The Most Useful SCOM Article on the Web Just Got an Update!

As anyone who's ever worked with SCOM will know, it's a fairly heavy and complex product to get your head around at first and the larger the environment to be monitored, the more administration and troubleshooting tasks you'll need to teach yourself.

Way back when I started working with SCOM, I quickly found myself lost in a myriad of blog posts and TechNet articles searching for help on how to extract information from the SQL databases to help me better understand the problems I was experiencing.

The one thing that kept coming up trumps for me in my searches time and time again was Kevin Holman's 'Useful Operations Manager 2007 SQL Queries' post. This post brought together a virtual treasure chest of SQL queries that the 'non-SQL admin' like me could easily copy and paste into my SQL Management Studio window for instant information or configuration changes in my customers SCOM environments.

It was probably the first SCOM reference on the web that I saved as a favourite into my web browser and was always a location that I'd tell new SCOM admins to go check out and bookmark.

As the title of Kevin's post suggests, it was originally put together nine years ago as a central repository of SQL queries for SCOM 2007. When System Center 2012 and ultimately 2016 came around, these queries still worked with the newer releases of SCOM but there was often some confusion from people trying to understand if they only worked with SCOM 2007.

So to address this, just recently Kevin took the time to archive his original 2007-named post and create a new one titled simply 'SCOM SQL Queries'.

Not only has he renamed the post but he has also formatted it in a way that all queries are now much easier to read from and copy/paste as required.

Check out the new location for what is most likely, the most useful SCOM article on the web here:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kevinholman/2016/11/11/scom-sql-queries/

Experts Live NL 2016

Today I've just finished up presenting my last public conference session of 2016 at the awesome Experts Live conference in the Netherlands.

This is my second year to attend Experts Live NL and it already seems like the conference attendee and speaker count has grown significantly in that short space of time.

My presentation this year was titled 'Hacking OMS with your OpsMgr Skills' and is an extension of the session that I co-presented with my good friend Cameron Fuller at System Center Universe 2016 in August.

The original idea and title for this session was all Cameron's and with his blessing, I put my own spin on the content to ensure that Experts Live attendees were treated to a significantly different version of the one we delivered previously at SCU. Also, with the vast number of changes and feature additions that we've now become accustomed to with OMS, there was much to show on the day.

My session was the first to open after the keynote and it was refreshing to see the room filled with a large number of current OpsMgr users waiting to hear how to advance their skillsets with OMS.

(Photo credit Pedro van Vliet)

When my presentation was done, I took some time to hang out with old friends and to network with the attendees and various booth vendors around the event.

All in all, Experts Live NL was a good closure for me to a hectic few months of traveling and presenting. I'm looking forward to now refocusing my attention back onto my poor neglected blog and bringing some useful posts into the community over the coming months!