Several years ago, a colleague of mine Steve Rachui blogged about a custom management pack template supporting the scenario of allow discovery of AD Security Group membership for agent-managed Windows systems. Recently I was working with this management pack for a customer and identified an opportunity...

So this is a topic I have been meaning to post in a while now and finally made the time/effort to write it up. This is a scenario that is not documented in the Report Authoring Guide for Operations Manager and I had to go through the reports in the Generic Report Library MP in order to find an example...

Today I published on the TechNet Gallery, a custom management pack for providing additional montoring of Exchange Server 2010 with Operations Manager 2007 R2 and 2012. The following new features are new in this release of the Extended Exchange Server 2010 Management Pack: Includes performance...

After a brief departure from Microsoft I recently returned and will be actively blogging again. I just updated the blog post - "Performance Optimizations For Operations Manager 2007 R2" to include guidance for Operations Manager 2012, so please check that out as I know many of you have been asking what...

Based off of a recognized demand, I developed a management pack that provides three key reports for Operators and Administrators to leverage. These reports were based off of queries developed by Kevin Holman and Jonathan Almquist and tuned to support these reports. The three reports that I have included...

Please Note: This blog has been updated to provide guidance on which settings are applicable to Operations Manager 2012. This blog post is based on questions that people who attended our MMS 2010 session BB23 – Operations Manager 2007 SQL Server Configuration for Operations Manager 2007 Administrators...

You probably have noticed that the MPViewer HTML exports for our management packs that were released “back in the day” have not been kept up to date, nor provided for new MP’s released in the library on the OpsManJam website.   Due to the busy work schedule of the UA team who manages the content...

As promised and avaialble for download, here is the Excel spreadsheet from MPViewe that I edited to provide a breakdown of all the Unit Monitors in the Active Directory management pack. While the attached spreadsheet is specific to Active Directory version 2003, it also applies to 2008. If you find...

As you are probably aware, the Deployment Guides that compliment each management pack released by Microsoft do not go into detail highlighting the configuration of all unit monitors defined in a given MP. This can be a challenge when you are working with a service or application owner where they want...

Last week on http://www.opsmanjam.com my Maintenance Mode management pack was published. However, shortly after releasing it I discovered a couple of bugs, one of which prevents maintenance mode from starting against your targetted set of systems (pretty bad bug) intermitently. I have addressed those...

I was recently e-mailed by a colleague regarding the maintenance mode PowerShell script that was originally released by Boris Yanushpolsky (found here ) that worked great for RTM/SP1, but was failing when executed on an OpsMgr 2007 R2 agent managed system. In addition, the script was designed to place...

It has been quite some time since I have posted anything of relevance on my blog. I have been focused on updating some of the management packs that I published a few months ago, such as: Extended Windows Server Active Directory Extended Windows Server System Center Configuration Manager OSD...

One of the new features of R2 that hasn't received any attention yet (at least to my knowledge) is how we changed the functionality of Run As Profiles. Today in Operations Manager 2007, you associate a RunAs Account for a particular RunAs Profile on a specific computer. Pretty straight forward and if...

Over the weekend I was able to make the time needed to wipe and load Windows 7 Beta, which I can say with much enthusiasm is stellar (really, I am not saying that because I work for Microsoft). Anywho, I installed the Operations Manager 2007 SP1 Operations Console and fired it up to see how it would...