovery Cross-domain behavior model (eCIM) Root cause Analysis (code book technology)

Did you ever heard about Twitter? Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? More and more people in the System Center world are using Twitter as a means to communicate with each other. The latest in line is the The Manageability Team and according to J.C. Hornbeck why do they use Twitter?  “Well, the main reason is because while RSS and ATOM feeds are nice, with Twitter you can receive updates on your phone, via IM or on the web at places like Facebook.  It's much of the same information, it's just now you have more options on how you receive it." And what I would add is the great way you can respond to Tweets (messages on Twitter) by replying just like emails. I hope I’ve convinced you to start using Twitter. What are the steps to get started? Create a Twitter account here. Go and Follow people (following someone simply means receiving their Twitter updates) Who do I know which people I should follow? Here is a list of System Center/OpsMgr interested people I follow: rodtrent MSManageability MPNotifier opsmgr aquilaweb lazyindustries dani3l3 jpavleck wwwally bernardosanchez sstranger (me ;-)) Read and create Tweets. For reading and creating Tweets you can use the Twitter website or you can install different clients. Twadget — The Twitter Vista Sidebar Gadget Twhirl based on the Adobe AIR platform. And for Windows Mobile I use Tiny Twitter That’s it ;-) For more info on read the faq on Twitter. Most important twitter tip make sure that your Twitter settings say "get all @replies". Otherwise you only receive replies from people you follow. Warning! It’s addictive!

Source: Pavleck.Net I updated my OpsMgr Toolbox with a new OpsMgr Tool called OpsMgr Alert Closer from Jeremy D. Pavleck. It takes 2 arguments - your RMS and an optional comment to insert when you resolve the alert. It then connects to the SDK service on the RMS, retrieves all open alerts, then resolves them. And yes, it does ask if you truly want to do this. It’s in beta, so Jeremy would love it if you all could test it out for him. This is a perfect solution to handle those pesky alert storms and another tool in the box. I’ve downloaded it and I’m going to test it today. You can download it via my OpsMgr Toolbox link.

Source: Bernardo Sanchez Blog Yesterday I got an email from Jalasoft about Jalasoft and Savision team up at Microsoft Tech·Ed IT Professionals 2008 next week. Jalasoft’s Xian Network Manager Io and Savision’s Live Maps are both products designed to work with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007. Live Map’s elaborate mapping features give Xian users the power to create network aware topologies, business process and geographical maps of your network. Additionally, Xian Network Manager adds network devices down to interface level allowing you a detailed view of your topology so you can pinpoint exactly where the problem is located. “Xian Network Manager provides data and alerts; Live Maps brings it all together into an easy to understand graphical representation” said Dennis Rietvink CEO at Savision, “Customers who combine these two products with Operations Manager 2007 will be astonished by the visualization power.” Jalasoft and Savision can be found at booth E6 and E7 at Tech·Ed IT Professionals which takes place November 3 – 7, 2008 in Barcelona, Spain. So if you are in Barcelona check out their booths.

I got an interesting email about Netuitive SI. Sounds interesting. Maybe I should download their 30 day trial version and test it. Or does anybody else already has some experience with this (new) tool? Please let me know. Netuitive SI for Microsoft SCOM Netuitive SI helps Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) deliver significantly more value for your organization - and it makes life a lot simpler for busy administrators. The software replaces human guesswork with automated mathematics and analysis to deliver truly proactive systems performance management. Only Netuitive SI Automatically profiles your IT systems' full range of normal operating behavior - by the minute, hour, day and week Eliminates labor-intensive and error-prone manual setting of performance rules and thresholds for SCOM Isolates root causes and delivers real-time diagnostics Forecasts performance issues two hours in advance Eliminates false alerts; sends only System-verified Trusted Alarms®