Author Archives: Warren Kahn

Azure Monitor Agent (AMA) goes preview

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The new Azure Monitor Agent, is available for preview in the Azure Portal, lets have a look at how to configure data collection for this new experience.

If the Azure Monitor blade there are a couple of changes, we’re interested in the new option called Data Collection Rules this is how we’ll tell out new agent what data to collect.

Clicking new we can see there’s a few tabs to configure, under Basics, we need to name our rule, choose a subscription and resource group.

Next we need to choose the Virtual Machines we can to add to the rule, this will also deploy the agent to the VM if necessary. Note that due to the agent being in preview that it is not available in all regions currently.

Below the selected machines are all set and ready to go.

Finally we need to configure what this rule is collecting, you can choose logs or metrics and you can be more granular then before when it comes to log collection with a custom filter.

You can also have log and metrics collections in the same rule.

Once everything is configured simply click create, the agent will be deployed if necessary and the collection will start.

Easy as pie, enjoy the new monitoring experience!

SCOM 2019: Scheduled reports fail to run – The job failed. Unable to determine if the owner has access

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I encountered a minor issue today which luckily proved simple to solve. Hopefully this proves useful to others.

The Issue:

In a brand new SCOM 2019 deployment the scheduled reports weren’t sending. After investigation I found the below error in the Application log on the SSRS server:

SQL Server Scheduled Job ’62A9826E-082B-4ACD-9270-6BC13FC260BE’ (0x832F33183531EF4483665BBBFCCEBD9A) – Status: Failed – Invoked on: 2020-08-05 11:00:00 – Message: The job failed. Unable to determine if the owner (DOMAIN\USER) of job 62A9826E-082B-4ACD-9270-6BC13FC260BE has server access (reason: Could not obtain information about Windows NT group/user ‘DOMAIN\USER’, error code 0x5. [SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 15404)).

The Solution

The SSRS Instance, in this case SQL 2016 SP2, was deployed using system accounts for the SQL Server and SQL agent services. Simply changing these to use a domain account with access to the SQL instance resolved the issue and reports started sending shortly after.

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SCOM 2019: Update Rollup 2 Released!

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UR 2 for SCOM 2019 is out and it’s a big one get it here

This is a fantastic update with the long awaited MP change tracking feature and tons of fixes.

What’s new?

  • Change tracking for management packs
  • Improvements in scheduled maintenance mode
  • Favorite reports in web console
  • Support for folders in monitoring view of web console
  • Support for CentOS 8

What’s fixed?

This is a big update and the list of fixes is long as this includes not only the recent SCOM hotfix but also many other useful changes see here for the full list.

Coming soon: SCOM as a Service!

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Let me start by saying that this news is really exciting, as any one in the monitoring world can tell you SCOM has faced a little bit of uncertainty in the past and the announcement of an upcoming SCOMaaS offering from Microsoft sends a clear message that the product has a place in the companies future.

Not a lot of information is available yet but here’s what we do know:

For starters the solution will be containerized which will leverage all of the benefits of containers such as speed of deployment and scaling to name a few.

A SCOM administrator will be able to “lift & shift” their existing SCOM environment into Azure – Aakash Basavaraj Program Manager for the SCOM Team at Microsoft.

This bodes well for existing SCOM customers as it means that the ability to easily migrate to a SCOMaaS solution will be available and that they won’t have to set up their new platform from scratch. This really shows that Microsoft has given thought and care towards truly bringing SCOM to the cloud.

When will is be available?

Unfortunately no details are available yet around timelines or pricing, I know I’ll be watching this develop with keen interest. One thing is for certain SCOM and Azure Monitor are now more firmly hand in hand then ever before.

SCOM 2019: Updated SQL Management Packs for SSRS and SSAS v7.0.22.0

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Updated management packs for SSRS and SSAS have been released, they are available at the below links and support versions from 2012 through to 2019 and now include Power BI Report Server:

SQL Server Analysis Services

SQL Server Reporting Services

SQL Server Analysis Services MP Changelog

What’s New

  • Added support for SQL Server Analysis Services 2012, 2014, and 2016 in addition to previously supported 2017 and up
  • Added Start/Stop Analysis Services Windows Service tasks
  • Implemented Database Status monitor 
  • Updated display strings

SQL Server Reporting Services MP Changelog

What’s New

  • Added support for monitoring SQL Server Reporting Services 2012, 2014, and 2016 in addition to 2017 and up
  • Added Start/Stop Reporting Services Windows Service tasks
  • Updated Event Log Collection Target Management Server Discovery to make it use default SCOM action profile instead of SQL MP Discovery run as profile
  • Updated display name of SSRS Deployment object to display AG name as part of it instead of GUID
  • Updated logic of installation detection for local Reporting Services instance to query Windows Registry instead of WMI
  • Improved error handling for cases when error “Process with an Id is not running” is returned
  • Updated display strings

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed false alerting with status code 400 in monitor Report Manager Accessible for SSRS 2016 and PBIRS
  • Fixed alert parameter replacement failure in monitor Report Manager Accessible
  • Fixed issue with accessing DBConnectionString property of PBIRS
  • Fixed NullReferenceException error when Report Server portal being configured to have several ports

Scheduling reports using your Azure Monitor data

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It’s quite a common ask, as to how to take the data in an Azure Monitor Logs workspace and create a report that can then be scheduled. Lets take a look at how we can achieve that.

Immediately we are talking about automation when we use the word schedule and Azure has several tools which we can use. The best fit in this case is Logic Apps.

In this example we will create a report showing if any agents haven’t had a successful heartbeat in the past 24 hours.

Navigate to the Logic Apps blade in your Azure Portal and click +Add

Populate the fields selecting my subscription and resource group, creating a new RG if necessary. Then I’ll give my logic app a name and choose my Azure region and click Review + Create and then Create

Once the deployment is complete I can navigate to the resource and it automatically opens the Logic Apps Designer. Now every Logic App needs to start with a trigger and because I want to run a schedule I am going to use Recurrence

I want this on a daily basis so I’m going to enter 24 Hour as my parameters and then click new step

Search for Run Query and Visualize Results as this option will allow a KQL query as a parameter and the results can be manipulated in a variety of ways. Make sure to select the one for Azure Monitor Logs and not for Azure Data Explorer.

You will need to sign in to create a connection with Azure Monitor Logs. Now populate the fields choosing the subscription, resource group and workspace that contains the data you want to use in your report. Put your query in the relevant section and choose chart type HTML.

Heartbeat
| project TimeGenerated, Computer
| where TimeGenerated < now()
| summarize ["Last Heartbeat"]=max(TimeGenerated) by Computer
| where ["Last Heartbeat"] < ago(24h)

The last thing that needs to be done is connect the logic app to a step to send email, click New Step, search for send an email, I’ll be using Office365 but you can use other providers. Select Send an email v2 and sign in to create the connection.

Populate as below making sure to include the attachments

Click save and we’re all good to go. Now test by clicking Run.

You should receive an email with an attachment and voila opening it will have a nice html table with our query results.

These steps can be easily replicated and amended to be used for any number of handy reports using your Azure Monitor Logs data.

SCOM 2016: UR9 released!

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The latest Update Rollup for SCOM 2016 is out, you can get it here

A decent update fixing a couple of issues that have been around for a while. As always test before applying to your production environments.

What’s new and fixed?

  • Fixed: On Windows Computer View of SCOM Console, Queries are optimized for better performance.
  • Fixed: We have updated SPROC to handle Alert Source Path Names which are greater than 512 in length. It was a mismatch where the table which was populating the DB was allowing larger strings while the table which was populated in this view took only 512. This caused data truncation and subsequently console crash.
  • Fixed: Made changes to the IP address parameter to support both IPv4 and IPv6 windows cluster.
  • Fixed: Fixed the issue with conversion of data smaller than 0.01 which was generated by Rule or Monitor. The data was transformed to a wrong (big) value on systems with OS locale language which has comma (“,”) instead of dot (“.”) as decimal format.
  • Fixed: Fixed the schedule reports through the Schedule Management Wizard in APM AppAdvisor. Previously, it was failing with XML Malformed exception.
  • Fixed: In a scenario where SCOM monitors 100s of virtual machines hosted on a single Hyper-v server; every hour the MonitoringHost.exe of each Virtual machine write into the VM page file simultaneously. Due to this concurrent paging, every hour disk I/O increases and database becomes unresponsive. HealthService.exe now have Memory Trimming enabled by default on an hourly schedule. A registry key is provided to disable the memory trimming and control the duration.

Registry key is: “HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft Operations Manager\3.0\Setup\MonitoringHost\MemoryTrimming“Enable – 0 (Trimming is disabled); 1 (trimming is enabled)DelayInSeconds – Time period agent waits to start trimming (default is 120s)PeriodInSeconds – Recurring period at which the working set should be  trimmed (default is 3600s)

  • Fixed: Downtime duration will be calculated correctly for non-US time format in Downtime Report.
  • Fixed: fn_MPVersionDependentId creates an ID for each installed MP. The ID is a SHA1 hash of string “MPName, Version, Schema”. When the “Schema” part is omitted, it generates different hash which doesn’t match with the expected value. In the fix, “Schema=2” part is re-added in fn_MPVersionDependentId.
  • Fixed: We have made sure that correct end date for Availability, Health and Performance Details are shown in reports
  • Enabled support for MSOLEDBSQL driver so that users may move from SQL Native Client.

Management Pack Recap – January & February 2020 Wave

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This is a summary of the wave of Management Packs that were released in January and February 2020. Information and download location in the links provided:

Certificate MP v1.4.3.0 – here
SQL Management Pack v7.0.20.0 – here
Oracle Management pack v1.3.1683.0 – here

If you know of any other Management Packs that have been released recently that I may have missed leave me a note in the comments and I’ll add them

Azure Monitor and SCOM: Together in a hybrid world

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I recently published an article on LinkedIn with my thoughts on monitoring Hybrid cloud with Azure Monitor and SCOM, I am cross posting on my blog for my record but if you prefer you can also read it here https://lnkd.in/d8PvWsH

With the shift of the IT landscape towards public cloud and then toward hybrid there has been some confusion as to which monitoring solutions are the best fit. People with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) are wondering about the product life-cycle and others are wondering where Azure Monitor comes into the picture.

Hopefully I can shed a little light onto this puzzle.

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First lets look at SCOM, well good news, it’s not going anywhere for quite some time. The current iteration 2019 has a commitment of 10 years of support from Microsoft with an Update Rollup release every 6 months. If you have any on-premise real estate then SCOM is still a strong contender to manage those systems with it’s powerful proven track record, extensible custom monitoring and data-center focused features. If you have extended your network into the cloud you can also leverage these features for your data center-like IaaS components such as VMs.

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Now for your cloud needs, let’s talk Azure Monitor. You may be thinking “but I’m not using Azure” and that’s ok because have I got more good news for you, Azure Monitor can integrate with VM’s running on other clouds, additionally with Azure Arc you can now make use of Azure services and features on any cloud.

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Azure Monitor is a cloud first monitoring tool as such it’s designed to manage and monitor a wide range of cloud components and services leveraging not only the real-time capabilities of Azure Metrics but also the power of Log Analytics both of which feed into a wide variety of insights, visuals and analysis tools. This allows you to have a complete in-depth picture of your cloud real estate from a single location. Azure Monitor is also designed to be configured to monitor only the items you deem most critical which, when done properly results in a lean noise free monitoring experience.

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So what should I use to monitor my Hybrid Cloud scenario?

The short answer is: No matter where you are you are on your cloud journey there’s a monitoring scenario that has you covered.

Regardless of whether you are migrating your VMs to an IaaS platform; refactoring your on-premise applications to leverage PaaS/SaaS services or have some applications which reach back into your on-premise environment, you have options and you don’t have to use a single tool either

Lets unpack this a bit.

If you have a large on-premises environment then certainly a data center designed tool such as SCOM will meet your needs and it can also cater for any VMs that you have migrated into the cloud. This will of course give you the on-prem monitoring experience that you are familiar with, which does offer a level of comfort while preparing to move to more cloud focused services.

Similarly if you are nearing the end of your cloud journey then Azure Monitor has got you covered from Billing to Subscriptions and everything in-between. Not only will you be able to proactively handle your tenant and resources through automation but you will also have access to rich interactive reports in the form of workbooks as well as machine learning capabilities.

However if you are between these two scenarios you can use both tools, in fact I’d even encourage it, they work very well together and leverage each others strengths to give a comprehensive single pane of glass across any Hybrid environment.

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Silect Dashboards for SCOM

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Silect has released an awesome set of dashboards for SCOM and best of all they’re free. You can request your copy here.

All you need to get started is PowerBI Desktop available here, then load the pbix file and edit the data source to point at your SCOM database instances.

Then hit refresh and you’ll have 10 nice health dashboards with an overview of your SCOM environment.

I really like this solution, it’s elegant and easy to setup. Great job Silect.