Backing Up Unsealed SCOM 2012 Management Packs to TFS

Eric Mattingly — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 04:30:00 GMT

There are many different solutions out on the web for backing up unsealed management packs in Operations Manager. Most of these involved storing the backups on a share somewhere and usually still required manual intervention.

After using (and loving) the new Visual Studio Authoring Extensions I began to think about how I can get my unsealed MPs in TFS as well. This would then give me a one stop shop for all the management packs used in my environments. It would also give me an easy way to view the changes that were made.

The result of my daydreaming (and work!) is the below script.

This PowerShell script (although some might call it “C# in PS”) will sync any unsealed Management Packs to a folder in TFS. It works by exporting all unsealed MPs and then checking TFS for differences. It will do adds, edits, and deletes in TFS and check-in all pending changes.

Requirements:

This PowerShell script must be run on a server with the following installed:

Team Foundation Server 2012 SP1 Object Model
SCOM 2012 Operations Console

Use:

Script is at the bottom of this post

First things first, you will have to configure the script with the details of your environment…

Variable	Description	Example Value
$TfsUrl	URL to the TFS instance which will be used. This can be found by connected to TFS and viewing the properties of it in Visual Studio Team Explorer	http://servername:8080/tfs/projectcollection
$TfsFolder	Folder in TFS where the MPs will be stored	$/Monitoring/SCOM/Management Packs/Unsealed Management Packs
$ManagementServerName	The FQDN of any management server in the management group	CONTOSOMS01.contoso.corp.com

With that you should be good to go! The script does drop events which can be tracked. Down the road, Ill share a management pack for alerting on any issues.

Also, check back in the future for a post on the V2 version of this (Hint – This would make a nice custom Activity in an Orchestrator Integration Pack… )

Please provide any feedback on the script in the comments below. I'm always one to give credit to others for finding bugs or providing improvements.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Use of included utilities are subject to the terms specified at http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm

Missing Data in Operation Manager 2012 Dashboard’s Performance Widget

Eric Mattingly — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 22:10:55 GMT

One of my favorite new features in SCOM 2012 is the Dashboard. It’s a perfect way to surface SCOM data easily to a wide spectrum of people.

One of the first dashboards we created included a performance widget however we did not get the graph that we expected:

Why are the lines all funny looking?

To understand the problem better you have to first understand how the performance widget works. If you look at the image, I set my timeline to only the last one hour. Based on the introduction article - http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2011/10/04/widgets-performance-widget.aspx, this means that the data is being pulled from the raw tables in the Data Warehouse. The following chart helps to visualize this:

Time Range Selected	Source of Data
< 100 Hours	Raw Data
100 Days > < 100 Hour	Hourly Aggregate
> 100 Days	Daily Aggregate

So this means we were missing some of the raw data necessary to graph the line. Since I was not getting any alerts around failing to store data in the Data Warehouse I went to investigate the performance collection rule in the Management Pack. It was here I found that this specific rule was using the Optimized Data Provider and this was very likely the root cause. To provide some background, a performance collection rule (which is how performance data gets into SCOM) can use one of many data provider modules. These modules are in charge of reading and outputting System.Performance.Data data at a timed interval which will then get sent to the configured data sources (typically the OperationsManager and OperationsManagerDW databases).

The Optimized Data Provider is special in that it will only send data if the value delta has changed by a specified tolerance amount. An example of this is that if the % Processor Time\_Total counter stays at 5%, only the first instance will be sent and a configured number of instances will then be “skipped”. (I am putting this in extremely basic terms and glossing over some details, to learn more about this module check out - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee809318.aspx)

If you clicked through to the module description you noticed that there is a way to turn “convert” the data collection back to unoptimized:

The System.Performance.OptimizedDataProvider module type can output both optimized and unoptimized data. Unoptimized data results in a performance data item being returned once every specified polling interval. Use this when you want to collect every performance data value, regardless of whether the value has changed since the last polling interval.

To specify unoptimized collection, set the Tolerance parameter to 0 and set the MaximumSampleSeparation to 1.

Now that we knew we can “fix” this with an override, we had to figure out what rule the override will apply to. The easiest way to find the rule in the SCOM console is to open up a performance view of a server, right-clicking on the counter in the list on the bottom and selecting “Show or edit rule properties”

One thing to remember before making this change, this data provider is used on purpose as it helps to reduce the network traffic from the agent and the load on the SCOM databases. I would recommend not performing this override on all performance collections but only to a select few.

After the overrides were processed by the server agents, all performance data was being sent to the Management Server and both the OperationsManager and OperationsManagerDW databases.

Checking out our dashboard, we saw nice solid lines and no confusion for viewers!

Happy Monitoring!

Eric Mattingly's Blog

Backing Up Unsealed SCOM 2012 Management Packs to TFS

Requirements:

Use:

Missing Data in Operation Manager 2012 Dashboard’s Performance Widget