AuthorMPs

Microsoft iSCSI Target 3.3 Released

Steve Wilson [MSFT] — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 03:47:45 GMT

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...(read more)

Your MP Discoveries and Clustering

Steve Wilson [MSFT] — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:37:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Decentralizing Monitoring Configuration

Steve Wilson [MSFT] — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 04:10:00 GMT

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

Steve Wilson [MSFT] — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 19:42:00 GMT

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

Steve Wilson [MSFT] — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 17:30:00 GMT

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...(read more)

State Based Vs. Stateless monitoring

Steve Wilson [MSFT] — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 17:48:00 GMT

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

Steve Wilson [MSFT] — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 17:01:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Management Pack Schema

Steve Wilson [MSFT] — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 02:24:00 GMT

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

Steve Wilson [MSFT] — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 02:04:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Module Type Semantics

Steve Wilson [MSFT] — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 01:59:00 GMT

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...(read more)