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.  

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]

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.

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.

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!

Source: NEXUS SC: The System Center Team Blog Brad Anderson, GM of the Management Services Division, talks with us about his perspective on Microsoft's developments and directions in the virtualization and x-plat spaces, and where System Center fits in. He also talks a bit about what's coming in the months ahead. If you want a quick overview from the top, this is it, folks. Microsoft's Investments in Virtualization and Cross-Platform Management

Source: UGTV (User Group Television) Because of my Achillus Tendor Rupture I can’t do much except watching tv (the Olympics) or movies on my laptop. That's why  I stumbled on a webcast from the User Group Television (UGTV) in which Barry Shilmover demoes Operations Manager 2007 managing heterogeneous environments (Cross Platform Extensions) (07:15). UGTV (User group Television) for ITPro Debuts!