I have a quick update on the Schedule Maintenance Mode RESKIT Tool, also some information \ best practices.

Best Practices:

• Do not go beyond 20 Jobs scheduled.  Anything over this will start to place too much load on your Root Management Server
• Do not schedule more then 20 items in one Job.  If you need to go over this please create a group and target this.  Note: The MP has a bug that only limits you to select up to six objects.  I have attached an updated MP that corrects this issue below.
• When scheduling a group make sure to select system.group then select the group.  If you select the group itself the tool lists the individual group membership.

Known Issues:

• A common issue with our international customers is a date time casting exceptions or the schedule is not landing on the correct day.  This tool was designed and tested on EN-US only.  I cannot make any promises but I will look into extending this to support other locals in the future.  The work around is to install the Windows EN-US language pack. 

Given that there have been requests to support an ADMX format group policy file for Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM) I generated an unofficial one that the community can use for now. The ADMX file provided here has gone through very limited testing so please feel free to file any bugs in the comments section below.

Note that the ADM file format that the wizard provides will work on Windows 7 and W2K8 R2. Some companies have new policies in the place which require them to only use ADMX file types and so this is the stop gap solution for now.

For steps on how to configure group policy using ADMX files please refer to the article below.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd772705(WS.10).aspx

Once again please note this has not gone through a lot of testing and is a "Beta" version of the ADMX file for AEM.

Thanks

Satya

AEM-ADMX File attached below

I am pleased to announce the release of the System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Administration Resource Kit.

The System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Administration Resource Kit includes three tools designed to help improve the Operations Manager Administrator experience. Included: Schedule Maintenance Mode, Clean mom and MP Event Analyzer .

Feature Summary

The System Center Operation Manager 2007 Administration Resource Kit provides the following features to aid in management group administration:

• Scheduled Maintenance Mode - Ability to schedule and manage maintenance mode in the management group.

• Clean Mom - Helps remove all installed R2 components.

• MP Event Analyzer - MP Event Analyzer tool is designed to help a user with functional and exploratory testing and debugging of event based management pack workflows like rules and monitors.

The resource kit can be found on the Microsoft Download site here – Link

Quick Overview

Schedule Maintenance Mode is designed to use the Operations Manager platform. Due to this we are able to centrally manage Maintenance Mode instead of using a schedule task solution. Also, all information is stored in the Operations Manager database therefore no information is lost during a disaster if the database has been backed up.

You will find a detailed guide on how to setup and use this tool in the download package.

The tool provides the following features:

• Ability to schedule any type of object to be placed into maintenance mode in the form of a Job
• Group support including nested groups
• Automatically places Health Service Watcher in maintenance with computer
• Blocks RMS from being placed in maintenance
• Support for Run Once, daily, weekly, and monthly schedules (including complex scenarios like "second Tuesday of the month")
• Ability to cancel a maintenance Job where everything will be removed from maintenance automatically
• History Report
  

Screen Shots:

MP Event Analyzer

Scenario

David has heard from friends who have tested MPs for other teams that he needs to be really careful how he tests any Event Log based rules in Management Packs so that he is testing real events, rather than faked ones that may give him false positives.  David realizes that this tool can greatly reduce these false positives be enable him to both make sure that the events he triggers are as close to the real events as possible and that the Management Pack will, in fact, pick up those events.

He launches the tool and notices that there are two tab available to him; Validate Management Pack & Investigate Event sources:

On the Validate Management Pack tab, he is able to load in his team’s Management Pack and have the tool start to validate the different event sources that the MP’s rules are looking for.  In the left pane, he notices that there are a few event sources that the tool has not been able to map directly:

A few click later and the tool is ready to validate the MP rules and David is returned a score card of how his Management Pack maps to the events that his component may generate:

He is able to very quickly determine that a specific rule in his MP is looking for some events in the Event Log that will never get generated.  He quickly opens a bug to have the filter in that rule changed so that it does not look for an Event with an ID of 7015 as that event does not exist in the system :

To enable him to test this again in the future once the bug has been fixed, David right clicks on the rule in question and adds these Events to the Execution List:

Switching over the Investigate Event Sources tab, David is able to configure these events so that the real events are generated with his data:

Once his events are configured, David can use the MP Event Analyzer to generate these events in the EventLog to ensure that the Management Pack is, in fact, picking up the events and generating the appropriate alerts:

David can now save both his Event Execution List and Results and include them in his normal test reports.  He is also able to repeat these tests whenever he wants to ensure that bugs have been fixed and no regressions have been introduced.

As an added bonus, David and his team can navigate all the Event Sources on the system including Windows Event Logs, Crimson Logs, and Hybrid Logs to see if there are any events that could be added to their MP to make it more valuable to their customers:

With Event Sources that generate a large number of events, David can even filter out events:

Cleanmom

A command-line utility that enables you to remove any or all of the components of Operations Manager from a local computer in cases where the normal method of uninstallation has failed.

Feature Bullet Summary

1. Fast command line removal of agents.

2. Fast command line removal of server roles.

3. Removal of services associated with Ops Mgr.

4. Removal of registry keys.

5. Removal of Ops Mgr install directories and files.

Thanks!

Rob Kuehfus | Program Manager | System Center Operations Manager

At TechEd 2011, we announced that the OpsMgr 2012 Community Evaluation Program (CEP) is now taking applications.

What is a CEP

Many of you are likely familiar with Microsoft TAP’s, Technology Adoption Programs, where a small pool of customers partner with our engineering teams to preview and provide feedback on pre-beta software.  TAP participants provide our engineers with some early guidance and validation of next generation software, prior to us releasing publicly-available beta software.   TAP is a great program, but it starts very, very early on and usually fills up quick (and waay before beta).  The OpsMgr 2012 TAP has been very active in helping us with early builds, but it is unfortunately full.

The Community Evaluation Program (CEP) has recently been created to provide a broader range of customers with an in-depth experience with our upcoming beta software.

Essentially, a CEP is an organized way of bringing our subject matter experts (SMEs) from our product teams, our community (like MVPs and experienced users) and those interested in taking a deep look at our v.Next software for evaluation and preparation for deployment purposes.

About the OpsMgr 2012 CEP

Starting around the time of public-beta, the OM12 CEP will offer private and focused topic discussions, whereby the entire enrolled community will all look at one key feature/enhancement at a time.   This will give you, as enrolled participants, not only in-depth insight to the new OM12 features, but also access to the community of SMEs who can help you get the most out of Operations Manager 2012 (and 2007 R2 in some cases).

We are taking enrollment applications now, and will kick off the community reach-outs as we get a little closer to the public beta release.

We’ll start off looking at some of the features that you have heard a lot about so far, such as Network Monitoring or Application Monitoring.  Then, we’ll dig into some of the new topology changes, as well as upgrade scenarios, and then just keep looking at different facets of OpsMgr 2012 moving forward.

How do I apply

Information on all of the System Center and ForeFront CEP offerings is available here

For an overview of the Operations Manager 2012 CEP, take a look at the OM12 CEP overview datasheet.

For questions on the OpsMgr 2012 CEP itself, you can send email to OMCEP@microsoft.com.  (no, we can’t yet answer ‘when’ questions)   :-)

Click here to Apply for the OpsMgr 2012 CEP

We will notify all accepted participants as to the OM12 topic schedule and how to access the CEP discussion forums later in June.

A note of special thanks to all of the OpsMgr 2012 session attendees at TechEd 2011, some of whom enrolled even during the sessions themselves!

Good luck and we look forward to working with many of you on OpsMgr 2012 !