Our original plan for the MP Authoring Guide was to publish sections on TechNet as they were completed but not make the entire guide available for download until all sections were complete. We had quite a few requests to make the download available immediately...

We announced our new tools for building management packs in Operations Manager back at MMS but ran into some delays in making them publically available.  The wait is now over.  The Visio Management Pack Designer and Visual Studio Authoring Extensions...

The first management pack authoring video is now available in the System Center How Do I? Videos collection.  This walks through each step in the process to create a rule and monitor from a PowerShell script.  Detailed topics included in the...

We have a had a variety of comments about our lack of guidance on using MPSeal to seal a management pack.  I admit that we had pretty sparse information out there so the negative comments were well justified.  I just put up a new topic that...

I am going to include this issue in a video in the Discovery series I’ve been putting out (Script Discoveries is in the works right now), and we’ll probably get some more detail on this in the Authoring Guide.  I wanted to write up a quick blog entry...

Sample management pack specification now available in the OpsManJam Management Pack Library .  To everyone who attended my session at MMS 2011 last week, sorry for the delay on this one.  This is the document that I showed during that session...

Okay, so the name probably doesn’t invoke a lot of excitement for the more advanced crowd, but it was a significant missing piece in our documentation. The new Management Pack Basics section of the Authoring Guide is now available. This covers various...

The final section of the Management Pack Authoring Guide just went live!  New Sections This last section is called Presentation and covers Views and Linked Reports.  Views were something that most people had under control since the Operations...

We have new video available on the System Center Tech Center .  This one covers the basic concept of how to select a target for a monitor or rule and provides a couple of strategies for creating a new target if you don’t already have a suitable one...

I just posted a variety of management pack samples into the TechNet Gallery .  These are actually samples that have been on OpsManJam for some time.  We are planning on retiring that site in the near future though since we have more effective...

Many of you may be familiar with OpsManJam which we have used for the last few years to deliver Operations Manager content such as sample management packs and whitepapers. It has served us well for that time, and I’ve used it as my primary delivery...

It’s that time of year again!  I know it’s April when my days start getting filled up with slides and demos.  Yet another Microsoft Management Summit is upon us, and I’ll be flying off to Vegas this weekend. A little bit different for me personally...

The complete version of the Management Pack Authoring Guide is now available for download in Word as part of the System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Documentation .  This one is an update from the pervious version that was missing a couple of...

Linked reports allow you to create a customized report in a management pack with minimal effort.  We now have two new resources available describing linked reports.  First a new video describing the basics of how linked reports work and walkthroughs...

Some of the most common questions we get in the Operations Manager 2007 authoring world are about discovery. Given the different kinds of discoveries available, the specific requirements you need to adhere to in configuring the discovery data, and the...

At MMS 2012, Baelson Duque and I presented our new management pack authoring tools.  Visio Management Pack Designer allows you to create a complete management pack using nothing more than Visio.  Visual Studio Authoring Extensions provides a...

I’ve been pretty silent here on the blog in the last few weeks as I was heads down in getting through various milestones.  As we are starting to get some interesting things out there into the public though, I wanted to give everyone some updates...

Took me a bit longer than expected, but I finally got the samples out that I showed at my session at MMS 2012.  There are two sample management packs here.  First is the MPAuthor Stores Sample Management Pack .  That is an update of my...

The Windows Azure Application Monitoring Management Pack allows you to specify an application running in Windows Azure and have it automatically discovered and monitored. Creating custom monitoring for particular events or performance monitors beyond...

In our documentation for authoring Operations Manager management packs, we regularly reference the Management Pack Development Kit , mainly the Module Type Reference that includes reference documentation for the modules that are included in the standard...

For those who didn’t follow my old blog at BWren’s Management Space my name is Brian Wren, and I’m a Technical Writer in the UA team at Microsoft focused on management pack authoring in Operations Manager 2007. In my previous role as a consultant I was...

A couple of weeks ago, we published the new version of the Management Pack Authoring Guide which included just the Service Model section. Yesterday we published the Composition section which has a detailed discussion of how to create custom modules and...

I was just reading through a great series of blog posts by Oskar Landman on System Center Central on writing a management pack for a NetApp environment. This is an example of a custom management pack using SNMP. Even if you don’t need to monitor NetApp...

One of the real challenges that we have had in the world of MP Authoring is people locating technical information that they’re looking for.  I’ve run into several situations where people have asked me a question that is answered in some article that...

In my session at MMS a month or so ago, I mentioned a whitepaper that was been written by our product group on designing managed applications.  I am please to announce that this paper is now available for download (either Word or PDF depending on...