Automating SCOM to Make Your Life Easier!

My buddy Tao Yang (the Tim-Tam distributing, management pack creation machine) has been at it again and has released Part 6 of his 'Automating OpsMgr' series.

If you work as a SCOM administrator or consultant in any way, shape or form, then you really need to read through each of these posts as they are awesome! You'll come away with heaps of tools, tips and tricks that Tao has spent tireless hours scripting and putting together for the community and they'll save you loads of time with your deployments.

As an example of how much effort he put into this, take the first post in the series. In this post Tao looked at the PowerShell module that comes bundled with the SCOM installation and also took a look at what was on offer with the System Center Orchestrator integration pack for SCOM and the SMA portable integration module.

These offerings are useful in their own right, but still lack a lot of functionality, so Tao decided to spend 5 months of his own time (on and off)  to write a new extended PowerShell module for SCOM! This new module contains administrative tasks for managing agents, configuring management group references and backing up management packs. It also contains some super tasks to assist with basic and advanced management pack authoring.

The module can be run on its own or as part of SMA and each function of the module contains some very detailed help references.

The other 5 posts (so far) build on this new extended SCOM PowerShell module and leverage SMA for automation to carry out tasks such as collecting logs from ConfigMgr, creating management pack runbooks and managing groups in SCOM.

I know Tao has many more of these posts to put up in the coming months so make sure to check out the whole series so far and download the module and scripts so you can start playing around with them today.

Use the following tag on his blog to access all his posts:

http://blog.tyang.org/tag/automating-opsmgr/

A big thanks Tao for yet another awesome contribution to the SCOM community!

SCOM - New Community MP to Monitor SMA Runbook Instances

My buddy Stefan Roth has been hard at work putting together a new community management pack for anyone running both Service Management Automation (SMA) and SCOM in their environments.

This new management pack will monitor SMA runbook instances to alert you on whether or not an instance is running. It uses a PowerShell script to run an SQL query against the SMA database to return this type of information.

To get a full walk-through of this MP, check out Stefan's blog post at the following link:

http://stefanroth.net/2015/06/16/scom-2012-monitor-sma-runbook-instance-vsae-sample-mp/

You can also download the MP directly from the TechNet Gallery here.

Thanks Stefan!

Building Your Very Own Internal or External SCOM MP Catalog

This is essentially a cross-post to highlight some of the awesome work that my buddy Tao Yang has been working on in his spare time.

Recently and for whatever reason, the official Microsoft Pinpoint Site has been missing some of the more recent releases of SCOM management packs. Now, before people start panicking and complaining that they can't get access to any new MP's for their SCOM environments, you can be safe in the knowledge that the Microsoft MP Wiki is the first place to check for all of the latest and greatest MP releases:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/16174.microsoft-management-packs.aspx

You can also get access to MP's by performing a quick Google (Bing) search for the MP name or by searching the Microsoft Download Center site.

The Microsoft Pinpoint site used to be a one-stop-shop for all your Microsoft (and even some approved third-party vendor) management packs and if nothing else, it was a handy place to go and quickly download what you're looking for.

The On-Premise Solution

As the Pinpoint solution isn't as reliable as it used to be, Tao first started working on his own private 'MP Catalog' for SCOM that leverages the power of Service Management Automation (SMA) and SharePoint 2013 to deliver a fully dynamic and up-to-date list of all available Microsoft MP's that looks something like this.....

Check out Tao's walkthrough on how to get this up and running here.

The Off-Premise Solution

Not content on delivering an internal version of his private catalog, he then got to work on creating a similar solution up in Microsoft Azure using Azure Automation and SharePoint Online as his preferred model.

You can see this second awesome post here.

Whether or not you ever intend on actually deploying your own SCOM MP Catalog onsite or off-prem, what Tao has done shows the automation extensibility that comes with both SMA and Azure Automation. I highly recommend you take a read over both posts as there's some very useful information and scripts that can easily be used or tweaked for different purposes to suit your needs.

Great work Tao and thanks for sharing this content with the community :)

TechCamp 2014 - An Awesome Irish Cloud Community Event

After the success of our last TechCamp 2013 event, a week from tomorrow (Thursday 19th of June), we kick off TechCamp 2014 in Dublin's Citywest Hotel and Conference Centre.

This year we've decided to span the event out over two days and into two separate tracks - Hybrid Cloud & Software as a Service - and we have an awesome line-up of speakers presenting on some very relevant topics.

Day 1 (Hybrid Cloud Track)

I'll be delivering a session on Day 1 for the Hybrid Cloud track titled - 'Service Automation using System Center'. In it, you can expect to see some (hopefully impressive) demo's around System Center, Windows Azure Pack and Service Management Automation (SMA).

Day 1 also sees me share the stage with two good friends and excellent presenters - Aidan Finn and Damian Flynn. Aidan will be talking about Storage Spaces, Scale Out File Server and Hybrid Cloud and Damian will be digging into the new and seriously cool Windows Azure Pack in his presentation.

Day 2 (Software as a Service Track)

On Day 2 (Software as a Service), Nathan Winters - author, former Exchange MVP and now working for Microsoft UK - will be talking about Office365 Exchange & Lync. Later in the day there's a presentation from Sean O'Farrell - a colleague of mine in Ergo - who's making a lot of noise in the Office365 community and he'll be talking about using Office365 SharePoint & Yammer in the real world.

To finish off Day 2 and the overall event, we have Bob Duffy - who in his own words is an 'all-round SQL dude' but in my words - 'the one person on this planet that I've met that knows more about SQL than anyone else!'

Bob is an SQL Ranger/MVP/MCA/MCM/Maestro - so if you're interested in learning something new about SQL you'll definitely want to listen to what he has to say! His session is titled 'Power BI for Office365' and is sure to be filled with plenty of demo's and useful insights.

Registered Yet?

If I've got your attention and this event sounds like something you'd like to attend, then check out the agenda here and purchase your tickets from this link:

http://techcamp2014.azurewebsites.net/purchase-tickets

Like at TechCamp 2013, all proceeds from ticket sales are going to the very worthy charity - Camara. Also, none of the sessions will be recorded or streamed so if you don't attend, you don't get to see the sessions online at a later date - not to mention missing out on some excellent networking opportunities with peers and presenters alike.

So, like Aidan says - Don’t Be An IT Dinosaur – Attend TechCamp 2014 On June 19/20!

See you there :)

New Windows Azure Pack (WAP) & Azure Visio Stencils Available for Download

Well, it's been a few months since I last had a chance to work on some new Visio stencils and finally, I've managed to put one together for the relatively new Windows Azure Pack (aka WAP) and have bundled into the same stencil, some graphics for Windows Azure too.

If you're looking for some other Visio stencils related to System Center 2012 R2,  then you can find them here:

SCVMM 2012 R2 Visio Stencils

DPM 2012 R2 Visio Stencils

SCOM 2012 R2 Infrastructure Visio Stencils

SCOM 2012 R2 Application Visio Stencils

SCOM 2012 R2 Networking Visio Stencils

SCOM 2012 R2 APM Visio Stencils

This stencil contains images that cover things like the WAP Admin & Tenant portals, SPF Web Server, SMA, Service Bus and Workflow Manager.

I've also thrown in things like Visual Studio Online with its Global Service Monitor and APM capabilities, Orchestrator, VMM, AppController and standard Windows Azure roles and functions.

You can download the stencil from the TechNet Gallery at the following link:

http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Windows-Azure-Pack-Windows-813d13a8


If you find this stencil useful, please take the time to give it a Star rating on the TechNet Gallery :)

Let me know if you have any suggestions or problems with the stencil by posting in the comments section below.