Gateway Approval Tool - What is the SiteName property for?

2010-06-11T01:23:00Z

Recently, a colleague of mine from an internal team at Microsoft pinged me with a simple question: “How do I find out what Site a Gateway belongs to in the OpsMgr Console?” I’m not a Gateway expert, so after consulting with my fellow testers Lincoln and Hui, I think we found a solution.

Gateway Approval Tool Command Line Options

The SiteName parameter is an option parameter to the Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.GatewayApprovalTool.exe tool. It can be used to give the Gateway an extra descriptor for what site / area the Gateway serves. If you do not use this parameter during Gateway Approval, there’s no easy way to go back and add it. You’ll not see the Gateway in the view that this blog shows you how to create unless you use the /SiteName parameter at the time of Approval. Look for instructions on how to add this SiteName after Gateway Approval in an upcoming blog post.

Example – Approve a Gateway for a “London” site and a “New Delhi” site

London

New Delhi – Note, we need to put quotes around the SiteName if the SiteName contains spaces

Now that we’ve approved our Gateways, we can install the OpsMgr Gateway bits on the machines. Once that’s done we can see them in the Operations Manager Console views. The trouble is, there’ no out-of-the-box view for Gateway SiteName.

Where’s the SiteName in the Console?

The Windows Computer State View doesn’t show the SiteName. It shows the AD Site name, which is not the same thing as the Gateway SiteName property we defined.

The Management Server View doesn’t show us the Gateway SiteName that we defined during the Gateway approval either. Again, we can see the AD Site Name, but that’s not our Gateway SiteName.

Creating a view to display Gateway SiteName

I’m going to use the Operations Console to create this new view. The first step is to give your view a name. For this example, I’m using “Gateway Servers with SiteName” as my view name. Now, that we have a name, we need a target for the view. We must target “Site Management Server” in the System Center Core Library MP.

Now we have the View Name and View Target defined.

To show the SiteName column in the view, we need to click on the Display tab and select the Site Name column in the Columns to Display list on the left. Once that is done, click on the OK button to save and open the view.

Completed View

Here’s our final Gateway Servers with Site Name view. We can see the Site Name’s listed in the list as well as the Site Name listed in the details for the selected Gateway Server.

OpsMgr R2 Web Console Web.Config settings

2009-11-30T23:55:00Z

I’ve had lots of questions about what things can be controlled by the Web Console’s web.config settings. Until now, there’s never been a central location for all of the settings, until now!

Setting Name	Default Value	Explanation
LimitMaxViewRows	200	Ever wonder why you only see 200 rows in your Alert Views or State views? The reasons is that we only show 200 rows by default. The higher this number, the more rows that will be displayed in most list / grids (Alert, State, Performance Counter Legend, etc). Since this setting affects many views, its important to keep this number as small as possible since the impact on the overall Web Console can be large. The more rows you display, the higher the load on the server hosting the Web Console, the RMS, and on the OpsMgr database. Setting this setting above 1000 is not recommended.
AlertsDaysBefore	7	We show only the last seven days of Alerts by default. If you retain more than seven days of Alerts and you want to see them in the Web Console, adjust this number higher. The lowest value this can be set at is one. Most customer’s do not need to adjust this. Remember, that even if you choose to show more data, you will still be limited by the LimitMaxViewRows setting
AlertSeverity	1	Ever wonder why you dont’ see the same number of Alerts between the two consoles? The reason is that we show Critical and Warning Alert Severities by default in the Web Console and we only show the number of rows based on LimitMaxViewRows. You can choose to show either more or less Alert Severities as follows: 0 – Critical only 1 – Critical & Warning 2 – Critical, Warning, and Information
ShowAlertAge	true	The ShowAlertAge flag allows us to toggle between showing alert's age and time in state. By default its set to "true", meaning to show alerts age.
PerformanceHoursBefore	24	If you need to show more than the last 24 hours of data in your Performance Views, you can adjust this setting. I do not recommend going much beyond 72 hours since that can result in a lot of data having to be retrieved and rendered by the Web Console.
ViewAutoRefresh	5	This setting defines the time a view needs to be inactive for the console to refresh it. Views will only be refreshed when no activity has taken place for the time period specified. An activity can be selecting of an item, showing context menu, etc. Most customer’s do not need to adjust this setting.
PerformanceLegendMax	45	This setting defines maximum number of selected items in performance legend. Most customer’s do not need to adjust this setting. If you do need to adjust it, I suggest adjusting it down. Graphing 45 performance counters at once probably isn’t going to tell you must in most cases.
TimeViewLoads	false	This is a debugging setting. Defines whether the views, context menus, and details panes should report time it took to generate these on the server. The time reported is not the entire time needed to generate the view, but it will be good indication of which views are faster or slower.

Now that we know what all of the settings, how do we change them? These settings must be added to the Web Console’s web.config. The web.config file can be found in the OpsMgr installation directory on the server hosting the Web Console, typically C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\Web Console on the RMS. It’s an XML configuration file that can be edited with any text or XML editor.

In the web.config, we need to add new nodes into the <configuration><appSettings> section. From the screenshot below, you can see that I added values for LimitMaxViewRows, AlertsDaysBefore, AlertSeverity, and PerformanceHoursBefore. I’ve changed my web.config so that my Web Console shows 500 rows, 14 days of Alerts, all Alert Severities, and 48 hours of Performance data. You can choose to add as few or as many of these settings as you like. Most customer’s just add the LimitMaxViewRows and AlertSeverity options since that’s all they really need.

Here’s a text sample that you can use to edit your web.config file with. Be sure to make a backup copy of your web.config just in case!

<appSettings>
    <add key="ChartHttpHandler" value="Storage=memory;Timeout=180;Url=~/temp/;" />
    <!-- Specify the name or IP of the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Server to connect to -->
    <!-- This is internal connection between the web server and the MOM server. -->
    <add key="MOMServer" value="YourWebServerNameHere" />
    <!-- Application config parameters related to error logging -->
    <add key="AuditEventLogSource" value="Web Console" />
    <add key="AuditEventId" value="10" />
      
    <!-- New Settings that were manually added-->
    <add key="LimitMaxViewRows" value="500" />
    <add key="AlertsDaysBefore" value="14" />
    <add key="AlertSeverity" value="2" />
    <add key="PerformanceHoursBefore" value="48" />
    <!-- End New Settings that were manually added-->  
      
</appSettings>