MMS 2013 - Day 4 and Wrap Up

Admittedly I'm a little belated with this post (Vegas does that to you when you spend a week there!), however it's worth wrapping up what we did for the final days at the Microsoft Management Summit 2013 (MMS) over in the Mandalay Bay Resort, LV last week and giving people some references to the sessions that we attended.

The Sessions

Day 4 (Thursday) was another jam packed day of back-to-back sessions that kicked off with Microsoft's Vlad Joanovic presenting a session called "WS-B318 Manage and Monitor Your Windows Azure Usage From System Center 2012 SP1". In this session, Vlad walked through some scenario's about how to best use System Center 2012 SP1 to monitor and manage your Azure workloads from on-premise. Admirably, Vlad ran nearly all his demo's directly from Azure and thankfully on the day, he didn't get hit with the internet connectivity problems that were prevalent and an unfortunate feature of MMS 2013 throughout the week. As a side note to that though, it's a credit to Vlad's presentation skills that 6 minutes into his session, the fire alarm starting going off in the building and even with the automated voiceover alert from the fire alarm and the strobe lights too, he just kept on ploughing through without even a pause!

Check out this session on Channel 9 from here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B318


At 10:15, myself and Damian Flynn attended the "IM-B203 Building UI Add–Ins For System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager" session delivered by Microsoft's Jonobie Ford. This was an interesting presentation that delved into the 'not too widely known' world of SCVMM 2012 console add-ins. The demo showed a neat use case for example add-ins for Cisco UCS and HP Insight Control. This add-in delivered integration of Cisco UCS and HP Insight Control directly into the SCVMM 2012 console. As the company I work for are a HP partner, the latter example was definitely of interest and something that I think we can definitely look at deploying as a value-add to our customers.

Have a look at the session here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/IM-B203

Podcasting Again

Before the next session kicked off at 12:00 PM, I took a walk over to the Expo Hall where the vendors where located and came across Dan Kregor and his cronies recording another version of the Inside Podcast Network. Before I knew it, I had a microphone in front of me and I was joining in the discussion and banter with well known System Center guru's David Allen, Matthew Long, Mickey Gousett, Cameron Fuller, Christian Booth and Mike Resseler. We had so much fun on there that I ended up missing the next session and heading straight into lunch instead!

Check out all three of the MMS 2013 IPN podcasts here:

http://systemcenterpodcast.libsyn.com/ipn-special-mms-2013-day-2

http://systemcenterpodcast.libsyn.com/ipn-special-4-mms-2013-day-3

http://systemcenterpodcast.libsyn.com/ipn-special-5-mms-2013-day-4-free-food-and-boobs


Back to the Sessions

The penultimate session of the day for me was to attend "AM-B306 DevOps: Azure Monitoring & Authoring Updates for Operations Manager 2012 SP1" delivered by Microsoft's Daniele Muscetta, Marcin Jastrzebski and Brian Wren. These guys are at the pinnacle of SCOM management pack authoring and even though I'd already seen several 'DevOps' sessions during the week, I had to attend this one to see them do their thing. In this session, we were treated to a demo of the new Management Pack for Azure Fabric. This MP is a massive improvement on the older Azure one and should fill the gap nicely for those of you looking to dip your toe into Azure monitoring over the coming months. I particularly like the new Distributed Application template that comes out-of-the-box with this MP. We also had a run through on using the Visual Studio Authoring Extensions (VSAE) to author SCOM management packs and this again was interesting as it's the engine that Microsoft is pushing us to as the main authoring tool for SCOM - no more Authoring Console like in SCOM 2007.

Have a look at the full session here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/AM-B306

At 16:30, I attended what was to be my final session of MMS 2013. With so little sessions available the next day (Friday) and minimal time left in Vegas before we went home, we had made a decision to use the Friday for sightseeing and shopping. This session was titled "IM-B310 Troubleshooting Common System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager Issues" and was presented by Microsoft's John Messec , Amit Virmani, Kurt Scherer and Madhu Jujare. Here, they covered different troubleshooting scenarios and walked us through such things as ETW tracing, and troubleshooting Software Defined Networking (SDN).

Check it out here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/IM-B310


The MMS 2013 Closing Party

On Thursday night, we had the MMS 2013 closing party which was held in XS Night Club at the Wynn Resort and Casino. The venue for this event was really nice and we set ourselves up nicely outside beside the pool bar early in the evening.

With this years venue and last years one being held in the Paris Hotel and Casino, Microsoft have really raised the bar in terms of closing parties. Let's hope that they keep this standard up for any future System Center conferences as most people I spoke to that attended said they had a great time.

Final Day Sightseeing

A trip to Las Vegas is never complete without doing a bit of sightseeing and as mentioned earlier, we chose to not attend any of the sessions on the Friday (there were only sessions up until 11am) and instead go sightseeing. Myself, my Irish buddy John McCabe (Microsoft Senior PFE), his boss José and Didier Van Hoye (Virtual Machine MVP and Storage legend!) all headed to downtown Vegas to check out the Stratosphere Hotel. This is one of the highest points in town and a must-visit spot for picture taking.

We then hit the Cheesecake Factory in the massive Caesars Palace Hotel for some dinner

Before then walking/trekking up the strip to check out the dancing water fountains of the Bellagio - another truly amazing sight of Vegas

Finally, our last stop of the week was back at Rí Rá Irish Bar in the Mandalay Bay for a well deserved one of these...

Wrapping up the week and in reflection, out of the three MMS conferences that I've attended, this one was by far my favourite and hopefully (fingers crossed) we might have another one next year!

MMS 2013 - Day 3

Day 3 (Wednesday) was for me, probably the best day yet for sessions at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2013. All the sessions that I attended were delivered by System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management (SC CDM) MVP's and it's these type of sessions that normally have people talking about long after the conference is finished.

The Sessions

First up on Day 3 for me was attending an 08:30 session that was being co-presented by my fellow MVP and friend Damian Flynn. He was doing a session called "IM-B307 Early Adopters of System Center 2012 SP1" along with Microsoft's Nigel Cain. Damian and Nigel took the attendees through a number of lessons learned from their experiences in deploying System Center 2012 SP1 well before any of us had even heard of it as part of the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP).

Check out the session on Channel 9 from here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/IM-B307


At 10:15 we attended a session by Microsoft's Charles Joy titled "SD-B309 Orchestrating Hyper-V Replica Planned Failover with System Center 2012 SP1". Charles had an excellent demonstration on utilizing Orchestrator and Hyper-V to perform planned failover of your virtual machines. Charles has also made available over 50 Orchestrator runbooks that you can download now that form part of this session.

Have a look at it here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/SD-B309


The relentless sessions just kept on coming and at 12:00 we had Cameron Fuller, Chris Ross and Jason Sandys present one called "IM-B317 Provisioning in System Center: Users, Groups, Virtual Servers, Software and More!". This session had possibly one of the most fun openings of the week and they did a role-play type intro whereby the threw down a challenge to the best method to provision different resources - either manually or automatically with System Center 2012. This session also showed us an excellent customization of the System Center 2012 Service Manager (SCSM) Self Service Portal (SSP) that surely now opens up the boundaries for what we can do with the standard (and not very cool) SharePoint Foundation SSP.

I really enjoyed this session so go check it out here for yourself:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/IM-B317

After a lunch meeting with our book publisher, we looked forward to another round of MVP driven sessions. At 14:45 it was into a session with Cameron Fuller, Gordon McKenna and Sean Roberts called "SD-B313 Effective Capacity Planning of Your Infrastructure Resources".  This was an excellent session where the highlight was when Sean started working with OLAP cubes to mine data from the SCOM datawarehouse and use it with Performance Point to generate capacity planning reports and dashboards on the fly. There was also some short slots for a number of vendors to showcase their wares around the capacity planning space.

Here's the link to see the guys in action: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/SD-B313


The last breakout session of the day was delivered by Maarten Goet and his one was called "IM-B316 Monitoring and Managing the Network and Storage Infrastructure with Operations Manager 2012". In this packed session Maarten used his excellent presentation skills to show everyone the capabilities around network and storage monitoring in SCOM 2012 SP1 whilst leveraging the SCVMM 2012 SP1 integration and management packs.

Check it out here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/IM-B316


Once the breakout sessions ended for the day, it was time to attend some Birds of a Feather sessions with the other MVP's and Microsoft product groups. These sessions allowed the audience to ask any question they liked on System Center 2012 (excluding SCCM) and we got some really good questions with some equally good answers.

When they were finished, it was off to a meet and greet with some of my online System Center community friends and then (as you do) we went to the onsite Irish bar in the Mandalay Bay for some food and a few well deserved drinks!

MMS 2013 - Day 2

It was another excellent day at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2013 yesterday (Tuesday). This year for me, the conference is truly showing its value in terms of networking and meeting up with other members of the System Center community.

So far this week, I've resisted the urge to go crazy in Las Vegas partying and instead have been up bright and early each morning to attend the first sessions of the day which kick off at 08:30 (wonder how long that'll last....)

The Sessions

First up was a session titled "WS-B321 Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track v3: Private Cloud Reference Architecture Based on Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1". This session delved into the Microsoft Fast Track program and went through the private cloud reference architecture and where it fits in with Windows Server 2012.

You can check out the session on Channel 9 here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B321


The next session of the day for me was "WS-B329 Getting Started with Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks" which was delivered by Microsoft's David Aiken. The challenge for the presenter here was that the internet connection kept dropping off and when you're trying to demo a cloud based Azure solution, that's kind of important! To be fair though, he quickly changed over to his 'Plan B' internet and ran the demo from his phone hotspot! Once he got going, the session went into deploying VM's into Azure and was quite interesting.

Download and take a look at the session here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B329


The last session before lunch that I attended was another Azure one titled "WS-B331 Windows Azure and Active Directory".

Microsoft's David Tesar presented this one and promised that it wasn't going to be a Level 100 overview of Azure. He stayed true to his word and went into his slide deck and internet based demo's in great detail. I enjoyed this one for sure.

Have a look at it here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B331


Inside Podcast Network

After lunch, I was due to attend two sessions on "How to Design and Configure Networking in VMM and Hyper-V" with my Irish sidekick John McCabe (Microsoft Ireland Senior PFE), but ended up getting asked by my MVP colleague Christian Booth to talk with himself, Marcus Oh and Dan Kregor on the Inside Podcast Network about our experiences of MMS so far. This for me is by far the highlight of MMS as I regularly listen to Dan and his cronies (guests) on their monthly podcast.

I've had a chance to take a quick listen to some of the podcast and it sounds excellent and that's a credit to Dan (and big thanks to Rod Trent of MyITForum.com) for making it happen at this years event.

If you've got some time and want to listen to us talk tech, check out the Podcast here:

http://insidepodcastnetwork.tv/ipnspecial3/

MMS 2013 - Day 1

Even though on Sunday, we had registration and a couple of sessions, the day that the keynote speech starts is the day that most people count as Day 1 here at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS). This is a quick post to bring people up to speed about what went on over here yesterday (Monday 8th April) and a primer for what's going on today (Tuesday 9th April).

The Keynote

At 09:00 yesterday morning, all 5000 plus attendees were packed into the Event Center in the Mandalay Bay Hotel. This was a far better room to host the Keynote speech than the ballroom that hosted it at this event in this same hotel back in 2011. When we arrived at the Event Center, we were greeted with some cool tunes from Microsoft's Joey Snow and even though there were some WiFi issues throughout that hotel at the time (for a room full of nerds, this was a Major problem!), he kept us all occupied with his choice of music.

Here's Joey warming up the crowd

The Internet being down across the hotel was a blocker for the Keynote starting at it's original time of 08:30 (all the demo's had to run with Internet connectivity) but once they got the problems sorted, Brad Anderson - Corporate Vice President of Program Management in Microsoft’s Windows Server and System Center Group (WSSC) - came onstage to do his thing.

The Keynote this year was titled "Cloud Optimize Your Business with Microsoft Management Solutions" and it a basic description of it's content taken direct from the MMS site is here:

With a set of breakthrough new products and growing industry momentum, Microsoft is transforming IT management. The new capabilities of Windows Server 2012 with System Center 2012 SP1 enable customers to build and manage elastic infrastructures while reducing complexity, improving deployment of critical applications, and advancing the consumerization of IT. In this keynote session, Brad Anderson will demonstrate how Microsoft technologies deliver new cloud capabilities, and he will showcase how customers are already realizing gains in productivity, growth, and innovation through Microsoft solutions.
 

For me, although there was no new information around any vNext content, I did think that the customer case study examples and video's (Domino's Pizza, Toyota, Sundance Institute) that they showed during the presentation were excellent and will go a long way to helping consultants like me drive our customers over onto the Microsoft platform and away from the 'other guys' in the virtualization and management space. You can view the entire Keynote on the Microsoft Channel 9 site from this link: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/KEY1 The Sessions I attended a couple of excellent sessions yesterday - one was a DevOps session based on creating web applications in Team Foundation Server (TFS), then monitoring them with SCOM and Global Service Monitor (GSM) and finally triaging problems with the web application right back into TFS through the SCOM integration and alert attachment/intellitrace management packs. Check out the session on Channel 9 here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/AM-B303 The other session I attended was called "Hacking the Data Warehouse: Mastering the Reporting Experience in System Center 2012 Operations Manager". This session was delivered by Veeam and in fairness had no sales pitch - just deep-dive technical SQL stuff to help deliver some cool reports in SCOM. It was no coincidence that a large number of the SCOM community attended this session. Check it out here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/IM-B392  That's all for now, tomorrow I'll be attending some sessions on Windows Azure and System Center 2012 Network Virtualization and I'll post a bit more up here when I get some time. If you want quick and up to date info on what's happening this week at MMS, then get yourself onto Twitter and check out the following hashtags: #MMS2013 and #MMSFUN You can also follow me on: @kgreeneit

MMS 2013 Kicks Off - Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas

It's that time of year again when the Microsoft Management Summit 2013 kicks off in Las Vegas for a week of System Center sessions, community networking and of course a little fun (it is Vegas)!

I've been lucky enough to be able to attend MMS 2011 and also MMS 2012 and coming back here for MMS 2013, I sure feel like a veteran now! The week ahead for us attendees is packed full with sessions, instructor led labs, certification tracks and meet and greets.

Yesterday (Sunday) saw us register for the event (the registration process was a million times more efficient than last year's madness) and receive our swag which included a new laptop bag, a handy little zipper case for packing our power supplies, a pen, a 1GB USB key, a notebook, an MMS 2013 badge and a flashing necklace light which doubles up as our MMS 2013 closing party access key.

Although I'm not a huge fan of the bag this year (it's more to do with my own personal dislike for those type of laptop satchels than the actual quality of the bag itself), I've spoken with some other attendees and they're more than happy with it.

After registration there were a small number of sessions available to whet our appetite for the week ahead and myself and Damian Flynn headed into a session on "Updating 3rd Party Applications with System Center". The session was pretty cool and demonstrated how to use SCUP and SCCM to maintain your non-Microsoft applications - such as the never ending update app Java!

When we finished with that session, it was into a really cool private meeting between the attending System Center MVP's and Microsoft's Brad Anderson.

Today (Monday) is when the event kicks off fully and we have an early 08:30 start to attend the Keynote Speech before we then get stuck into the days packed schedule. If you want to see the Keynote Speech live, then make sure you're logged onto the official MMS 2013 micro-site and also the Channel 9 MMS 2013 channel. Links for both are below:

http://www.2013mms.com/

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013


I'll try to keep the blog updated over the coming days so stay tuned!

OpsMgr 2012 Unleashed Book

I've just arrived home from the commute to work today (still can't believe it's snowing at the end of March!) and found that this had arrived by post for me

As someone who has been working on pretty much nothing else but SCOM/OpsMgr for the past 3 years, the two previous versions of this book - System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed and System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Unleashed - played a massive role in helping me understand how to deploy and administer this complex monitoring and management tool.

When I heard that the latest version for SCOM 2012 was available for pre-order months ago, I wasted no time in getting out the credit card and purchasing it in both 'dead-tree' and then kindle formats. This blog post isn't a review of the book in any way, shape or form but simply just some quick observations along with some advice to anyone out there who's working on SCOM.

The book is a massive 1500 pages of front-to-back content that gives you expert tips and advice in every chapter. As someone who has tried their hand at writing a SCOM 2012 book that came close to 700 pages, I can assure you it's no mean feat to put together this amount of good high-level content.

When you check out the members of the authoring team whose efforts combined to bring us this book, it's a "who's who" of the SCOM and System Center world:

Lead Authors

Kerrie Meyler - System Center Cloud and Datacenter MVP
Cameron Fuller - System Center Cloud and Datacenter MVP
John Joyner - System Center Cloud and Datacenter MVP

With

Pete Zerger - System Center Cloud and Datacenter MVP
Jonathan Almquist - Scomskills.com
Alex Fedotyev - AppDynamics.com
Scott Moss - System Center Cloud and Datacenter MVP
Oskar Landman - System Center Cloud and Datacenter MVP
Marnix Wolf - System Center Cloud and Datacenter MVP

Technical Editor

Kevin Holman - Microsoft TSP (owner of probably the best SCOM blog on the internet!)


So with this kind of SCOM authoring firepower bursting out of the 1500 pages, I don't even need to read through this book to tell you that it's a quality resource that you absolutely have to add to your library if you're serious about SCOM.

Side Note (and slight groupie story...)

I've just noticed that a link to one of my posts on SCOM 2012 APM got a mention and plug in the "General Resources" section of the OpsMgr 2012 Unleashed book and wanted to say a huge and sincere THANK YOU to whoever it was from the writing team above that took the time to read over my post and feel it worthy of a mention. It wasn't that long ago that I attended MMS 2011 and won a signed copy of the OpsMgr 2007 R2 Unleashed book from Cameron Fuller whilst attending (what still is so far for me) the most fun and interesting SCOM presentation I've ever seen. Reading that book on the plane back to Dublin, I never thought a few years later I'd have a mention in it's successor and it's an honour to be included.

New MSFT Blog To Help Keep Your Feet On the Ground and Head In The Clouds

For the last few years everyone has been talking about 'the cloud' and what it means for their businesses. Depending on where you look or who you talk to, you may well get A LOT of different versions of what exactly 'the cloud' is.

As I work primarily in the Microsoft space, I'm really only concerned about what 'the cloud' means from their perspective and I just had to write up this blog post to tell people about a new Microsoft blog called 'In The Cloud'. This blog is headed up by non other than Microsoft's Corporate VP Brad Anderson and it's aim is to help us all understand what the cloud means from the Microsoft side and where they're going to take us with this journey.

The blog has just been launched in the last couple of weeks and already Brad has some interesting posts up there that are worth taking a look over as a taste of what's to come. I'd expect as we get closer to MMS 2013 and TechEd 2013 that there will be a plethora of great information added and if Brad and his team maintain the content here, it could well become one of the most popular blogs around on MSFT Cloud.

Along with the new blog, Brad has taken the plunge and (very bravely) joined Twitter to help get his views across and information out there. If you're on Twitter and interested in Microsoft cloud technologies, then this is an account that you'll definitely want to follow and if you're not on Twitter, then I'd recommend adding the RSS feed for the blog to your Inbox to keep right up to date.

Check out the blog and Twitter account from these links:

 'In The Cloud' (Blog)

@InTheCloudMSFT (Twitter)

Thanks to Brad and the rest of the System Center and Windows Server team for getting us access to these new resources!

Guest Blogger on TechNet UK - 10 Top Tips to Make OpsMgr 2012 Rock!

Recently, I was asked to create some content for a guest blogger slot on Microsoft's TechNet UK site and yesterday saw the post I wrote on some tips and best practice recommendations go live.

If you want to learn more and maybe pick up a few useful pointers to help you with your SCOM / OpsMgr 2012 deployments, then check out my post from the link below:

 10 Top Tips to Make OpsMgr 2012 Rock!


Enjoy :)

SCOM - Official System Center MP Catalog Wiki

A couple of years ago I created a blog post with a link to an 'Unofficial System Center Management Pack Catlog' that a member of the community had put together as a central location to get access to all the download links for non-Microsoft developed management packs. This post proved pretty popular and I still refer to it a lot myself when looking for a particular MP on a deployment.

You can check out this post here:  'Unofficial System Center MP Catalog'

In the last week or so, Microsoft's 'MP Supremo' - Daniel Savage created a new Wiki page that lists all of the existing and soon to be released Microsoft Management Packs along with each and every one of the download links to get quick access to them.

And before anyone mentions it, I know we have the Pinpoint Site that also has a central location for these MP's, but if we as members of the System Center community can ensure that this Wiki is maintained and the links kept up-to-date, then this can be the 'de facto' location for us to get quick access to these management packs.

The new Wiki can be accessed from this link: 'Microsoft Management Packs'

Once again, well done to Microsoft and in particular Daniel and his team for putting the effort into the management pack experience and ensuring that all our queries and issues with them are getting resolved. This type of initiative can only add to the overall value of System Center 2012 in the long run.

**Update April 2015**
I've just come across another useful blog post on SystemCenterCore.com that lists all management packs for both SCOM and SCSM and comes with a really handy MP Elements table and download link for each one.

Check the library out here - http://systemcentercore.com/

SCOM - Essential Community MPs, Scripts & Tools to Enhance Your Deployments

It's well known that System Center Operations Manager (SCOM/OpsMgr) is a complex product that can take a long time to master and be comfortable with. Without the right SCOM tools and resources to work with, then it can sometimes be like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube in the dark!

If you're responsible for delivering and managing SCOM either in-house or to your customers, you will also then know that just about every SCOM deployment is going to be different from the last one. The reason for this is that not every environment will require the same management packs and type of monitoring. For me though, there are a few management packs and scripts that I will nearly always install to every SCOM deployment and I thought it's about time that I shared them.

This post will describe some of my favourite free community management packs (some old and some new) and scripts that I think are essential to the majority of SCOM deployments out there. Although not an absolute and definitive list of all of the excellent community resources that are available, I will list the ones here that I deploy (or plan to deploy if it's a newly released MP) on a regular basis.


Management and Maintenance Tasks

These management packs will add a number of really useful maintenance and management tasks to the Tasks action pane inside the SCOM Operations Console.

OpsMgr Self Maintenance Management Pack (by Tao Yang)

SCOM Task Collection MP (by Stefan Roth)



Upgrading or Migrating to SCOM 2012

This is an excellent MP that will essentially allow you to modify the SCOM Management Group (MG) name on your multi-homed agents. Ideal for when you are migrating from SCOM 2007 to SCOM 2012 and want to remove the old MG name when the new environment is ready.

 SCOM 2012 Extended Agent Info (by José Fehse)



Backing Up SCOM 2012

Tuning and customizing your SCOM environment is what takes the most amount of time during deployments and ensuring that these modifications are backed up and quickly recoverable is where this management pack comes in. A 'must have' MP in my opinion.

Backup Unsealed Management Packs (OpsMgr 2012 Edition from SystemCenterCentral.com)



Scheduled Maintenance Mode in SCOM 2012

In SCOM 2007 we could make use of the Scheduled Maintenance Mode utility that came bundled with the SCOM 2007 R2 Admin Resource Kit. Unfortunately, this great tool doesn't work with SCOM 2012 so Pete Zerger and Matthew Long from Infront Consulting came up with the perfect script to help you place groups of servers into maintenance mode whenever you wish.

 OpsMgr 2012: Group Maintenance Mode via PowerShell (from SystemCenterCentral.com)

Stefan Roth has just recently (December 2013) created a new Maintenance Mode tool for SCOM 2012 SP1 and higher that will allow you to schedule your maintenance windows in much the same way as the old SCOM 2007 R2 Admin Resource Kit tool. Check it out here:

SCOM 2012 – Maintenance Mode Tool V 1.0


Viewing MPs, Overrides and Proxy Setting Tools

When Boris Yanushpolsky originally developed his MPViewer, OverrideExplorer and Proxy Settings utilities for SCOM 2007, he immediately endeared himself to SCOM administrators around the world! Daniele Muscetta has taken these tools and given them an upgrade to work with SCOM 2012 and you can get information and downloads to both sets of tools from the link below. I use at least one of these tools in just about every SCOM deployment I'm involved with.

 Boris’s OpsMgr Tools – Updated (by Boris Yanushpolsky and Daniele Muscetta)



Additional SCOM Resources

The above tools and scripts are just a small portion of a huge number of resources available to you right now (and for free!) that have been developed by the greater System Center community. If some or all of these tools are new to you, then I'd highly advise you to take a good look around the websites and blogs of each of the authors above and when you've done that, then check out some of these links below for even more information to get you started on the right track:

ThoughtsOnOpsMgr (by Marnix Wolf)

Cameron Fuller's Catapult Systems Blog

Bob Cornelissen's Blog

Kevin Holman's System Center Blog

System Center: Operations Manager Engineering Blog (Official MSFT SCOM team blog)

System Center 2012 Operations Manager Survival Guide (Official SCOM Wiki page)

SystemCenterCentral.com (by Pete Zerger et al.)

MyITForum.com (by Rod Trent et al.)

SCOM 2012: Overview link blog (by Dieter Wijckmans)

SCOMfaq.ch (by Stefan Roth)

With these reference links and all of the MP's, scripts and tools, you should have more than enough information to truly enhance both your existing and new SCOM deployments.