Unified physical and virtual IT management for midsized businesses
If you've used Essentials 2007, you noticed that it monitored Windows, Exchange, SQL and Active Directory 'out of the box.' Essentials is able to do this because it come pre-loaded with management packs that encapsulate knowledge for how to monitor these applications. If you wanted to monitor additional applications, you needed to import a new management pack to monitor the application. Management Packs are available from a catalog, just recently moved to Microsoft Pinpoint.
In Essentials 2010, we added a feature to help you understand which management packs are needed to monitor the applications and operating systems in your environment. We call this feature 'Monitoring Configuration'. The feature detects applications installed or used in your environment, and then recommends that management packs are imported to monitor these applications. Recommended management packs are determined by detecting applications that are installed in the Essentials server domain using Active Directory LDAP queries and OpsMgr SDK interrogations.
When Essentials 2010 ships, it will include the ability to detect and import management packs for these applications:
Here’s a screencap of the Monitoring Configuration dialog recommending import of the Hyper-V and DPM management packs. Clicking the ‘Import’ button will import these packs, and any dependencies, and configure Essentials to start monitoring these applications.
You’ll also notice there are two options to be configured.
Automatic Discovery of new monitoring – this option configures Essentials to scan once a day for new applications installed in your environment that are not already monitored. If a new application is detected for which a management pack is not imported and available, you will be notified via a banner in the Computer workspace. Do not notify about MPs that I chose not to import – this option allows you to configure Essentials not to recommend management packs that you have chosen not to import. You can still import these recommended packs in the future; you just won’t be notified about them.
Microsoft can update the list of detectable applications and operating systems in the future through product updates, so that as new management packs are released, you’ll know that they are available and recommended,
One last topic; management packs are frequently updated. To help you know when there is an updated management pack available via the management pack web service. The screenshot above shows Essentials checking for updated packs.
When packs are available, click the link which launches the ‘MP Import’ wizard. Then select to obtain packs from the ctlalog. Lastly, select ‘Updates available for installed management packs’ in the View drop down to see packs that are newer version of packs that are already imported in Essentials.
We’d love to hear your feedback on this future – drop us a note through our forums: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/systemcenteressentials/thread/d9924697-120f-4a33-b945-28ddab7434e4
How to enable Auto-select for Microsoft Update (MU) subscriptions in System Center Essentials 2010
What is Auto-select?
Auto-select is a new feature in Essentials 2010 which improves the experience and performance of managing Microsoft update content. Essentials uses information collected about the software currently in the IT environment to automatically synchronize and download only the product updates that require evaluation. When the managed computers no longer need updates for outdated or removed software, those updates are no longer synchronized automatically and any existing packages containing outdated updates are purged. When a new computer or product is added and managed, auto-select feature automatically adds the appropriate category to the list of synchronized content. If the computer is not yet reporting to the server, Auto-select assumes that it runs the current Essentials management server operating system version, and selects the corresponding product on the Essentials management server. The Auto-select feature does not make any changes to update classification and languages; however, you can further limit or expand the content synchronization based on the automatic selections.
Value to Essentials customers
The decisions you make about how to synchronize with Microsoft Update can have a dramatic effect on the efficient use of bandwidth and disk space. Essentials offers you the ability to download only the updates which are based on your environment by enabling auto-select. It discovers exactly what updates are needed across the whole network. This can help if you are struggling to strike a balance between synchronizing enough updates from Microsoft in order to stay secure and synchronizing too many which can create a burden on the WSUS/Essentials server as well as adding complexity to the your other update deployment tasks. If you manually download too few categories or languages, then you might not be aware that some of your managed computers are no longer securely up to date. If you synchronize too many, you have to use extra command-line tools to purge the surplus content. Both paths involve considerable work on your part to achieve an optimal balance. Auto-select can provides confidence that you are downloading only updates for the products Microsoft supports in your environment.
How to enable Auto-select
After specifying the proxy server in the Configure System Center Essentials wizard, you can change how updates are downloaded on the Microsoft Updates page. To enable Auto-select, select the Automatically (recommended) option.
Note: When you enable the Auto-select feature, Essentials also configures Windows Update synchronization to be automatic. To change the Windows Update synchronization settings back from automatic to manual, you must first disable Auto-select.
How to see the selected list of products and how to disable Auto-select:
User can verify the products selections within a 2 hour window:
1. Open the Essentials console.
2. Click the Administration navigation button to open the Administration workspace.
3. In the Administration pane of the Essentials console, click Settings.
4. In the Settings list view, under Type: Update Management, double-click Products and Classifications.
5. Click the Microsoft Updates tab.
6. Select the Manually option, and you can see the list of products.
7. Do one of the following:
· To continue using Auto-select, click Cancel, and then click No when asked if you want to save changes.
· To disable the auto-select feature click Apply, and then click OK.
How Auto-select works
The updates database of Essentials (default name: SUSDB) stores all available product categories from Microsoft Update (MU) upon initial synchronization. Each subsequent synchronization refreshes the list in the database with the latest update categories. Essentials then evaluates the synchronized category collection, asking each managed computer’s update agent about which updates they need. Essentials then generates a manifest of relevant categories for each managed computer. Essentials combines and summarizes to distinct categories from all managed computers to represent the right subscription set/relevant categories and applies the completed list to the synchronization settings for Microsoft Update. This produces the same results as if each computer reported directly to Microsoft Update.
Thank you to everyone who has been using the Essentials 2010 Beta and RC. Many of you may have already discovered some of the User Interface enhancements we’ve made. In this post I’d like to share 9 tips and tricks when using the Essentials console.
Bonus Tip: Pete Zerger has blogged some of the shortcut keys available in Essentials 2010
The nice folks at ZD Net in the UK just posted their review of SCE 2010, based on the Release Candidate. Click here to read the whole review, but their bottom line was:
Virtualisation is definitely the big draw for SCE 2010, but there are enhancements to the other tools as well — not least the software update option. Based on WSUS technology, the changes here are aimed at automating the patching process in order to, for example, discover exactly what updates are needed across the whole network, set auto-approval deadlines and handle distribution differently on workstations and servers. There's also support for third-party update services and a clean-up wizard to help keep the update database down to a reasonable size.
First a note of “thanks” to our friends in the UK who looked at SCE 2010.
Its been an exciting several months since the beta was first released, and we are very pleased with the number of folks who have downloaded the pre-release versions. Its great to see all of the excitement around leveraging System Center’s management technologies in midsized organizations, so we are looking forward to releasing SCE 2010!
The monitoring capability within Essentials comes from Management Packs, and the majority Management Packs that work with Operations Manager also work with Essentials. This is great, because it means there is a wealth of deep monitoring that is available for Essentials.
During the Beta and RC period we’ve had lots of great feedback (please keep it coming), and some of this feedback has focused on the monitoring capabilities provided by Management Packs. This post covers the common feedback, and configuration changes to improve the monitoring experience for the following management packs:
There is an issue with the Windows 7 Client OS MP that will generate errors after the initial import of the management pack. You are likely to see 4 alerts that are very similar. You can dismiss the alerts and they should not reappear. The 4 alerts you are likely to see will all start with:
OleDb Module encountered a failure 0x80040e37 during execution and will post it as output data item. : Invalid object name
and then have one of the following:
These issues may be fixed in a future release of the Windows 7 Client Operating System Management Pack. When an updated version of a management pack is available you will see a yellow notification bar at the top of the Computers workspace in the Essentials console.
By default, if you attempt to view CPU Performance, Processor Queue Length or Memory in the Computers workspace for computers running XP, Vista or Windows 7 the graphs will be empty.
To show information for Client Computers you will need to enable the following rules for each OS:
To enable collection of these performance counters:
More information is in the Management Pack Guide.
By default, the Microsoft Exchange 2007 Management Pack will not automatically discover any Exchange 2007 Server roles, and no monitoring is distributed to Exchange 2007 servers.
Initially, the only discovery that runs automatically is called the Exchange 2007 Discovery Helper Discovery. It is a lightweight registry discovery that runs on all Windows servers. Its only purpose is to discover Exchange 2007 servers in your environment without actually starting monitoring.
To verify that Discovery Helper has discovered your Exchange 2007 servers
If no Exchange 2007 servers are discovered, you might want to make the discovery run more frequently than the default. You can change the frequency of the Exchange 2007 Discovery Helper Discovery in Object Discoveries located under Authoring in the Operations console.
To enable Exchange 2007 Server Role Discovery
Discovery Name
Description
Exchange 2007 CCR Clustered Mailbox Server Role Discovery
Discovers CCR and SCC clustered Mailbox servers
Exchange 2007 CCR Node Role Discovery
Discovers CCR node servers in a CCR cluster (the physical nodes)
Exchange 2007 Standalone CCR Node Discovery
Discovers standalone CCR node roles (nodes that are participating in log shipping but are not part of an active Mailbox server) and standalone mailbox roles
Exchange 2007 CAS Role Discovery
Discovers Client Access server roles
Exchange 2007 Hub Transport Role Discovery
Discovers Hub Transport server roles
Exchange 2007 Edge Role Discovery
Discovers Edge Transport server roles
Exchange 2007 UM Role Discovery
Discovers Unified Messaging (UM) roles
For example, to enable discovery of all Hub Transport servers, right-click the Exchange 2007 Hub Transport Role Discovery and select Overrides\Enable the Object Discovery\for all objects of type Exchange 2007 Discovery Helper. If you want, you can choose to discover servers using a group (containing Exchange 2007 Discovery Helper instances) or a single instance of Exchange 2007 Discovery Helper. It is also possible to use a group containing the computer objects of the Exchange servers.
More information is in the Management Pack Guide and also on the Operations Manager blog.
Importing the Exchange 2010 Management Pack on the Release Candidate of Essentials 2010 will cause the following alert to be generated:
Critical hotfixes required for reliable operation of the Exchange Server 2010 and other management packs are not installed on this server. Please see the appropriate KB article for more information, and to download the required hotfix.
The hotfixes referred to by this alert are included in the released version of Essentials 2010.
These updates resolve issues affecting state rollup using dependency monitors. These updates allow the Exchange Server 2010 Management Pack to accurately monitor whether Exchange databases are mounted. Without these updates you are also likely to see inaccurate availability reporting.
If desired, you can disable this alert:
This is only a temporary workaround for use with the RC and should be reverted when upgrading to the RTM version of Essentials 2010.
More information is in the Management Pack Guide
A number of workflows in the SQL Server 2008 Management Pack run scripts, which rely on SQL Data Management Objects (SQL-DMO) to query information from the SQL Server. SQL-DMO is now deprecated and is not shipped as a part of SQL Server 2008. Every system with SQL Server 2008 that will be monitored must have SQL-DMO installed from the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Backward Compatibility Components.
To install SQL-DMO on computers running SQL Server 2008:
These issues may be fixed in a future release of the SQL Server 2008 Management Pack. When an updated version of a management pack is available you will see a yellow notification bar at the top of the Computers workspace in the Essentials console.
If you are using the Express edition of SQL (installed by Essentials) you will see the following errors:
Warning Service Check Data Source Module Failed Execution
Warning Service Check Probe Module Failed Execution
Both errors will mention the following workflow:
Workflow name: Microsoft.SQLServer.2008.DBEngine.FullTextSearchServiceMonitor or
Workflow name: Microsoft.SQLServer.2005.DBEngine.FullTextSearchServiceMonitor
This will happen on any system that has SQL installed without the Full Text Search Engine. You can apply an override on that monitor to disable it for the systems that don't have that service installed.
To disable these monitors, perform the following steps: