SolarWinds - too fast!

Hi, dear friends!

Some time ago I thought that it's specific property of huge corporations to be a slow and reactive...unfortunately this pattern also could be applicable for not so big companies (of course - not so small also). I'm talking about SolarWinds company - well known producer of cool monitoring stuff (and that's true - they do really cool tools and they really care about IT people!).
So I've found ridiculous forum thread which started in 2004, continues in 2009 and finally done in 2011...this thread is about external API for SolarWinds Orion. Some guy asked for it and realized that there was no API or SDK in 2004...another guy asked about it in 2009 again with high hopes "...This post is over 5 years old, so I guess I'll ask the question..." Ho-ho-ho! So optimistic! NOOOOO! They had no it in 2009...
SolarWinds must say their customers really big thanks for patience because they released SDK only now!

You can find this really-wanted SDK at http://thwack.solarwinds.com/forums/6/solarwinds-community/216/orion-sdk/29001/orion-sdk-information/

And you can read that sad forum thread there: http://thwack.solarwinds.com/forums/48/network-management/9/orion-network-performance-monitor/386/solarwinds-api/

Thank you, guys!

Manageability resources

Hi, dear friends!

I want to share with you rather interesting link to another manageability-related resource where you can find some presentations regarding technical and budiness sides of mnageability. For me it was very useful because it's given me more information to prepare very nice presentations on TechEd Russia.

Yes...I know - that site is russian only and it's rather confusing to refer it from this blog...but in fact TechEd Russia is a local conference like other local TechEd's (e.g. TechEd Europe or Africa...).

And very good news about TechEd - now you can see some of recorded presentations on TechDays site. I hope that you can see ALL presenations from all tracks there soon!
Please pay attention to my favorite presentation - it's from security track...this is a case when nice lady talk about security and 150 hardcore admins listen and applause! So - look, listen and applause - Paula Januszkiewicz and "Ten deadly sins of Administrators"!

Windows Azure Monitoring

Hi, folks!

Now we are all moving to the Cloud! Or to CloudS to be more accurate - public, pricate, IaaS, PaaS,... som many clouds, so many services. And what's new in the cloud from monitoring and manageability perspective? First of all - cloud distinguish manageability for cloud services and user's workload. I called it "cloud services" and "user's workload" because exact meaning of these substances depends on Cloud type - e.g. for PaaS cloud (like Azure):

Mobile Experience for SCOM 2007 R2

Hi, folks!

I hope that it's surprise for me only - not for you, but I've found that you can try mobile experience for IT Operations with SCOM 2007 R2. There are JalaSoft Xian Wings 2010 for System Center Operations Manager 2007! Check this product out! Right now they offer it for three platforms: iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile. Yes...looking to this platform I can suppose that it's rather old product (I can't imagine that somebody use Windows Mobile now :) and BlackBerry platform is also dead now).
Unfortunately I couldn't try it because it's not so easy to get evaluation copy of this tool. Also I'm not sure that JalaSoft is going to develop this deriection to support more actual mobile platforms like the latest versions of iOS, Android and Windows Phone. It looks like that it's not so profitable market or they didn't invested in marketing enough.
What we have now - just impressive screenshots:

...and some video-tutorial which explains these capabilities with more details. For me - it's interesting enough to start work in this direction because I believe that IT ops really needs powerful mobile solution to work with their IT infrasctructure - at least for monitoring (which usually related with some urgen actions).

How to extend your SCOM e-mails and...re-open vulnerability hole!

Hi, All!

Some time ago when trees was yound and skyes was blue Microsoft  SCOM allowed to send HTML mail notifications on alert. It was nice capability which allows send links to any web-consoles, better format notifications etc. BTW it was a security issue. What is the problem? Heh...it's very easy to create new fake MP which simulates for example SQL Server alerts and provide a link to fake admin console to IT operations! Very easy way to grab admins passwords.
In SCOM 2007 R2 Microsoft fixed it and now you can recieve ugly boring plain-text mails from your SCOM...no fun, no links, no colors :( but you can feel safe yourself!
At the same time some of IT operations really loved that capability and prefer to use it instead of be safe. For such brave guys Tao Yang propose workaround available by this link. There some PowerShell scripting and configuration actions but finally you can have your old nice formatted notifications...of course it's pretty safe because I can't believe that many IT operations will use it so it's not so interesting for hack...

SCOM: Incorrect rollup state issue

Actually I don't want to make this blog as an issue list of SCOM but...another issue which you should know - especially because workaround is already found. :)

Sometimes you can see that your rollup monitor (dependency or aggregate) doesn't change its state to correct one after all nested monitors already green. Sometimes you can wait about 2 minutes and correct state appears...sometimes you need to reset health of this monitor manually or reset Health Service (ouch really strong and ugly way).

Bad news - it's a SCOM issue and you can't prevent yourself or your MP users from this case.
Good news - Microsoft PFE Daniel Mueller found a workaround which is really better because prevent your from any "hacky" actions on your SCOM environment.
So follow this link and enjoy this workaround!

Good luck!

Bug in scripting in SCOM

In the DOS there is one unpleasant bug that manifests itself in SCOM. If one of the parameters contains quote, then quote will be lost in the end. What then shall we do?

We can use Enviroment Variables for transfer theese parameters.

Btgore transfer set variable in command line

SET param1=His name is "Bond"

In script read this parameter from enviroment vaiable

Set objShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

Set oEnvVars = objShell.Environment("Process")

Wscript.Echo oEnvVars("param1")

That all.