Marc Umeno's Blog : Active Directory

Service Manager Test Drive Available Now

mumeno — Mon, 04 May 2009 21:06:08 GMT

I have exciting news to share!

We have a Service Manager Test Drive preview of Beta 2 available to try out now. It’s on hosted VMs, so all you need to do is log in with your Windows Live ID and start playing with it.

The VMs have all of the same sample data we used in our demonstrations at the Microsoft Management Summit. You will be able to evaluate the core Incident, Change, and Configuration Management features, as well as integration with Active Directory, System Center Configuration Manager and System Center Operations Manager. There is also some sample data for a few reports available in the Test Drive.

Please check it out and let us know what you think – you can post feedback and questions in the Service Manager TechNet forum.

Users in Service Manager Beta 1

mumeno — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 11:39:38 GMT

Quick points on users for Service Manager Beta 1:

1. You can automatically populate users in Service Manager by creating an Active Directory connector.

2. It may not be obvious, but you can view users in the Administration workspace under the Security node:

3. You can also create a new user by selecting the “create user” task after selecting the Users node in the Administration workspace:

Administering and Tracking Service Manager Beta 1 Connectors

mumeno — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:52:14 GMT

Early feedback on Service Manager Beta 1 has highlighted that many folks would like more information around administration of connectors, especially on how to track the progress of a connector.

TASKS

First, I would like to point out some of the tasks available for Service Manager Beta 1 for a connector:

The Sync Now task initiates an on-demand data sync for a connector. However, contrary to what you might think, this sync will not be completed immediately as there are often many underlying processes that are involved with a connector sync. I will touch more on the details around connector syncs later on in this post.

The Delete Connector task will do a couple of things, one of which may be surprising. First the connector is deleted and removed from the Service Manager database. What may be a surprise to you is that deletion of a connector will also delete any Configuration Items (CIs) it created, unless those CIs were also updated by another data source. This capability can be very convenient if you need to remove a lot of data from the Service Manager CMDB.

The Disable task will prevent future connector syncs from happening for a particular connector. In-progress syncs will complete even after this task is used.

The Enable task will re-enable a disabled connector and in Beta 1 at least, this will also initiate an immediate connector sync.

The Edit Connector task will pop-up a property dialog for the connector.

TRACKING SYNCS

As I mentioned above, each data sync for a connector is actually comprised of a number of smaller processes that actually run asynchronously.

Each sync for the AD and SCCM connectors comes in 2 asynchronous steps – the first step extracts data from the source and puts it into a staging data cache; the second step takes data from the staging data cache and writes into the Service Manager CMDB.

You can follow the progress of these data syncs in Service Manager Beta 1 by looking at the Event Viewer under Administrative Tools:

If you click on the “Filter Current Log” action and pick the “Lfx Datacenter” “Lfx Service” and “Lfx Source Config” Event services, you will narrow down the events to those related to connectors.

If you are only interested in tracking the progress of a connector, you can filter to just the “Lfx Service” events.

For an SCCM Connector, you will see a sequence that looks something like this – once all of these events are done, the sync is completed.

Date	Event
12/2/2008 2:18	Done:MomStore.DCMNonCompliantConfigItems.DefaultCache.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:16	Done:MomStore.DCMConfigItemRelations.DefaultCache.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:15	Done:MomStore.DCMConfigItems.DefaultCache.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:14	Done:MomStore.TopConsoleUser.DefaultCache.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:14	Done:MomStore.DeviceHasSoftwareUpdate.DefaultCache.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:12	Done:MomStore.DeviceHasSoftwareItemInstalled.DefaultCache.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:11	Done:MomStore.NetworkAdapter.DefaultCache.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:10	Done:MomStore.Processor.DefaultCache.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:09	Done:MomStore.LogicalDisk.DefaultCache.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:08	Done:MomStore.PhysicalDisk.DefaultCache.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:07	Done:MomStore.OperatingSystem.DefaultCache.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:06	Done:MomStore.LogicalComputersOnPhysicalComputers.DefaultCache.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:05	Done:MomStore.LogicalComputers.DefaultCache.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:04	Done:MomStore.PhysicalComputers.DefaultCache.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:03	Done:Importer.DCM.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:02	Done:Importer.Updates.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:01	Done:Importer.Inventory.SCCMConnector.
12/2/2008 2:00	Done:Importer.Computers.SCCMConnector.

During the running of a sync, even if the connector has not completed all of the processes, Configuration Items might be created or updated & can be visible in the Service Manager console. For example, you might see a number of computer CIs created during an SCCM sync. However, if you were to look at the Software or Software Updates installed on that computer, you might find they are still missing if the sync has not completed.

System Center Service Manager Beta 1 is Released!

mumeno — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 09:29:22 GMT

System Center Service Manager Beta 1 has shipped!

You can download the Beta from Connect:

https://connect.microsoft.com/SelfNomination.aspx?ProgramID=2733&pageType=1&SiteID=446

System Center Service Manager Beta 1

mumeno — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:15:46 GMT

It’s been a while since I posted as we have been feverishly working on the Beta 1 for System Center Service Manager. Now that we are getting close to shipping Beta 1, I will start blogging again.

Beta 1 has a number of great features, including Incident Management (including automatic creation of incidents from SCCM Desired Configuration Management compliance errors), Change Management, Configuration Management/CMDB, and Connectors to Active Directory & System Center Configuration Manager.

We are very excited about sharing what we have been putting together – it’s coming soon!