The core MP’s have been updated on their regular schedule.  If you are running OpsMgr 2007 R2 – you should update these as soon as possible.

You can get the update here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=61365290-3c38-4004-b717-e90bb0f6c148

I have updated my recommended hotfix page to include these here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2009/01/27/which-hotfixes-should-i-apply.aspx

Note:  If you have downloaded previous core MP updates with the same name – sometimes your browser will not download the new file and grab the previous one from cache.  I have had this problem many times in the past.  Make sure you delete your browser temporary internet files before you grab the new one.  Also make sure you validate once it extracted – you have the correct MP’s by date and version:

Microsoft.SystemCenter.2007.mp
Microsoft.SystemCenter.OperationsManager.2007.mp
Microsoft.SystemCenter.OperationsManager.AM.DR.2007.mp
Microsoft.SystemCenter.OperationsManager.Reports.2007.mp
ODR.mp

I recommend you download and extract the MSI and import these manually.

What's new and why do I need this?

(As always – read the guide – but here are some key highlights:)

• Added the “Agents by Health State” report which will list all agents, management servers, gateway servers and the root management server grouped by their current health state (i.e. unavailable, error, warning or success). For more information, see Appendix: Reports.

This is a cool report.  This report is filtered by Health Service Objects by default – to run this against ALL healthservices – ignore that…. and Add Group: Agent Managed Computer Group

 

Here is an example report output:

 

• Added the “An alert subscription has been automatically disabled due to invalid configuration” rule to generate an alert when an alert subscription is disabled due to invalid configuration, such as when the account that created the subscription being deleted.

This is super helpful because some customers have found they are not getting notifications all of a sudden, and find the subscription is disabled.  This will provide some warning about that condition.

 

• Added the “WMI Service Availability” aggregate monitor and the “Windows Management Instrumentation Service” unit monitor to monitor the state of the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) service (winmgmt) on agents. By default, the unit monitor samples the WMI service every 125 seconds and generates an alert when the WMI service is not running for 3 consecutive samples. These settings can be changed by using overrides.

WMI not working properly on an agent is one of the most common causes of alert noise and lots of MP failures.  This will give an alert, that is easily understandable… instead of trying to decipher all the “script failure” or “WMI failure” alerts for each workflow. 

 

 

This monitor also includes an optional recovery you can override-enable to restart the WMI service if this condition is found:

• Added rules to that can be enabled in place of monitors that require manual reset of the health state. For more information, see Manual Reset Monitors.

For customers who use product connectors, or whom do not like the manual intervention required by manual reset monitors – there are rules included now which create the same alerts as two manual reset monitors that have always been around in this MP.

• Updated product knowledge for some workflows.
• Changed the "Computer Verification: Verification Error" event collection rule to be disabled by default. The alert from this rule would only be generated when running the discovery wizard, when the user would directly observe that one or more computer verifications failed.  The alert is an unnecessary duplication.
• Change the “Collect Configuration Parse Error Events” rule to be disabled by default.
• Changed the parameter used for alert suppression for the following rules:
  •    Alert generation was temporarily suspended due to too many alerts
  •    Workflow Runtime: Failed to access a Windows event log
  •    Workflow Initialization: Failed to initialize access to an event log
  •    An error occurred during computer verification from the discovery wizard
  •    A generic error occurred during computer verification from the discovery wizard
• Removed alerting from the “Data Integrity” aggregate monitor and added alerting to its unit monitors:
  •    Repeated Event Raised
  •    Spoofed Data Check
  •    Root Connector Data Validity Check
  
• The Operational Data Reporting Management Pack has not changed in this release.  The version number of the Operational Data Reporting Management Pack was updated to keep the versions the same across all of the management packs in this package.