February, 2009

There are two issues with the recently released cluster Management Pack that you should be aware of.

One of the Windows Clustering hotfixes required as a prerequisite for the Management Pack has been removed from the download site because it introduced problems for customers managing clusters with System Center Virtual Machine Manager. The hotfix is KB article 958807 “Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering WMI provider does not correctly handle invalid characters in the private property names causing WMI queries to fail”. The clustering team is working on re-releasing that hotfix. The impact for customers is that they are not able to implement the cluster Management Pack until the re-released hotfix is available. Note that customers that are not managing clusters through VMM and have already downloaded the hotfix and Management Pack are not affected by this issue. It is however likely that they will need to re-apply the updated hotfix.

We will post information here when the updated hotfix is available.

Another issue is that the Management Pack may cause high CPU utilization on clusters with large numbers of resources (we’ve seen this on clusters with 60 and 80 resources). We are working on an updated Management Pack which will resolve this issue. The issue is with the “Resource State Monitor” which by default checks status of all cluster resources every minute. To mitigate, affected customers can override the frequency of this monitor. There is a fix being tested at the moment. Note that customers that are looking to implement the cluster Management Pack will also need the updated hotfix mentioned above.

UPDATED QFE NOW AVAILABLE:  4/8/2009:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f82ef6b3-a08e-4295-b9e3-fb78a74aefa8&displaylang=en

We have found a problem with the IIS Modules QFE and working on fixing it. In the meanwhile, the binaries for the QFE have been removed from the download site. The issue is in the setup code which causes the SDK and Configuration services on the RMS to be stopped and disabled. The setup code of the QFE may also modify the follow registry value on the RMS: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Operations Manager\3.0\Server Management Groups\<MG NAME>\IsRootHealthService to 0.

If you installed the QFE on your RMS server and seeing the SDK service and Config service as disabled, you need to do the following to resolve the issue:

1 – If the registry key mentioned above was modified, set it back to 1

2 – Enable the SDK and Config services to their previous startup state (Automatic, except for the case of Clusters which should be Manual)

3 – Start the SDK and Config services.

*Update March 10th - Please note the following key may also be impacted on any Management Server (non-RMS).  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Operations Manager\3.0\Server Management Groups\<MG NAME>\IsServer.  This DWORD value should be set to 1 for any Managment Server (non-RMS).  Thanks to Raphael Burri from the OpsMgr community for this additional information.

I just want to make sure everyone is aware of some recent resources that are available for the deep MP author.  These are really focused on authors who use the authoring console / XML editing to build MPs and want to understand some of our more complex module type library and how to use them.  The following resources are available:

Module type reference documentation (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd391800.aspx)

This documentation covers some of the most common module types many authors will use.  It is the first set of module types we have documented and more will come.  You will find detailed configuration information and examples of module type use here.  You can rate this content - please let us know if level of detail works for you!

Some new AuthorMPs tutorials (http://www.authormps.com/dnn/Tutorials/tabid/101/Default.aspx)

I have started to write these again and there are three recent additions:

1. Using property bags for multi-instance monitoring - this shows how to best use property bags in scripts and common mistakes made
2. Consolidation and composition - this shows how to use our consolidation module type and also how to build into a custom composition
3. OLEDB discovery - this shows how to use the little known OLEDB module type to query SQL without using scripts

There will be more tutorials up soon once I have some time!  Next up will be likely be OLEDB monitoring; typed property bags and then monitor type definition

For feedback on the authormps content specifically or to give me some ideas about what you want to see on the site please mail me at steve@authormps.com.

Enjoy

Steve

Apply - to participate in the "Operations Manager Public Beta" - https://connect.microsoft.com/SelfNomination.aspx?ProgramID=2249&pageType=1&SiteID=446

Get it - System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (Beta 1) - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/opsmgr/dd239186.aspx 

Tell us what you think! - Give us your feedback - https://connect.microsoft.com/feedback/default.aspx?SiteID=446

A beta of the native Exchange 2007 Management Pack is now available. To
request access to the Management Pack, send a mail to mpcc@microsoft.com.
The Management Pack is currently scheduled to release during Q2 of this year.

We appreciate your feedback.

The following features are new or updated in this release of the Exchange
Server 2007 Beta Management Pack:

• Equivalent Monitoring Coverage. This beta management pack covers the same
  core set of rules and monitors as the previously released converted Exchange
  Server 2007 Management Pack.
• Support for monitoring any number of Exchange Organizations using a single
  Management Group. There are no specific requirements imposed by this
  management pack for monitoring multiple Exchange Organizations.
• Full support for clustered configurations and Log Shipping scenarios.
• An extensive class model, showing the relevant Exchange 2007 Server Roles
  and components, as well as service-centric components, allowing you to
  measure availability or performance at the desired level of granularity. It
  also fully supports the Distributed Application Designer, allowing you to
  create custom Distributed Applications using the appropriate Exchange 2007
  components.
• Improved Low-privilege support. This management pack supports installing
  the agent with the minimum rights required by the Operations Manager Agent.
  This also enables the user to install the management pack in certain System
  Center Essentials scenarios
• Improved Tasks. The management pack includes a number of tasks that
  simplify troubleshooting and alert resolution times.
• Improved Topology Discovery. This management pack introduces a number of
  improvements to topology discovery.
• Improved Synthetic Transactions. This management pack improves the support
  for the Exchange 2007 synthetic transactions in several ways:
• All Synthetic Transactions that involve several Exchange servers (such as
  remote mail flow tests or Outlook Web Access (OWA) tests) are represented as
  Operations Manager perspectives that change state and can be shown in a
  state view. This makes it easier for an operator to quickly zoom in on a
  potential Mail Flow issue for example.
• The management pack supports a number of mail flow transaction types,
  including local, intra-site, inter-site, cross-organization and internet.
• Discovery of Exchange 2007 Server Roles are disabled by default, and no
  Exchange 2007 monitoring is applied by default. This allows you to discover
  and monitor your servers gradually, as well as tune the management pack as
  you bring more Agent-Managed Exchange 2007 servers into the Operations
  Manager environment.
  

Last year we released a whitepaper that details how to extract Operations Manager data and view this in PerformancePoint dashboards.

The original solution which can be downloaded here : http://www.microsoft.com/business/performancepoint/downloads/default.aspx contained sample data and scorecards to highlight the possibilities.

Thanks to some help from Ted Tasker at Microsoft we have now made this solution more production ready so it can be used direct against your OpsMgr DW.

Instructions to update the sample solution to the production ready solution are attached.

Daniel Savage

Microsoft and the Operations Manager 2007 product team would like to know what you think about the quality of Microsoft management packs for Operations Manager 2007. This community survey is your chance to rate the quality and features of several management packs to help Microsoft understand where they need to focus their time and effort to improve management pack quality. 

This is a short survey (only 9 questions) allowing you to rate the individual quality of several management packs, and communicate your thoughts on monitoring features, tuning effort required - everything that makes for a good MP.

The survey should only take about 5 minutes. We’d like to get your feedback by Monday, February 16th if possible. However, we’ll leave the survey open longer if responses are still coming in sufficient numbers.

Click Here to take the survey