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.

Favorite Tasks in SCOM - hidden value

It's really interesting when you find some valuable capabilities in product which you use every day. For SCOM it's really usual thing because of poor documentation :) And today I want to share the "Favorite Tasks" feature which is not well known but really useful for you if you have some often-used tasks. So, look - it's easy!

Step 1 - choose your popular task and right click on it:

choose "Add To Favorites" and click it...

Step 2 - go to any view (e.g. Alert View) where task target is available and enjoy - submenu "Favorite Tasks" appears in context menu!

So now you can enjoy you favorite tasks from context menu!

original article is published on System Center Central

How-to transfer override parameters from the unit monitor to diagnostic task

• There is a display unit based on Microsoft.Windows.TimedScript.PropertyBagProvider.
• There is a diagnostic TASK tied to the unit monitor, based on Microsoft.Windows.ScriptProbeAction
• It is necessary to pass the values of override parameters in the diagnostic task

So here we go:

• Modify the script monitor, so that it returns the value of its parameters

Call oBag.AddValue("Minimal Table Size", nTableSize)

Call oBag.AddValue("Minimal Fragment Size", nFragmentSize)

• After that, modify the default values diagnostic task follows

<TableSize>$Data/StateChange/DataItem/Context/DataItem/Property[@Name='Minimal Table Size']$TableSize>

<FragmentSize>$Data/StateChange/DataItem/Context/DataItem/Property[@Name='Minimal Fragment Size']$FragmentSize>

We all got those values of override parameters monitor for which there has been a change state

Also you can read greate post about DataItem from motitor context

SQL defrag manager

Hi, All!

Today I worked on crazy SCOM monitor to allow IT operations care about SQL Server database fragmentation level. Unfortunately SQL Server 2008 R2 MP still doesn'y provide any index or table monitoring. And the key issue for me was a correct and usable user scenario:

• what is a real critical situation which need attention of IT operation?
• what is expected reaction of IT operation for information about some high-fragmented indexes in some large tables? just go to fix it? or escalate it to DBA?
• how often this check should be performed (it looks like that it's not too variative metric :) )

...and on, and on, and on... questions! And I want to point that I've found product which could be used as a solution pettern here. It's Idera's SQL defrag manager - standalone application which provide powerful and detailed analisys and maintanence for SQL Server databases - first of all in fragmentation context! 14-days trial is available and I'm going to download it and try to evaluate the expected user scenario - may be it will be really good! :)

AVIcode in System Center

Hurrah! Finally System Center published AVIcode Intercept Studio as another System Center product: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/avicode.aspx. It's the first rather detailed news about AVIcode after acquisition. So now we can see that no "Intercept" anymore...now it's AVIcode 5.7....it's really funny that company become product...

BTW, I'm very happy that this acquisition happened! Congratulations!

OpsMgr: Deleting Cluster (Agentless Managed) entities after hosts have been retired

Hi!

Here is an interesting repost from System Center Central about clear decomissioning Windows Server Cluster from SCOM monitoring. It looks like that it describes pretty popular mistake of IT guys :) So, let's look what they offer to do (post of Pete Zerger):

The Problem

The company retired a clustered set of servers before I was able to remove the SCOM agent from them. They have been wiped and repurposed already, so there's no chance of getting them back.I am unable to remove the agents from the 'Agent Managed' list because I get a "Agent (hostname) is managing other devices and cannot be uninstalled. Please resolve this issue via Agentless Managed view in Administration prior to attempting uninstall again." There are cluster groups listed (as healthy, LOL!) in 'Agentless Managed' view that will not go away. I have right-clicked and hit 'Delete' and receive no error, but the entities will not delete.

How do I get rid of these entities so that I can finally delete the absent hosts?

How I meet Opalis

Hello!

Yesterday I started my activity related with the new System Center product: Microsoft System Center Opalis. This product is like a BizTalk but for Data Center Automation! It orchestrates actions across a lot of IT tools which are used in the datacenter. For example we can develop our own workflow which take some specific alert information from SCOM and than apply some recovery action using SCCM or something really more complicated!

The first useful links which are must-to-know for Opalis newby is the following:

1. http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/opalis.aspx - Opalis Home Page at System Center site. There you can find the official info about this product download trial version etc.

2. http://blogs.technet.com/b/charlesjoy - cool blog about Opalis N1 (author - Charles Joy)

3. http://blog.elmore.be/ - cool blog about Opalis and Integration Packs (author - Sebastien Morel)

Two blogs above provide a lot of integesting notes which could be useful if you want to develop your own workflows for Opalis, want to understand this solution better or develop your own Integration Pack (what is actually my case :) ).

Another interesting thing - you can find some sources on the Codeplex! Search by "Opalis" word and you will find comunity version of Opalis Integration Service and Integration Pack for the Active Directory.

XenServer Management Pack for SCOM

Hi!

SCOM platform becomes more and more popular out of the Microsoft universe :) I was very surprised when found in the news that the Management Pack for the Citrix XenServer solution has been released recently!

To be clear - XenServer is and open-source, Linux-based hypervisor and when Hermes Softlab decided to develop monitoring solution using the SCOM platform - it's a sign...sign which means that it's reasonable to build monitoring solutions for non-Microsoft applications and services using the Microsoft SCOM.

Of course they don't cover XenServer itself only - because it's not commercial and definitely can't bring any value to Hermes. They release MPs for XenApp and for XenDesktop solutions which are commercial and provide more interesting capabilities for datacenters.

It looks like that Microsoft was right when released cross-platform extensions for SCOM SP1 and then add it to SCOM R2 as an embedded option. Good decision, MS! :)

Icons sizes for Classes

Hi!

If you want to create your own images for management pack classes you should know image dimensions:
1. 16x16 - this icon is used in the details pane (e.g. in state view) when user choose specific object and in target picker (e.g. user create new monitor, rule... to extend MP capabilities)
2. 80x80 - this icon is used in diagrm view.

Pay attention that image files should be in PNG (or JPG) format - not old-school ICO!

MP to XML

Hi!

It's very often task for me when I discover third-party management packs to convert it from Sealed MP-format to original XML form. After that I can relax, open it in VS and review structure and code to understand how I should work with this management pack (yep...operations guide is just operations guide - not development guide :))
How to do it? Two options:
1. Use MP2XMLDumper tool which export MP from RMS directly to XML format.
2. User PS script from Boris Yanushpolsky which just conevrt MP to XML.

Option one is explained well there, option 2 is explained with some useful comments of SCOM MVP David Allen there. Review, download, convert and enjoy! :)

All-In-One SCOM VPC

Hi!

I've found nice article about deploying all-in-one VPC which includes Windows Server OS, DC Role, SQL Server and SCOM 2007R2. It includes some usefult tunings hints which might be useful!
http://ops-mgr.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3D3B8489FCAA9B51!2271.entry?wa=wsignin1.0&sa=947412494

This is a blog about manageability

Hi!

This blog is a reflection of my "technical" side of work and personal development. Now I'm focused on software manageability aspects and some other ...-abilityes :) So to start I want to share interesting link to russian blog about Microsoft System Center Service Manager: http://blogs.technet.com/b/scsmru/