SCOM R2 RTM has been released to get it go here.  To find about what is new and for more information read this.

Just got a note about a new site launched by a few of the SCOM MVP’s.  You should probably visit it, register, and subscript to one or all of the RSS feeds that are available.

System Center Central

We are proud to announce SystemCenterCentral.com, the site to visit for “Everything System Center”.

SystemCenterCentral.com was founded by three System Center community members; Pete Zerger, Rory McCaw and Maarten Goet. SystemCenterCentral.com is a community initiative that will combine a number of existing Internet properties under a single community site and strive to become the leading community landing page for all System Center technologies.

As Microsoft continues to invest in its System Center brand, we feel that there is a need for a community site that focuses exclusively on the technologies included in this suite of products. Unlike other community sites, the motivation behind this site is to continue to give back to the community at large, one of the reasons why each of the founders have been awarded the Microsoft MVP title.

The official launch of SystemCenterCentral.com will be at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas, NV, the week of April 27 to May 2, 2009. SystemCenterCentral.com has a dedicated community area where you can check out the site, get more information or become a member!

At this time you will find blogs, where well-known MVPs will start blogging in the coming days, a download area, a community “pack catalog” and forums. Later in May, we will be launching a wiki and a ‘community feedback’ platform and other exciting features.

SystemCenterCentral.com is a strong supporter of user groups. We have the commitment of the following user groups to user SystemCenterCentral.com as the main landing page to find their user group and some of these groups will transfer their internet presence to SystemCenterCentral.com in the following weeks:

Atlanta Systems Management User Group, Microsoft Enterprise Management User Group (Denver), System Center Professional’s User Group of Jax (Florida), New York System Center User Group, Portland EPG System Center User Group, Northwest System Center User Group (Seattle), Windows Management User Group (UK), System Center User Group (Netherlands), System Center User Group (Belgium), System Center User Group (Malaysia), System Center Virtual User Group and the Powershell Virtual User Group.

We would like to thank our sponsors for making this possible. Both Quest Software and Microsoft are supporting SystemCenterCentral.com as Gold Sponsors and will be active participant in this new online community. By having them as gold sponsors, we are confident this will become the go-to, online community for all things System Center..

Also, we would like to thank Bridgeways and SecureVantage, who are supporting SystemCenterCentral.com as Silver Sponsors.

Not going to MMS, but still want to check out this new System Center community site? Go to www.systemcentercentral.com now and join!

Best regards,

Peter Zerger, Rory McCaw and Maarten Goet

I saw a few posts about this in the Operations Manager news groups and decided to outline the steps to achieve a report for Logical Disk % free space.  The steps I outline will show you how to set up the Generic report for “Performance” to report on:

· Particular instances (or all instances) on a server or multiple servers.

· Particular instances (or all instances) on servers in a group (maybe in several groups, but you would have to play around with the settings)

· High level initial views and charts of performance with several drill-down reports that can be subscribed to or saved to favorites (several detail reports nested in this report).

· Known issues (OpsManager Reporting) with large numbers, but this is a percentile report so you shouldn’t run into the funny looking numbers in the details for samples.

· Be mindful of the date range. All too often you might be running a report with a time range of from 9 PM today to 12PM tomorrow, but then the day changes as you are configuring the report or running the report, therefore it’s best to switch to advanced in the time range and select -1 hour, day, week etc). A messed up date range may return no results and no errors, thus causing you to think there is no data.

Here are the steps (if you have verified or know that the “% Logical Disk Free Space 200X” collection rule is enabled and not overridden, then you can skip these verification steps: 1 -3):

1) In the authoring pane select rules and change the scope to Windows Server 200X Logical Disk. Searching for Logical should limit the scope as seen below:

2) Once you are scoped to those targets look for performance collection rules starting with “% Logical.” Once you do that you should see the rules listed:

3) Ensure that they are enabled (should be by default) and that they are no over rides applied to the servers you wish to report on.

4) Open the reporting pane.

5) Select “Microsoft Generic Report Library” from the reporting library and then select the report called “Performance”

6) Open the report “Performance” and you should see the following:

7) Change the “From” field to something in the past.

8) After you change the time range click on the button labeled “Change…” and you should see the following:

9) Click the button “New Chart” and give the chart a label. In my example I have two charts and they are described based on what they are collecting. Make your Objects box look similar to this:

As you can see from above I have customized each chart name to represent what is being reported on (to some degree). I could have put a company name in there, application name, etc. Label them however you want, but make sure it will make sense to whoever is viewing them. Below are detailed images of the criteria you will need to select to build the chart. For the first chart I only selected two servers and their instance of C:\. I could have added all C:\ objects (on all servers), but for the example I show just selected two. Be sure you have the collection rule specified and that the specific instances match (I am not 100% certain if you need to specify the instance when you are selecting the object).

· Criteria for % Logical Disk Free Space 2003 for C:\ object on SERVERA and SERVERB:

· Criteria for % Logical Disk Free Space 2003 for D:\ object on SERVERA and SERVERB:

· Criteria for % Logical Disk Space 2003 for all logical disk instances on all servers in the Management Server Computer Group and Root Management Server Computer Group (you can choose other groups, but keep them to computer groups):

· Run the report and you should get a report that looks something similar to this:

Now you can drill deep down to get full details on all of your logical disks. If you need these reports for groups of servers, or just certain instances for your entire agent managed servers, then be smart about setting these reports up. Consider the amount of data you are requesting (instances/objects/time range) before clicking “Run Report”.

Last night I installed a Ops Manager SP1 agent on a Windows 2008 64x Server.  After the install I saw some odd errors and decided to investigate.  From what I saw, I decided to uninstall the agent and look for solutions.  There were several hits returned in my search for advice and one seemed to hold the answer I was looking for.  I brought this up to our internal teams, but there was some discussion around if the patches had to be applied to agents or not.  They wanted clarification.  Luckily Kevin Holman was there to save the day.  He informed us of the following:

MSFT will not support a SCOM SP1 agent running on Windows 2008 unless you have previously applied the OS hotfixes outlined in KB953141.

Which two are those? They are these:

952664 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952664/ ) The Event Log service may stop responding because of a deadlock on a Windows Server 2008-based computer

953290 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953290/ ) An application may crash when it uses legacy methods to query performance counter values in Windows Vista or in Windows Server 2008

So if you are going to deploy Ops Manager agents to a Windows 2008 server, then you will need to have these two OS hotfixes installed.  If you have deployed agents already and your Windows 2008 servers don't have the hotfixes, then apply the OS hotfixes (reboot may be required) and you will be good to go and fully supported by MSFT for this agent.

My blog post is intended to help you ONLY in regards to issues with Ops Manager AGENTS (not other Ops Manager roles - just for clarification).  Also, ensure that you have previously applied Ops Manager hotfixes for agent related issues: KB954903 and KB957511

For more information on Ops Manager related hotfixes please visit Kevin's blog.

I work in a shared Operations Manager environment so today I created a management pack that would contain all of my custom computer groups (I.E. Exchange: ASIA, Exchange: EMEA, etc).  The reason I did this is so that I can seal the MP (which would contain groups only) and apply any over rides from other unsealed MP's to my computer groups.

I created the management pack and then started to create my first computer group.  While I was trying to complete the creation of the group in the console I got this exception:

Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Common.UnknownServiceException: The service threw an unknown exception. See inner exception for details. ---> System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[System.ServiceModel.ExceptionDetail]: parsing "^.*(mcs|MCS).*)$" - Too many )'s. (Fault Detail is equal to An ExceptionDetail, likely created by IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults=true, whose value is:
Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Mom.DatabaseQueryModules.DatabaseQueryModuleException: parsing "^.*(mcs|MCS).*)$" - Too many )'s. ----> System.ArgumentException: parsing "^.*(mcs|MCS).*)$" - Too many )'s.
   at System.Text.RegularExpressions.RegexParser.ScanRegex()
   at System.Text.RegularExpressions.RegexParser.Parse(String re, RegexOptions op)
   at System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex..ctor(String pattern, RegexOptions options, Boolean useCache)

...etc...etc...etc...

The output was similar over and over again, despite the fact that I changed the criteria for the regular expression.  I found a post on the news groups about something similar (from Anders) and I tried the solution (bounce the SDK service on the RMS and run the console with the /clearcache switch).  This did not fix anything and I got the same error.

I decided to delete the management pack, to see if that was what might have been causing the issue.  I deleted the management pack and created a new one.  I created a group and saved it to the new management pack and it worked.  I am not 100% sure that the management pack was the issue, but once I deleted that I was able to create groups and save them in the new management pack with no issues.

If this happens to you, then I hope you will find this helpful.