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! :)