AuthorMPs

Microsoft iSCSI Target 3.3 Released

2011-04-06T03:47:45Z

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 which is the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target. This has been available for production use use as part of Windows Storage Server since early 2007. Storage Server is a version of Windows Server that is available only as an OEM branded appliance. It has...(read more)

Your MP Discoveries and Clustering

2011-03-14T00:37:00Z

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 are things you need to consider for every production quality management pack even if your application knows nothing of clusters. I am not going to discuss the Windows 2008 cluster management pack that is available from the management pack catalog. This...(read more)

Decentralizing Monitoring Configuration

2011-03-12T04:10:00Z

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.

...(read more)

Installation of Authoring Resource Kit on .Net 4.0

2011-03-10T19:42:00Z

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-of-system-center-operations-manager-r2-authoring-resource-kit-fails-on-net-4-0-enabled-computers.aspx

Visualizing the MP Schema

2011-03-08T17:30:00Z

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 MSDN schema documentation. This visual documentation was exported from Altova XML Spy which is an awesome XML editing tool but fairly expensive. However there is an equally good way to view the schema using Visual Studio. First, make sure you have...(read more)

State Based Vs. Stateless monitoring

2011-03-07T17:48:00Z

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.

...(read more)

Seed Based Discovery Concepts

2011-02-25T17:01:00Z

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 not that clear exactly why and when to use it. I wanted to make sure I had a worked example to really illustrate this concept. There is also an alternative approach to consider instead of a seed but it does have issues so I wanted to walk through this...(read more)

Management Pack Schema

2011-02-25T02:24:00Z

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 am just going to point to MSDN instead. If there is anything not here then use the feedback comments on the MSDN site and it will get routed to the writers or post a comment to the news groups.

You can find the schema documented here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee533489.aspx

If you actually want the schema files to author against, you need to download the R2 authoring resource kit. After you install this you will find the files in the “MP Schema” directory of your install. You can get the resource kit here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9104af8b-ff87-45a1-81cd-b73e6f6b51f0&displaylang=en

Workflow Types

2011-02-25T02:04:00Z

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. In Operations Manager 2007 there are a number of distinct types of workflows that are used for different purposes. Some of these are loaded by the health service on the agent or server and are running continuously while others are loaded on-demand...(read more)

Module Type Semantics

2011-02-25T01:59:00Z

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 defined in management packs and distributed to agents and servers via the Operations Manager channel. Workflows can do many things such as collect information and store in the operations database or data warehouse, run timed scripts, create alerts...(read more)