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 between more than one monitoring workflow.  ...

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.com/en-us/library/ff381335.aspx http://myitforum...

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 computer objects and it was a mistake, you'll...

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 computer objects. Instance groups containing other...

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 discoveries, rules or monitors should be sealed...

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 with using the wizard to create your service monitors...

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 right solution. To get state of all services...

Just wanted to post this management pack authoring link list for easy reference.  I’ll add new authoring posts to this list when they become available. ·         How to create a computer group http://blogs.technet.com/b/jonathanalmquist/archive/2010/04/28/how-to...

Have you ever needed to trend the growth of ‘something’, but no registered data source existed that could provide the values you needed to collect?  With the combination of Windows and all the applications it can host, we have countless performance counters at our disposal.  Even still, there...

In previous posts, I demonstrated how to create a group of Windows Computer objects and how to create a group of any type of instance .  These are the building blocks for creating even more sophisticated groups using expression filters, as I’ll demonstrate in this post. The reason I wanted to post...

We’ve all seen little nuances with some alerts that just don’t quite provide the information we’d expect to see.  One element that displays in an alert that we all want to display consistently is Source.  When possible, Source should always display (or contain) a computer name.  However...

This question has come up in more than a few conversations and threads, and in this particular thread I promised that I’d write a post to cover this. I think the fundamental reason why many are bewildered by the fact that we “cannot” write a script-based rule that directly generates...

I was having a blast with XPath today, and discovered an interesting little tidbit.  I was working on a custom write action which writes event data to the Application log.  Then another alert rule monitored for this event, and generating an alert which contained the event data in the alert...

I recently posted an walk-thru about how to create a computer group , so I figured a demonstration on how to create an instance group was in order. I mentioned that it is a best practice to create at least one computer group in your management pack in that first article, and gave a couple reasons why...

First, a best practice tip. Every management pack should have a group containing instances of Windows Computer objects.  This group should contain all Windows Computers that host some component of the application you are monitoring.  We use this group of Windows Computer objects for various...

A little troubleshooting tip for you here. You likely will not see this alert unless you’re authoring a management pack and didn’t get the alert description parameters quite right. If you see this alert generated by a sealed vendor management pack, there isn’t much you can do, unless...

UPDATE: Monitoring the operational database grooming procedure is now included in the SCOM management pack since version 6.1.7672.0. I will keep this post up as an example of how to create a monitor based on a script that queries a database. Often times we’re not aware of, or concerned about...

It seems almost inevitable that the Default Management Pack will become cluttered in time.  This primarily comes down to educating staff on being careful not to save anything to the Default Management Pack.  This is one of those "gotchas" in Operations Manager 2007, which we always...