So this is not a normal topic for this blog. I will be back soon with some more content but things are fairly busy at the minute in our development cycle! I wanted to share some news from our team (Windows File Server) about one of our technologies...

This is one of a few posts I will likely do on monitoring applications running on clusters using SCOM. This is one of the areas that does not get much attention from MP developers especially if their applications are not cluster aware. However, there...

SCOM provides rich override capabilities from the console so authorized users can override configuration such as thresholds, enable / disable or anything marked as overrideable. This allows customers to tune management packs as appropriate before or after deployment. There are times when people want to give some control of this away to the application or server owner and allow them to tune some settings at the monitored server.

This post walks you though the basic approach for using discovered properties for monitoring and refines this to avoid some pitfalls in real life.

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If you are using the Authoring Console and are having problems trying to install it if you only have .Net 4.0 installed please see the article below from the SCOM support team. http://blogs.technet.com/b/operationsmgr/archive/2011/03/10/new-kb-installation...

Did you know you can use any edition of Visual Studio to easily visualize and walk through the MP Schema? I got a few complaints when I removed the schema documentation from authormps.com that the diagrams were nice and they were not available in the...

This is more of a philosophical post I wanted to write based on some recent conversations I have had in my team when trying to educate some people on SCOM and management packs. There are different opinions on this and these are only mine. Feel free to disagree and feel free to post some comments if you do.

Within SCOM you have two overarching choices for monitoring – state based and stateless. Lets look at each and the benefits / drawbacks each one has and then I will get to the crux of things and why I think you should not try to force state based monitoring on something that you cannot really model the state.

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Seed based discovery is a reasonably common concept that is used in many Microsoft MPs. There are a few articles out there such as this detailed one by Dan Rogers. However I was trying to explain this to someone in my team recently and realized it was...

As I was moving content over from the old authormps, I was reviewing all the old schema documentation I had up there. This is really duplicated by the MSDN documentation which came after I started the site. As a result rather than porting this over I...

In MOM 2005 things were fairly straight forward. You had the concept of rules, tasks and responses. That was really it. There were some more advanced type of rules that carried state change information but this was for a small number of advanced MP authors...

This is a quick summary of the different module types available in Operations Manager. Again nothing new here just cataloging the old content from my site so it is easy to find here. Operations Manager uses modules to define workflows. Workflows are...

This tutorial shows some composition basics and uses a write action that we will use in a task to show this. The tutorial talks about the reasons you might want to consider composition and how it can greatly improve the end user experience.

A very quick run through of how and why to use an abstract class when building management packs. Full tutorial and completed MP included.

To go with the basic rule MP here is the basic monitor MP. Again nothing new, just good XML reference material.

This is a collection of basic collection rules and alert generating rules from a number of different data sources. If you are not new to SCOM, nothing to see here - move along please. More old content getting on the blog for historical significance! ...

This is a nice collection of discovery samples - again very old but should still work. The zip file has a set of small MPs which show some of the basic methods: Registry keys and values WMI Scripts - single / multiple classes Nothing...

This is a very old tutorial I wrote that is a good first step into the intricacies of XML authoring for SCOM. This talks about how you set up your XML editor pointing to a schema and then walks you through a simple class definition and discovery from...

Another old favorite topic I get asked about quite a lot. This tutorial covers two concepts and ties them together into an end to end monitoring scenario. First I introduce the consolidation module type and build a rule that does not use the module...

Another old tutorial I wrote. This tutorial and sample MP shows you the right and wrong way to go about multi instance monitoring when you are using scripts and property bags. If you are not careful you can end up running way too many scripts without...

OK first real post on this new blog. This is a set of tutorials and sample MPs I wrote a while back. This has come up on a number of threads recently with people trying to use scripts to query SQL. There is a better way! You can use the OLEDB data...

This blog is going to be the replacement for www.authormps.com .  Maintaining this site is quite an administration overhead and some of the content is old, out of date or now available on TechNet so I really need to scrub the site and refresh it...