The first update for System Center 2012 R2 has been released, Update Rollup 1 is avaibile here
This update contains 10 fixes for System Center 2012 Operations Manager and adds support for Oracle Solaris 11 aswell as fixing 8 issues with UNIX and Linux Monitoring.
It’s nice to see the release of an update so soon after the initial launch.
Update: Kevin Holman has written a great step by step article for applying this update, there are some thing to e aware of.
Something I’ve noticed, being exposed to a variety of SCOM deployments, is that in quite a few cases Management Packs are installed and never looked at again. Generally this seems to stem from either the engineer looking after the environment doesn’t know any better or is perhaps too cautious to perform an update but there may be other specific reasons such as client restrictions.
Never the less it is good practice to check all of your management packs regularly, I’d say at least once a month, to see if any updated versions are available.
The easiest way to check MPs available through the catalog is to use the wizard in the SCOM console and search for “Updates Available for installed Management Packs”
In my experience once you have found a new version of a particular MP has been released it is always a good idea to download the MSI from the relevant site instead of using the wizard. This is because if a new management pack has been added to the package that wasn’t there in the previous version then you will not detect it as an update for an installed Management Pack.
If you have management packs not available through the catalog then they unfortunately need to be checked against the latest version at the vendor site manually.
Remember: If possible always test before deploying a new version of a management pack, if you don’t have access to a lab then an alternative is to keep an eye on community blogs and sites like System Center Central and MP Wiki, to see if any issues crop up.
If you have a good method for keeping your management packs up to date leave a comment.
Here is a great article on using the “Sync time” property correctly in SCOM overrides and workflows, written by Kevin Holman, follow the link for the complete article. On a side note it’s good to see Kevin back in the saddle as a PFE for SCOM. I’m sure we’re all looking forward to what wizardry he comes up with.
“We use the scheduler datasource in SCOM for workflows for all kinds of purposes. Most workflows have some concept of a schedule in the datasource to tell how often to inspect for something, like a service running, or to look at perfmon data, or to run a script.
The most common property would be the Interval, which is how often we want the workflow to run.
SyncTime is another common property. This is used to tell the workflow to run “synchronized” on a very specific point in time. From: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj130319.aspx“
With another year of innovation in the ESM space behind us, I for one am certainly looking forward to see what 2014 brings us, both in the System Center world and in the world at large.
I’d also like to say thank you again to all the supporters of this Blog, it’s been rewarding to finally get it up and running and seeing the readership climbing every month has been fantastic.