Having been on the TAP program for Exchange 2010 I have had some experience with the beta version of this management pack.  MSFT released the Exchange 2010 management pack yesterday and you can get it here.

There are a few pre-requisites before installing this management pack.  Basically they are hotfixes that need to be applied to either your SCOM 2007 SP1 or R2 environments.  These are documented in the MP guide and information on how to obtain them are listed as well.  Be sure you get these and apply them to your environment before installing this MP.

MSFT also has a list of recommended additional management packs that should be installed, but not necessary for all environments (I.E. Labs, etc).

One thing that you will notice that is different for this management pack is that it will install a service on one of your management servers.  The RMS is recommended, but that decision is up to you.  This new service is called the Correlation Engine (reminds me of what HP does with it’s EVA systems using something called WEBES).

So when you install this MP you will see two directories for data to be extracted in.  After the install you simply import the MP (there are two mp files one for monitoring and one for reporting) and wait for discovery to be completed.

One thing to note, is that you must enable agent proxying on all Exchange 2010 agents in order for this MP to work (as well as have the service run as local system).  It might be a good idea also to verify that those agents did receive the hotfixes necessary before importing the MP as well as proxy enabled (both of these things can easily be checked by creating state views to display this data).

In the guide there is a warning that if you have the Cluster Management pack installed, you will be told how to exclude Exchange 2010 clusters from this management pack.  I looked through the guide and didn’t find those instructions.  I contacted the MSFT party responsible for the MP and he said that note should have been removed prior to it releasing, so if you see this and get concerned, then don’t worry it wasn’t meant to be in the guide.

As always, read the guide carefully before installing this MP and ensure you understand how alerts bubble up, and how components are discovered.  Overall the deployment was relatively simple and I am looking forward to seeing just how well this MP will manage our Exchange 2010 infrastructure.

MSFT announced a new connect site portal that will allow OM users the chance to give feedback directly to the OM MSFT team.  Register and start to use this new feedback channel today!

HTTPS://connect.microsoft.com/opsmgr

MSFT is in the process of doing away with the NNTP newsgroups for System Center Operations Manager.  Going forward you can now post questions to the new categories on the TechNet Social OpsMgr Forums found here.

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

Are you still using MOM 2005?  Has anyone approached you with this request? 

If you did, then I had this same question from our team who manages CA Message Manager.  They wanted to be able to get a real count of files in message queue folders, set thresholds on the number of files, age of the files, and create performance data for trending.

In the past I was using a old MOM 2000 script from a NetIQ consultant (Ugo Corti) to do this.  However, as we progressed more and more towards using MOM 2005 as our one stop shop for monitoring, the CA Message Manager group needed something a bit better.  This older script wasn’t going to work as they liked.

Knowing that there are great resources on the net for MOM 2005 (and SCOM) scripts I decided to check them out and found a great script by Pete Zerger.  The script I am talking about is called “ App Dir and Queue Monitoring (MOM 2005) ”.

I imported this script into my MOM 2005 labs and started testing.  It worked as expected except for the performance collection portion.  Performance objects were being created and collected, but the value was always “0”.  I asked Pete about this and he was very helpful in troubleshooting the issues I was having (despite the ribbing I was giving him about this old script). 

He wanted me to have someone else test the script in there lab to see if the results were the same, so as to rule out my environment.  So that brings us to Scott Moss.  Scott, like me, still has MOM 2005.  Scott, unlike me, happens to actually know Visual Basic along with many other things (like top 10 famous midget wrestling matches, how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop, etc).  So tonight he was kind enough to give me a hand with this issue and guess what?  He fixed it!  I could have said I fixed it, but I’d like to say I was his muse to get this script working.

Anyway, if you need this script and want the performance data to be processed and collected correctly by MOM 2005, then all you need to do is make a minor cut and paste:

Area of the Original Script that needs to be modified:



Area of the Original Script after modification:

Once you do this, then the number of old files in the folder that you are monitoring will be logged correctly in your performance view.

Thanks again to Pete and Scott (as well as a few others) for all the help with this issue!  If you haven’t added their blogs to your RSS readers, then I highly recommend you do so!  Also, you can visit both of them in Las Vegas next week as they will both be attending MMS.  Give them a hug for me!

This article applies to the MOM 2005 Server Base OS MP version: 05.0.3500.0010 (The latest version)

Tonight I was ensuring that specific counters were collected for CA Message Manager.  We monitor this application and the engineers for it wanted me to add any counters that MOM isn’t currently collecting.

After I installed agents I made some views for CA MM.  I looked at the performance data views and saw about nine counters.  I thought that was odd.  So I did some digging and found that in the MSFT Windows Servers Base OS>Windows 2003>Performance RG some of the counters I wanted to collect were there.  I scratched my head, because this was a W2K3 server.  So I checked the computer groups the RG was bound too.  It was bound to W2K3 Virtual Clusters!  Sweet!  Oh wait, not so sweet.  Why this computer group is even in there is beyond me.  I thought maybe I got drunk one night and decided to do some tweaking and broke it.  However, I checked all my environments and it was the same.  I downloaded the MP from the catalog, imported it with the option to OVER WRITE any changes to my MP and sure enough it was still there.

What does this mean?  That these performance measuring rules are not running against stand alone W2K3 servers.  It also means that someone didn’t QA the MP very well.  Now I have to go check all the other RG’s to see if there are MORE mistakes.

I know not a lot of people are still using MOM 2005, but just imagine if this happens in OM 2007?  Sealed MP targeting the wrong server class?  How fun would that be to fix.  My fix will be to remove the cluster computer group and add the Windows 2003 Server group.

Details:

Computer Group bound to the performance RG in W2K3 Servers RG:

MSFT needs to pull this MP, fix it, and repost it.  Otherwise, you need to do the right thing and change it on your own.  It’s up to you if you want to leave the cluster computer group in there.  I doubt you have to since your nodes are W2K3 servers.

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.

So I documented about this in the past, but had to revisit it and noticed I might have made a few mistakes <g>.  I will document this again and post it shortly.

In the past a lot of people wondered about this management pack.  How good it was for monitoring their HP EVA storage solution.

We have been dealing with this MP since it initially came out.  HP released the 2.3 version of this MP several months ago and it has fixed a lot of the issues we were seeing.

One issue we discovered with an older version of the MP is that a patch to WEBES on our EVA management servers broke feeds to our MOM servers with the WEBES Listener service.  I believe this is a known issue and well documented.

Now we are running the right version of WEBES on our EVA servers and the feeds are working as expected.  In the past you would have to add the "ghost" machines to a computer group, but that is no longer the case, as HP has enabled the MP to now display the server the alert was forwarded from.  In the past you would see the alert on your Management server and the details would show you which EVA system was broken, but now the host and domain appear in the console (remember the management server is raising these alerts via the XML feed similar to SNMP Traps that might be fed in to MOM).

So now when you import this MP you just have to add the management servers that have the webes listener service in to the WEBES listener computer group.  If you are not using SNMP to get alerts from the various hardware components on the EVA's, then I suggest you disable this RG as it might cause noise.

Outside of the default rules we have added a few performance collection and threshold rules.  I have also added a rule that looks for the DESTA service crashing, if it does crash, then it raises an alert and tries to restart.  Ensure this rule is running against the management server hosting the listener service.

There are a few other customizations I have done per the request of our EVA engineers and the MP has been doing very well.  The next step is testing it with a new version of WEBES that will be rolled out to our EVA boxes as well as testing this MP in SCOM.  From what I can tell this maybe a converted MP, so don't expect many changes in SCOM.  I will document all of this in more detail as I work through the deployment.

If you are having issues with the EVA MP, then let me know and I will do my best to assist you.  From what I have seen over the past year or so, you shouldn't be having any new issues.  The only issue you might have is if your WEBES service on your EVA's is not compatible with the listener service on your management server.

The other day I logged onto my management server to run some reports but when I loaded the console and clicked on reporting I got an error:

Loading reporting hierarchy failed.
The request failed with HTTP status 407: Proxy Authentication Required.

I had never had problems before and I wondered what had changed.  I thought it might have something to do with my admin id that doesn’t have a proxy id for IE.  I talked to my co-worker who shares the environment with me and he said he didn’t have that issue.

I had him shadow my session to see just what was happening.  Then I decided to check the IE settings (connections>lan settings) for this admin account. I noticed that the box for ‘Automatically detect settings’ and ‘Use automatic configuration script’ were checked and the proxy address was filled out.

I unchecked ‘Use automatic configuration script’ and went back to the console.  I clicked on the reporting tab and the reports appeared.

Not sure why this would affect how the console operates.  I hope to get an explanation, but in the meanwhile I know how to get around it.