SCOM 2016 & 2012 R2 Prerequisites Script

Lately, I've been working a lot in my lab with the Tech Preview build of the upcoming SCOM 2016 release and as is always the case when you deploy new builds of SCOM, there's a load of prerequisites to install before you can get stuck in.

I've updated my original SCOM 2012 SP1 PowerShell script from here to include the relevant prereqs for SCOM 2016 and SCOM 2012 R2.

This version has some new aesthetics built-in and will download and install the SQLSysClrTypes and ReportViewer utilities to a folder location of your choice (modify the $dwnld variable to specify a folder).

The updated script can be downloaded from my GitHub repo here:

https://github.com/kgreeneit/scom/tree/main/SCOM-2016/prereq-scripts

SCOM - Sample OS Summary Dashboard

One of the reasons I love working with SCOM is the extensibility it has around dashboards and other visualizations. With the right know-how and PowerShell Kung-Fu, you can create some pretty cool solutions right out of the box.

This is what Microsoft's Wei H. Lim has been doing for the last year or so and if you're on Twitter and not following him, then you'll miss all this cool stuff!

Wei's latest post involves him creating a new management pack bundle (.MPB) for SCOM that contains a sample dashboard for displaying a summary of Operating System KPI's using the new 'blue bars' that have been introduced in SCOM 2012.

Check out the full post and download from the following link:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wei_out_there_with_system_center/archive/2015/06/01/opsmgr-sample-os-summary-dashboard-with-blue-bar-columns.aspx

Keep up the great work Wei!

Free eBook - System Center Operations Manager Field Experience

A couple of months ago, the guys over at Microsoft Press released a new free ebook titled 'System Center Operations Manager Field Experience'.

At 128 pages, it delivers some 'quick-hit' tips and tricks on deploying and managing SCOM in the real world and after reading through it today, I can confirm that there's some very useful pointers that you should take note of - particularly related to enhancing SCOM performance.

You don't have to read this book from front-to-back right away and instead, it can be used as a guide whenever you need to get some additional advice from the team of Premier Field and Support Escalation Engineers that authored it.

You can download it in a number of electronic formats from here:

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/ebooks#9780735695825

SCOM - Updated Hyper-V 2012 R2 Community MP

The SCOM MP authoring machines that are Daniele Grandini and Tao Yang have joined forces to create a super-charged management pack for Hyper-V 2012 R2 environments. The requirement for this community released MP has come about due to the lack of functionality and engineering effort gone into the existing Microsoft Hyper-V MP.

Here's a list of some of the features this new MP has:

Comprehensive discovery with at least the same information you can get from the SCVMM MP integration:

• OS and platform 
• Farm (very useful to create dashboards and groups)
• Hardware configuration
• Connected VHD(x)
• Connected NICs 

An optimized discovery that gets triggered when virtual machines are moved, started or stopped.

A complete replica monitoring scenario with diagnostics, recoveries (disabled by default) and tasks to resume replica.

A couple of monitor related to GPUs and remoteFX inherited from the MS provided MP, disabled by default since I consider them not useful. But in any case I didn’t want to lose monitoring capabilities.

Integration services obsolescence (only for Windows VMs since I don’t know how to update *nix VMs now that MS isn’t releasing anymore IS for platforms that have the services included in the kernel).

VHD(x) fragmentation level monitoring, this one can be noisy, but if you have fragmented VHDs you better know it, since the performance impact can be significant.

VM uptime in % in the observation period -  this can useful to bill on uptime.

VM measures as performance counters for enabled virtual machines (Enable-VMMeasure).

You can learn more about this MP from Daniele's blog post here and you can download it directly from GitHub or the Technet Gallery using these links:

https://github.com/brandubh/HypervMP

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Hyper-V-2012-R2-management-2e067735

When you give it a test drive, feel free to add your comment's or requests to Daniele's blog posting or on GitHub.

SCOM - Free Log File Monitoring MP from NiCE

If you use SCOM regularly, you'll know that it can monitor just about anything in some way shape or form once it's connected to a network! This extensible capability is greatly enhanced by the various management packs that Microsoft, third-party vendors and System Center community authors release and our friends over at NiCE have just recently released an awesome one to add to your collection.

The SCOM Log File Monitoring management pack enables you to dive into those log files from bespoke line-of-business applications and garner useful information to help you better understand how the applications are performing.

Best of all about this management pack - its FREE! (that was NiCE of them....)

Here's an overview taken directly from their website:

As we all know, business critical applications write health and performance information to log files and this data is often left unattended and simply archived. It is time to tap into the pool of information that is contained in the log files. The NiCE Log File MP is THE product to scan and analyze the information contained in your log files. It provides more than 100 custom wizards to the SCOM Authoring console to create rules and monitors with ease. Additionally, all parts of the NiCE Log File MP leverage native SCOM capabilities and provide a powerful tool that analyzes log content in full detail.

My good buddy and fellow System Center MVP Marnix Wolf wrote up a super blog post on a real-world example where this management pack can be used to solve problems and you can check out his post here.

If you haven't already downloaded the Log File Monitoring MP, then you can get it from this link:

http://www.nice.de/log-file-monitoring-scom-nice-logfile-mp

Enjoy!

SCOM - URL Genie Management Pack

If you're working with SCOM and have a requirement to monitor a large number of URL's, you'll understand the pain of how long it takes to get them under monitoring using the built-in Web Application Transaction Monitoring Wizard.

Well, Microsoft's Tyson Paul (Premier Field Engineer), has come up with an awesome management pack to speed up this process and after him spending the best part of 2 years on and off developing it, you know you're going to get a quality end-result.

He's created the URL Genie Management Pack and here's an overview of what it does (taken from his original post):

The URL Genie Management Pack provides a fast and easy way to implement monitoring for a large numbers of URL instances from only a few instances up to many thousands! In addition there are some special features which allow monitoring sites which require client certificates in addition to pages that use forms-based authentication. With URLGenie you can easily configure monitoring for thousands of standard URL instances in less than a minute.

For a full description and walkthrough of this awesome MP, check out his blog post at the following link:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tysonpaul/archive/2015/05/04/urlgenie-management-pack-for-scom-an-easy-solution-for-bulk-website-monitoring.aspx

You can download it directly from the TechNet Gallery here.

Even if you don't have a requirement to manage large numbers of URL's, this MP is definitely worth taking a look at and I'll be putting it to good use in the coming months as I come across the need to use it.

Thanks for the effot in putting out this great free contribution to the SCOM community Tyson!

SCOM - New Community Health State Synchronization Library MP

The management pack authoring machine that is Tao Yang has been hard at work again.

This time he's written an MP to synchronize the health state from a monitoring object managed by a remote management group into a local management group to support managing multiple SCOM management groups.

Having this multi-management group management scenario is seriously useful - particularly if you're working with multi-tenancy in your datacenter.

Read through Tao's detailed post on his blog here:

http://blog.tyang.org/2015/04/19/new-mp-opsmgr-health-state-synchronization-library/

Then if you're working with multiple management groups in SCOM, make sure you download it to make life so much easier for you :)

SCOM - New Community Windows Azure Pack MP

Another super community contribution - this time from my buddy Oskar Landman - here's a picture of me towering over him at the MVP Summit a few years back...

Noticing that the existing Windows Azure Pack MP was seriously lacking functionality, Oskar took it on himself to rewrite it completely and then release a new version to the community for free!

He's added diagram views, performance views and enough state views to keep everyone happy..

If you or your customers have deployed Windows Azure Pack and are using SCOM, then this MP is an absolute no-brainer to import.

Check out Oskar's full post on SystemCenterCentral.com from the link below:

http://www.systemcentercentral.com/windows-azure-pack-scom-management-pack/

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

SCOM - Various Ways to Find the ID of a Monitoring Object

A while back, my buddy Tao Yang (underground purveyor of Tim Tam's and System Center MVP) wrote an awesome post on how to find the ID of a particular object that's monitored with SCOM.

In his post he demonstrates several methods to retrieve the ID and if you're responsible for creating dashboards, management packs or reports, then this post is a must-read.

Check it out here - http://blog.tyang.org/2015/03/11/various-ways-to-find-the-id-of-a-monitoring-object-in-opsmgr/

SCOM - Microsoft Platform Ready Test Tool for Management Packs

It's been way too quiet on this blog lately - mainly due to a new book project that I'm in the middle of  - but over the coming few days, I've cleared some time to catch up on the long list of cool blog posts, tools and management packs that have been released in recent months by the System Center community for SCOM.

First up is a handy tool for anyone that's involved in developing management packs for SCOM called the Microsoft Platform Ready Test Tool.

With this tool, mp authors can ensure they are meeting best practice compliance and recommendations for their management packs.

Check out the following screenshots....

You can download this tool for free here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=46400