Matt Goedtel on Operations Management : MP

Extended SQL Server MP Released on OpsManJam

mgoedtel — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:39:00 GMT

As promised, I finally finished and submitted the Extended SQL Server 2005/2008 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 and it is now available for download on OpsManJam.

This management pack augments the existing Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 management pack by monitoring for the following change in your environment:

A database mirroring event has been detected on the principal server, affecting replication of the database transaction logs between principal and its mirroring partner based on user-defined performance thresholds for that mirrored database instance.
Performance collection of key database mirroring performance counters for viewing in performance views inculded with this management pack, or referencing in a performance report.

This management pack was developed referencing the latest version of the Operations Manager 2007 SQL Server Management Pack, version 6.0.6569.0.

After my short break, I'll begin working on the next version of this management pack, which will include a health model and monitoring of the health of a mirrored database. Hopefully I can turn this around withina reasonable timeframe. As always, I encourage and appreciate your feedback.

Operations Manager 2007 Performance Monitoring Management Pack

mgoedtel — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:24:00 GMT

I just completed the deployment guide for this custom management pack that Walter and I have been working on. It is now ready for you to download and evaluate.

Description: This management pack provides performance views and dashboards to present key performance data from the SQL Server(s) hosting one or all of the Operations Manager databases.

What this management pack does not do is proactively monitor and alert/change health state if the SQL Servers are not operating reliably. This is something that I am currently evaluating as a possibility for the next version, in addition to supporting dynamic membership so that we can automatically discover the Windows Server(s) hosting SQL Server 2005 and the Operations Manager (operational, data warehouse, and audit) databases. If time can be found, I'll look to devote some effort towards developing the next version. One of the things I wished I had more time to focus on was the discovery and targeting of views/rules dynamically for the operational database, due to the way discovery and targeting is configured in Operations Manager today. That is a topic I don't have time to discuss further right now, sadly.

Limited testing of this management pack has been conducted by myself and Walter.

Feedback is encouraged.

Verifying MP Workflow on Agent

mgoedtel — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:14:00 GMT

So I have finally found some free time to devote to updating my blog this evening. Today as I was giving a presentation at my customer regarding Management Pack Lifecycle Management, they approached me with some good questions on the topic. Specifically around "how do I verify 1) that the MP imported successfully, and 2) that once the Management Pack is imported, the agent actually received the rules and is running them?"

The first question is pretty straight foward, the import wizard will inform you of success or failure immediately. If that is not enough to satisfy the most anal individuals, then if it imported successfully go into the Operations Console and under the Administration view, select the Management Pack node and verify the MP is listed. And if that is not enough, then run the pre-canned report "Microsoft ODR Report Library\Management Packs." That will triple verify the MP is installed in the MG. Now onto the second part, validation of agent recieving rules which are:

Run the Effective Configuration Viewer Reskit tool for Operations Manager 2007, which can be downloaded from here - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A9DB4DCA-6716-478D-89B9-42F27EBC76A8&displaylang=en. Once you install it on your MS, RMS, or desktop with the Operations Console, you can execute it and select an object, such as a computer, and then view a list of monitors and rules. In my testing of this tool thus far, you are not going to see the same results as you would if you ran the task I highlight in option 2. I am still playing with this to understand why this is, so bear with me because I just started to sink my teeth into this Reskit tool.
From the Operations Console, select the Monitoring view and target the Agent Health Service (this can be accomplished a couple of different ways, but the default OOBE is expand Operations Manager\Agent node in the left pane, and select the Active Alerts dashboard view). Highlight an agent and select the Task - Show Running Rules and Monitors for this Health Service. When you execute it and it displays the results, take note in the Task Output the tag "Count" as this will inform you as to how many are actually running against the agent. This is a bit crude, but effective as a "quick and dirty" approach.
From the Command Shell, run a script provided by my colleague Boris Yanushpolsky that retrieves rules and monitors for a specific target, found here - http://blogs.msdn.com/boris_yanushpolsky/archive/2007/11/21/retrieving-rules-and-monitors-targeted-to-a-particular-class-target.aspx.

I am actually thinking of seeing if I can create a Report that would provide you with this information also. If can find the time in the very near future, I just may see if I can knock it out.

New Releases for Operations Manager 2007

mgoedtel — Sun, 13 May 2007 03:10:00 GMT

This week we released the Windows Vista Client Monitoring Management Pack. This new management pack is built on the Windows Diagnostics Infrastructure in Windows Vista that detects, diagnoses and tries to resolve hardware and software problems. Information and analysis on the issues that the system detected are collected by the MP through an agent on the client and sent to OpsMgr where this data is converted into health state, alerts (if need be) and processed for aggregate reports. The MP monitors the following areas:

Disk reliability and utilization
Memory reliability and utilization
System Performance
Runtime performance
Bootup performance
Shutdown performance
Sleep performance
Resume performance

And surfaces information in these areas by:

Raising individual alerts when there are impending catastrophic failures.
Raising trend-based alerts on significant changes to any OEM or computer group in one of the monitored areas.
Health monitors giving an in-depth view of the health of individual machines with knowledge articles to guide the admin.
Reports giving a landscape view of the health of all monitored clients in all the monitoring areas.

You can download the new MP from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a2d42208-d4fd-46a6-9e8d-0ff7694b5634&DisplayLang=en

Also released is the Operations Manager 2007 Security Guide, which can be downloaded from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=49369779-93f7-463f-b2a5-8555b11c5683&DisplayLang=en