Considering all my work with OpsMgr management packs and my infatuation with PowerShell, it's surprising that I've never put the two together in a public forum.  I keep meaning to, just don't ever seem to get there.  I finally committed myself...

In a previous blog post , I explained how to run PowerShell scripts from a management pack. I honestly don’t remember why I titled that “Part 1” because I don’t remember what I figured that Part 2 was going to be. Turns out that using the native PowerShell...

This is one I've been asked about several times and am finally getting around to blogging the answer. The Distributed Application Designer in Operations Manager 2007 makes creating and modifying distributed applications quite easy. You can create a component...

The Windows Service template in the Operations Console lets you discover and monitor a Windows service by doing little more than typing in the service name. I was just talking with someone who had a situation where the name of the service includes the...

As promised, here are all the samples that I am showing in my MMS session on Command Shell. There are also a several samples I'm planning on mentioning but won't have time to show. Hope it's helpful. Given the length of the this, chances are pretty...

I was given a challenge recently to come up with a solution for an organization that wanted to suppress any alerts for certain computers and services during a particular time window every night. The particular set of objects and the times in question...

Well, it looks from my last post that I took about a eight month hiatus from the blog.  Fortunately, I've been doing a bunch of OpsMgr in that time, so I have a bunch of content to get out here.  Just a matter of taking the time to write it...

After 13 years of consulting, I joined the UA team in Redmond last August as a technical writer focusing on management pack authoring.  My initial focus is a new version of the Management Pack Authoring Guide which will provide background concepts...

The concept of what target to use for a particular rule or monitor in OpsMgr 2007 seems to be one that people are struggling with. The confusion is most prevelant among people who have had experience with MOM 2005 since the methods have completely in...

There has been some question about how to get properties for monitoring objects with Command Shell. I wanted to go into this in my MMS session last week, but I already ran out of time just trying to cram in all the topics I did cover. Shouldn't be too...

I've already explained how to work with WMI events in MOM 2005 in an article in TechNet Magazine . Most of the information in that article still applies since it covers the basics of how WMI events work and how to write a query to detect them. What has...

I recently help someone out getting a monitor working that uses the System.SnmpQueryProvider module in the System.Snmp.Library management pack to perform a query against an SNMP device.  They were getting back an error message showing some cryptic...

I’ve been getting this question quite a bit, so I thought I’d give a quick answer to it.  The question is whether we can use the R2 Authoring Console to create management packs for SP1.  The answer is that you absolutely can – with a minor caveat...

Obviously, /a great way to learn how to author a management pack is to look at existing ones. The problem is that most of the interesting ones are sealed so you can't read the file, and the Operations Console won't allow you to export a sealed management...

I just got done with my previous post on setting maintenance mode for a group of objects, and I happened to check Boris Yanushpolsky's blog . Bori's blog is an outstanding reference for various Command Shell scripts, and I have to give him credit for...

You may have noticed that all monitors in OpsMgr 2007 have an option called Reset Health. The problem you may have encountered with this option is that it doesn't do anything on most monitors. It will typically only work on monitors that were created...

I did a post bacin February 2008 on running a PowerShell script from a management pack .  This was prior to the native PowerShell modules that came with Operations Manager R2 and that I wrote about on a separate post .  The original information...

Just a few days ago, I mentioned that the new Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack Authoring Guide was going to be released "very soon". Sure enough, it's been posted at http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/4/d/74deff5e-449f-4a6b-91dd-ffbc117869a2...

My apologies that I forgot to talk about this in my MMS session earlier today. I did mention it to a couple of people after the session. Derek Harkin came up with an interesting method for initiating maintenance mode from an agent. No OpsMgr client of...

Andrzej Lipka, a fellow consultant in Poland, took my maintenance mode sample MP and added some interesting features. Have a look at the specific post here . I also added a link to Andrzej's blog to my general list since he has some great posts on OpsMgr...

I will be doing a presentation at the upcoming MMS 2008 titled Administrative Scenarios using the Operations Manager 2007 Command Shell. This is a bit of a departure for me since I've presented several times at MMS but usually on management packs and...

As I ran out of time in the MMS session, I quickly showed a script that listed all performance monitors and their thresholds. This came from the SharePoint Portal Server Management Pack Guide . The only change I made was to comment out the command to...

Attached to this post is a version of my sample application for Operations Manager SP1. This has the process monitor removed that relies on the modules in R2.

A bit wiped out after delivering four consecutive sessions on management pack authoring.  I'm impressed with people who made it through the entire five hours.  That was definitely not light content.  Seems like they were well received though...

I've been asked a few times where I got all the information behind the different management pack related posts I've done. I actually don't have any more access to documentation than anyone else. I come across this information through www.authormps.com...