The business need: It is a very common request to monitor a process on a given set of servers, and collect that data for reporting, or monitor it for a given threshold. One thing you might notice when trying to monitor some performance counters, is that...

This is a rare but interesting scenario… which can cause you to see and monitor duplicate objects (and get duplicate alerts) for specific types of discovered hosted objects that have a parent class which was upgraded from one version to another. For instance...

Or – How to use the <AllowProxying> XML item.   When you monitor the event log in OpsMgr, there is some built in security that the agent modules perform.  Normally this wont affect you, except for unique situations where events are logged...

System Center Central has published some really good reports – which will help you keep up with the health of your environment. http://www.systemcentercentral.com/BlogDetails/tabid/143/IndexID/73350/Default.aspx   Many of these are based on queries...

  Update 11/24/2010 – this MP has been superseded by a newer update:  http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2010/11/24/opsmgr-2007-r2-core-mp-s-updated-6-1-7695-0.aspx   This article is out of date.       The core...

Daniele Muscetta (Microsoft PFE) has published a VERY handy spreadsheet, which contains all the OpsMgr events and their descriptions.  This is a super handy reference when looking up events, especially when someone is verbally calling them out, or...

Attached you will find a PowerPoint slide deck that I used to present to the System Center Virtual Users Group meeting on June 11th. This discussion was looking at your management group overall health from a database perspective. There are many facets...

  Here is something that a customer brought to my attention, and is probably impacting you already.   They noticed that WMI on some of their Server 2008R2 monitored agents was consuming a large amount of memory – and continually increasing. ...

As a SCOM admin, I don't need to be an Exchange 2010 “expert”.  However, I do need to be familiar enough with the MP, and how it interacts with a live Exchange environment, to be prepared for when my company rolls out Exchange 2010.  SCOM admins...

  ****NOTE OpsMgr 2007 R2 CU5 is now shipped and this is an old article. http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2011/08/03/opsmgr-2007-r2-cu5-rollup-hotfix-ships-and-my-experience-installing-it.aspx       The Cumulative Update...

Tim McFadden of Microsoft PFE has updated the scripts for his “ SCOM Remote Maintenance Mode Scheduler 2.0 ” tool.  They now work with R2 and wont put the HealthService or HealthService Watcher into maintenance mode, as this is automatic in R2 and...

MMS 2010 was a blast as always.  We had some really good sessions on SCOM coming from the community and fellow MS PFE’s.  We also had a LOT of Service Manager sessions this year, with the long awaited RTM of Service Manager.  It is certainly...

I get asked this every year at MMS - “What should I do if I am completely new to SCOM?”   I wrote this article up a couple years ago in a forum, I have been meaning to publish it here so I can refer to it.   So you are completely new to SCOM...

Here is an interesting little concept of how to use OpsMgr. Because I have a lab, that is exposed to the internet over port 3389, I get a LOT of hacking attempts on this lab.  Mostly the source is from bots running on other compromised systems. ...

Something I wrote to get a report on tasks being run on the OpsDB, and their output: select tv.Name as TaskName, bme.fullname as ObjectName, jsv.SubmittedBy, jsv.TimeStarted, jsv.TimeFinished, jsv.Output, tv.Description as TaskDescription from JobStatusView...

This post is a collection of the most common issues and resolutions I see with the SCOM 2007 R2 Web Console:   Windows Auth on a non RMS.   The most common issue is typically where customers install the Web Console using Windows Authentication...

Today I was setting up a new lab server for SQL 2008 x64 on a new Windows 2008R2 x64 failover cluster. It wasn't exactly what I would call fun.  :-)  I imagine this is because Server 2008R2 released after SQL 2008 did… so you have to do a little...

Do you ever get script errors from a discovery scripts?  Or you aren't discovering something that you feel should be discovered?   There are many ways to troubleshoot this discovery process, this will cover the “basics”. First thing I like to...

We have several “Time” variables, to which you can add to a notification subscription format, which will include a timestamp of something related to the alert.  For instance: From: http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2007/12/12/adding-custom...

(Or – How to patch a RMS Cluster in 14 easy steps)   I had a previous blog post on this subject that I have since taken down.  This has been a “fuzzy” area really since Microsoft shipped OpsMgr 2007, mostly just because there was no official...

As you deploy the latest OpsMgr R2 core MP updates version 6.1.7599.0 which I blogged about HERE , you will probably notice a new script error popping up in your environment: Alert Description: The process started at 10:36:57 AM failed to create System...

  You may notice that there are actions you might want to take on an agent, that are grayed out and not available in the console. There actions might include: Change Primary Management Server Repair Uninstall See the below image for an example:  ...

The Microsoft SQL Server management packs for 2005 and 2008 will discover and monitor SQL 2005 Express edition and the Windows Internal Database by default.  This is often not desired, and causes a lot of noise in the management group, because these...

Jimmy Harper has written some really cool reports for making ACS data more useful, and these can be used as templates for creating your own similar reports.  Get them here: http://blogs.technet.com/jimmyharper/archive/2009/12/10/some-custom-acs-reports...

Normally I don't spend a lot of time blogging on MP updates… unless they are a really big deal, but since the MP catalog is not working as well with the conversion to Pinpoint, I will be blogging on these until it gets fixed: at least until we add back...