Hi everyone. Just wanted to inform anyone that currently subscribes to this blog to add a new blog to your RSS reader. I will no longer be posting here. I’ve already added a couple of postings to the new blog, and have transferred some of the more...

I created a small management pack a couple years ago to help identify performance bottlenecks in an Operations Manager 2007 R2 environment.  It started with a couple collection rules targeting the core SCOM server roles.  I would then query...

I was reading the Operations Manager 2012 RC documentation today and thought this was interesting enough to put up here. For those of you that might need to save some time building out a lab or two, this can be handy. 1. Log on to the server by...

Thought I would do something useful while sitting on the airplane today and write up a cookdown example expanding from my last post .  This will be as straight forward as possible with mostly just screenshots of the steps I took to share a data source...

I recently did a presentation in which the scenario was cooking down a data source. I ended up created these visual aids in Visio on the plane. I hope they might help others out there understand cookdown. Other resources http://technet.microsoft...

There are a couple different ways to include a group picker list in your custom report. One way is to use the built-in report controls included in the SCOM reporting framework. Personally, I have found these controls to be tricky to implement and not...

This question came in today and Vishnu Nath, Program Manager at Microsoft, gave a very concise answer.  This made for an excellent blog post! “In Operations Manager 2012 we support monitoring of network devices that support SNMP.  Port monitoring...

This is a continuation of a previous post . The only difference is this accepts a literal expression, rather than a group system name. As with the other script example, there is no reverse action. If you specify a group that contains hundreds of windows...

It’s possible to leverage a powershell script in a composite write action to distribute credentials to a health service. The following example will distribute the specified credentials to health services instances derived from a group of windows...

/*Return all dirty aggregations in last X days*/ DECLARE @Days AS int SET @Days = 1 --number of days to go back SELECT DS.DatasetDefaultName, CASE SDAH.AggregationTypeId WHEN 0 THEN 'Raw' WHEN 20 THEN 'Hourly' WHEN...

/*Count dirty aggregations in last X days*/ DECLARE @Days AS int SET @Days = 1 --number of days to go back SELECT Count (*) AS [Failed], DS.DatasetDefaultName AS [Dataset], CASE SDAH.AggregationTypeId WHEN...

New article in the Exchange 2010 MP online library recently.  Read more about it here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff360301(EXCHG.140).aspx Taken from the article: Explanation This Error event indicates that end-to-end e-mail message...

Noticed I didn’t have an agent-specific one to reference – here it is. #Assign agents a management server failover list $primaryMS = Get -ManagementServer | where {$_.Name –eq '<MS1_FQDN>'} $failoverMS = Get -ManagementServer | where...

Just wanted to answer this question here as a pointer for later reference. But b efore I continue, I want to mention that this is from the perspective of SCOM. You’ll need to read documentation of your specific application before collocating your...

Here’s a fairly common stumbling block when creating custom reports, so I wanted to share this quick tip. Discovered inventory will stay in the data warehouse for 400 days, by default, at which time these items will be deleted.  In the interim, these...

Shortly after posting the sample Windows service monitoring library , I realized a “short” follow-up article was in order to explain how to use the monitor types defined in the library. First and foremost, any management pack that includes...

I was recently working with the Microsoft.SystemCenter.WebApplication.UrlProbe module and wanted to know exactly what I could pass through an expression filter and potentially include in an alert description.  It’s easy enough to get this after creating...

Sometimes customers need to create their own Windows service monitors. This usually leads them to the Windows Service wizard in the Operations Console . There is nothing wrong with using the wizard, but let me tell you about one of the drawbacks...

Occasionally customers will ask how we can monitor all services that are configured to automatically start on all agent-managed computers. This is a good question and one that does have some merit. I n reality, this can be a challenge coming up with the...

I find this especially useful in determining out of box heartbeat settings, since the default 3 minutes is almost never an optimal setting.  Without the information returned from this query, I generally suggest 9 minutes out of box (adjusting the...

Just figured out this annoying issue I have seen come up many times while saving Powershell script workflows. For some reason, I would get management pack validation exceptions when trying to save workflows in the Authoring Console. Note: The following...

Since we migrated to a new platform in May, 2010, there are more options for us as bloggers to customize the readers’ experience.  I was making some changes to my blog recently and noticed we now have a translator widget available.  Not sure...

If you see these alerts generated by your Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 servers with unusually high values, this is due to an issue with the RegQueryValueEx function , which is used in the Average Disk Seconds Per Transfer monitor. For Windows 2008...

/* RMS Unavailable History with Reason http://blogs.technet.com/b/jonathanalmquist/ 04-19-2011 Updated 04-20-2011 with outage durations dd:hh:mm */ SELECT ME. Path , HSO.StartDateTime AS OutageStartDateTime...

Someone asked today if there was a way to generate a report displaying inventory/configuration of SQL Server.  Chris Harris, SCOM Program Manager, answered the question with one of our built-in configuration reports.  He was so kind as to provide...