MPAuthor

VSAE Video

Brian Wren — Wed, 08 May 2013 23:17:44 GMT

David Allen who is an MVP from Infront Consulting Group in the UK just completed a great video going through use of Visual Studio Authoring Extensions. David does extensive work in management pack authoring so I’m always anxious to share out any content from him!

http://blogs.technet.com/b/wincat/archive/2013/05/03/3570491.aspx

MMS 2013

Brian Wren — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:26:46 GMT

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 this year as I’m not doing a breakout session for the first time in ten years. Instead, I’ll be delivering an instructor led lab on Visio Management Pack Designer. Doing the session three times on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday so there should be plenty of space for people to attend. I’ll also be participating in a session on Thursday with Marcin Jastrzebski and Daniele Muscetta that includes new Azure monitoring and a good demo of Visual Studio Authoring Extensions. Plenty of other outstanding sessions this year including one on custom dashboards, and I’m looking forward to attending several myself.

I’ve had requests for another set of sessions like the full day marathons on MP authoring that we delivered at MMS a couple of years ago. I’m actually in the process of updating those materials and am going to get them recorded this summer. Those will go online so we can finally have them available for everyone.

I have some free time during the conference if anyone wants to talk about management pack challenges that you're trying to solve. I’ll be in the Expo most of Wednesday. Or just send me a message, and let’s work out another time to meet. Special bonus if we can work out a discussion over pints of Guinness!

Some Love for Visual Studio Authoring Extensions

Brian Wren — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 14:18:05 GMT

We announced Visual Studio Authoring Extensions back at MMS last April, and it’s now become our standard tool for building complex management packs. While we provided some basic documentation for VSAE, we’ve been lacking in a collection of exercises for building a variety of monitoring scenarios. In an effort to rectify that, we have posted a collection of new exercises in the Management Pack Authoring Guide on the TechNet Wiki. These are the same exercises that were published in the Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack Authoring Guide, but they have been updated to include VSAE in addition to the existing Authoring Console example. Just the exercises for building a Service Model (classes and discoveries) and a Health Model (monitors and rules) are available at the moment, but we will be getting the Presentation and Composition exercises updated as well.

In addition to the updated exercises, we have a collection of the completed management pack and Visual Studio project in the TechNet Gallery for you to download. There is a separate download for Service Model and Health Model. This allows you to have a look at what the completed exercise should look like and help troubleshoot any issues with your own work.

There are some other topics that we need to cover for VSAE such as how to create a management pack bundle and how to work with resources such as images. That content will be coming shortly.

Please also keep in mind, that this is a wiki. If you see any issues with our exercises or content, or if you think that you can augment them with some better content, then please go ahead and do that. As always, please send a mail to MPAuthor@microsoft.com if you have any questions or concerns. If there is any management pack authoring topic that you feel we have not addressed properly, then we want to know.

Custom Shape for Visio Management Designer

Brian Wren — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

We put out an article in the TechNet Wiki and the code for a sample shape in the TechNet Gallery for creating a custom shape for the Visio Management Pack Designer. My apologies for the delay on this since I showed a preview of this way back at MMS in April. Since the VMPD has been beta though, we had not finalized the interface for custom shapes. It turns out that there were some changes made that broke that sample. They were good changes though since it’s much easier to install that custom shape on a workstation. The example I showed at MMS required you to register your DLL in the GAC, while we now just need to copy it to a particular folder.

If you are interested in creating a custom shape for the VMPD then this should be all you need. We are planning on creating a project on CodePlex in the near future to collaborate on some custom shapes. The idea is to give you a base starting point for your own requirements in addition to giving you access to some custom shapes that you can use for your own management packs.

As always, please contact me at MPAuthor@microsoft.com if you have any suggestions on how we can improve your access to content that you need. I would also like to hear about custom shapes for the VMPD that you think would be valuable since those could form the base of a sample project.

System Center Authoring Hub

Brian Wren — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 23:35:00 GMT

I wanted to call everyone’s attention to the new System Center Authoring Hub on the TechNet Wiki. This is intended to provide a single location for all content related to authoring custom scenarios in System Center. We even have a vanity URL for it at http://aka.ms/scauthorhub.

This is meant to address two issues related to authoring content that we've been challenged with for some time. First is a way to better get the assistance of the community. The MP Authoring Guide has been well received and has been our definitive source of knowledge for technical content related to designing and writing management packs. The problem though is that it's not easy for us to readily update, and we have no opportunity for the community to contribute to it.

The second challenge is that there are a variety of technologies to automate Operations Manager and other System Center components, and they aren't properly associated with one another. A single monitoring scenario might include a management pack, a runbook, and some SDK customization, but we've left it up to you to figure out where all that content lives. In addition to that, we really don't have a suitable place to document scenarios that include multiple components.

Our vision with the Authoring Hub is to tie together all of the authoring and customization content across System Center under a single umbrella. We will still maintain deep content like the MP Authoring Guide as its own entity, but it will now tie back to the top level hub as opposed to living under the Operations Manager content as it does now in the TechNet Library. The idea is to put it alongside other content like the System Center Integration Guide and content that we will be creating in the future such as a proper Runbook Authoring Guide.

As you can see, this will involve a combination of new content in addition to moving content from the TechNet Library to the TechNet Wiki. We are in the process of moving the entire MP Authoring Guide and updating it to include exercises for the new authoring tools. I'll make sure to announce on our Twitter feed when we get significant updates out there. At some point when all the content is moved, we'll consider removing it from the Library altogether. New content and guides will be delivered on the wiki in order to maintain community involvement.

As always, please don't hesitate to provide your feedback and requests to MPAuthor@microsoft.com.

Retiring OpsManJam

Brian Wren — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 23:21:00 GMT

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 vehicle for samples that I wanted to put out into the public. As useful as it has been though, the time has come for us to retire it.

The primary reason that we created the site in the first place was because we did not have a suitable location to house content from the community. Since the time it was created though, we have some great resources on TechNet designed specifically for this purpose. We have the TechNet Wiki for providing technical documentation and other content, and we have the TechNet Gallery for providing downloads such as sample management packs.

The primary advantages of the TechNet sites over OpsManJam are as follows:

They are housed within the umbrella of TechNet which is Microsoft’s primary repository of technical information. OpsManJam is an external site making it more difficult to locate and to link to related content.
Community members can freely contribute content. With OpsManJam, no one can contribute content without going through an administrator of the site.
Community members can freely edit existing content on the TechNet Wiki. With OpsManJam, no one can edit existing content.
The rating system in the Gallery and the point system for TechNet contributors allows users to assess the value of content.

So what do with the existing OpsManJam content? I’ve moved all of my MPAuthor sample management packs into the TechNet Gallery. Just do a search for MPAuthor, and you should be able to find those. I’ve also talked to other contributors about moving their contributions into the Gallery so we should see those show up.

The Featured Articles section has a variety of useful articles that different people have provided. Ideally, that content would be moved into the TechNet Wiki, but that’s a significant amount of work. Rather than try to do that, I zipped them all up into a single file and made it available in the TechNet Gallery.

I’ve gone through other content that we have on the site, and it appears the majority of it is either out of date and/or hasn’t been significantly used. We’re going to go ahead and retire that content along with the site. If anyone knows of any content that you think we need to keep available, then please let me know.

I don’t have a specific date yet when we will pull the site offline, but I’ll announce when it goes We’ll redirect the URL to an explanation to alleviate any confusion. The current target is to have that completed by the end of the calendar year.

As always, please send a mail to MPAuthor@microsoft.com if you have any comments.

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Update 1/7/2013

OpsManJam is officially offline. The URL will bring you to this blog entry. Again, please send me a mail if there is any valuable content that we didn't account for.

New management pack samples – kind of

Brian Wren — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 19:41:54 GMT

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 repositories for samples and content including the TechNet Wiki and TechNet Gallery. So, if you’ve already seen these samples before, then don’t get too excited. If you never stumbled across OpsManJam though, then these should all be new to you!

Sample Management Pack - Business Hours
Sample Management Pack - Network Devices
Sample Management Pack - Working with a Property Bag
Sample Management Pack - Diagnostics and Recoveries
Sample Management Pack - Process Data Source
Sample Management Pack - Registry Monitor
Sample Management Pack - Linked Reports
Sample Management Pack - Cookdown
Sample Management Pack - Discovery

The new authoring tools are here!

Brian Wren — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 00:27:39 GMT

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 are now available in the Download Center.

Documentation for the VMPD and VSAE is available in the TechNet Wiki. Traffic there has been relatively slow since the tools themselves weren't available. We of course expect that to now change now.

Where is VSAE and VMPD?

Brian Wren — Wed, 30 May 2012 20:26:23 GMT

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 professional management pack development environment in Visual Studio. Response to the sessions was great, and people having been chomping at the bit to get their hands on them.

We had expected the tools to be available by now but have run into some delays in the process of making them available for download. I’m as frustrated as anyone else, as I can’t wait for people to get their hands on these tools so they can access the samples and content I’m putting out there and we can start getting some good feedback and collaboration.

The teams are in daily contact to get these tools out. I apologize that we don’t have an exact release date yet, but we are expecting them soon. I will absolutely have a post here the moment they are available.

MMS Samples Available….Finally!

Brian Wren — Wed, 30 May 2012 00:05:49 GMT

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 Demo.StoreApp management pack that I have used for the last few years as a demonstration of a variety of different authoring concepts. In fact, if you ever did a training with me, chances are that’s the management pack that we used in the class. The update adds an Orchestrator element to it with a recovery starting a runbook and other runbooks starting in response to alerts and health state changes. Those are the exact demos that I showed at MMS.

I’m planning on building on that sample in the future. Next will be a dashboard or two based on the health state and collected data. I also want to add other System Center components in there such as Service Manager.

The other sample that I put out is the Orchestrator Runbook Sample Management Pack. That one discovers and monitors Orchestrator runbooks. The Stores sample uses a write action module in this one that allows you to start a runbook from a management pack. All of the magic for that is in scripts that use the Orchestrator web service.