Category Archives: SCOM 2007

SCOM: Objects, Classes, Targeting and You

This posting will be part of my SCOM basics series and covers the key concepts of Objects and Classes.

Objects

An object is the basic unit of management in Operations Manager. An object typically represents something in your computing environment, such as a computer, a logical disk, or a database. It could also represent something more abstract, such as an application, an Active Directory domain, or a DNS zone. An object can also be referred to as an instance of a particular Class.

Classes

A class represents a kind of object, and every object in Operations Manager is considered an instance of a particular class. All instances of a class share a common set of properties. Each object has its own values for these properties which are determined when the object is discovered.

Most management packs define a set of classes that describe the different components that make up the application that is being monitored and the relationships between those classes

Targeting

A target in the Operations console represents all instances of a particular class. For example, a viewlists all of the objects that are instances of the class that is used as the target class for the view, and a monitor is applied to all objects that are instances of the monitor’s target class.

targets

Classes have two further categories. Base Classes and Hosted Classes

Base Classes

Every class in Operations Manager has a base class. A class has all the properties of its base class and could add more. All of the classes from the different management packs installed in your management group can be arranged in a tree with each class positioned under its base class.

When you select a class as a target that is a base class for other classes, the monitor or rule applies to all instances of each of those classes. For example, if you use Windows Operating System as the target for a monitor, then the monitor applies to all instances of Windows Client Operating System and Windows Server Operating System. This is because those two classes use Windows Operating System as their base class.

Hosted Classes

Most classes are hosted by another class. When one class hosts another, the hosting class is called the parent, and the class being hosted is called the child. Instances of the child class cannot exist without a parent.

For example, several classes are hosted by Windows Computer because they are components on a computer. It would not make sense to have a logical disk if there was no computer for the disk to be installed on. Therefore, Logical Disk is hosted by Windows Computer. This means that every instance of Logical Disk must have one instance of Windows Computer as its parent.

Note about Groups

I’ve included groups in this posting because it can be a common mistake to try and use a group as a target for a rule / monitor this can cause that rule / monitor to not function correctly as the class for a group only exists on a management server, the group will not be enumerated into it’s members from the target selection.

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SCOM: Checking for a word on a webpage

Monitoring if a website is available is simple enough with the SCOM 2012 Web application availability wizard but what if you want to check if a specific word appears on that page?

In order to add this additional criteria to your web application monitor first open your web app and click on Change Configuration:
webappconfig

Then in the section titled alerts tick the box for Content Match, then choose if the word or phase you are looking for must be present or missing and type the word or phrase into the criteria box. In this example an alert will be generated if my page does not contain the word Demo.

webappconfig2

And there you have it a web application which will alert you if a word appears on a monitored web page.

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SCOM: Updated SharePoint 2010 Products Management Pack 14.0.7137.5000

The MP for SharePoint 2010 Products  14.0.7137.5000 was updated to fix a bug in the service discovery it is available for download here

This update contains a bug fix:

  • SharePoint 2010 MP had a PS1 file with syntax error causing the shared service discovery to fail. With this fix the PS1 file syntax error is resolved and the discoveries will be made.

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SCOM: The System Center Management service terminated with service-specific error %%-2130771964

Just a quick issue which bares being noted.

A colleague of mine had an issue where the health service on one of his management servers would not start. The error displayed was “The System Center Management service terminated with service-specific error %%-2130771964″

The resolution is simple, rename the Health Service State folder and then start the service.

This issue is caused by corruption in the health service cache which is preventing the service from starting,

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SCOM: Updated Windows Server MP v6.0.7297.0

Version 6.0.7297.0 of the Windows server management pack has been released and in available for download here.

Updates in this version:

  • In 2008, 2012 platforms, the “Logical Disk Free Space (%) Low” monitor do not alert as expected when free space is 0%. With this fix, this monitor will alert when free space is 0%
  • In all platforms, logical disks are un-discovered if we configure them as Asymmetric storage on Failover Cluster. With this fix, this issue will be resolved
  • The Windows Server OS Management pack collects logical disk size is megabytes. During discovery this value used to be assigned to integer property. When logical disk size is significantly large (for example, when disk is of several petabytes), in megabytes format it goes out of boundaries of integer type. As a result the workflow fails while trying to insert discovery data. To support large logical disk another double properties was introduced, since double type has much more wide values range. Old integer property with constant “-1” value is preserved for upgrade compatibility and marked as DEPRECETED
  • “Volume Mount Points on Dynamic Disks” aren’t discovered by Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Discovery MP. With this fix, this issue will be resolved
  • MP has been modified to not discover System Reserved volumes on Windows Server 2012 to ensure it is consistent with the rest of the OS versions

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SCOM: Deleting a MP with a Microsoft.SystemCenter.SecureReferenceOverride dependency

This situation will occur when you try and remove a management pack that utilities a Run As account. You’ll get an error that the management pack is dependent on Microsoft.SystemCenter.SecureReferenceOverride and removing that can be a little bit painful.

Anyone one who has ever removed a management pack with a dependency knows the old method of exporting the management pack, removing the offending refference and importing it back again. The steps for Microsoft.SystemCenter.SecureReferenceOverride are slightly different but the principle is the same.

1. First you need to remove the Run AS account from the Run As Profile
2. Export the Microsoft.SystemCenter.SecureReferenceOverride management pack
3. Edit the management pack and remove the references as you would with any other dependency
4.  Increment the management pack version
5. Re import the management pack

Here is a nice method from Matthew Long which uses powershell and doesn’t require any XML editing.

The below is copied for my records, original posting here

  1. Open a powershell session with the Operations Manager module/snappin loaded.
  2. Type: $MP = Get-SCOMManagementpack -Name Microsoft.SystemCenter.SecureReferenceOverride
  3. Now we can view the referenced management packs by typing $MP.References
  4. From the list of items in the Key column, note down the alias of your MP you wish to delete.  If you are having trouble finding it, the Value column will list the full ID of the MP.
  5. Now that we know the MP alias, we can remove it from the Secure Reference MP by typing $MP.References.Remove(“yourMPAliasGoesHere“)
  6. Now we can verify the MP is valid by entering $MP.Verify()  to ensure there are no orphaned overrides, etc.
  7. Finally, we can save our changes by typing: $MP.AcceptChanges()

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SCOM: Database Status Report

I’ve been tinkering with trying to get a single health view for one of my clients SCOM environments.

I started with the SQL instance as this can be intensive to manually check every component.

Here is a sample of what it looks like so far my next step is to add free space information:

DB Status Report

 

Thanks to Dave Pinal for his post giving me a starting point.

Please leave a comment if you have any suggestions as to what else can be added or if you have something similar.

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XPost: Creating dynamic groups for objects which exist behind a gateway in OpsMgr

Cameron Fuller said it best “Even when you spend years working on a specific technology occasionally you are pleasantly surprised to find out that something already exists in the product but you are unaware of it.”

He has written an article which is available here which describes the use of the /SiteName switch when approving a gateway in order to automatically create and populate a group containing all devices being managed by that gateway.

This is certainly a useful feature.

Note – If you use the /sitename switch then bookmark this article by Brian McDermott – How to remove an OpsMgr 2012 Gateway Server that is associated with a site to prevent some future headaches.

 

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SCOM: Cluster maintenance mode, resource groups and you

One of my colleagues brought an issue to my attention whereby placing a Cluster server into maintenance mode was causing a flood of  “Cluster resource or group offline or partially online” alerts from that clusters resource groups.

It turns out that the default maintenance mode setting for the Resource Group dependency rollup monitor is “Rollup monitor in maintenance mode as error”. This means that any objects rolling up as maintenance mode will cause the resource group monitor to go critical and generate “Cluster resource or group offline or partially online” alerts.

Changing the value to maintenance mode alleviates this issue. I’ve also has success placing the resource groups into maintenance mode before the cluster objects.

clusterb

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SCOM: Windows Server OS MP update 6.0.7296.0

It looks like MS has released a fixed version of the Windows Server OS MP so the duplicate drive discovery issue should be resolved now. This highlights the importance of testing management packs before releasing them into your live environments.

This version is 6.0.7296.0 and is available for download here

Changes in this version

  • In 2003, 2008, 2008R2 platforms, the mount point discovery script was also discovering logical disks as mount points which appeared to many as duplicates. These mount points for logical disks were removed to prevent confusion.
  • In 2012, 2012R2 platforms, mount point discovery was causing rediscovery of logical disks and this rediscovery resulted in rules being run again. This was fixed.
  • In all platforms, duplicate performance rules were shown for mount points and logical disks. This has been fixed.

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