I came across a great article on TechNet which is essentially a compilation of useful SCOM information, it includes everything from the basics and key concepts, to deployment guidelines and information on how to configure and use different features.
This is definitely one to keep in your favorites
Go here for the full article
With the release of SCOM 2012 R2 Microsoft has official amended the supported SQL collation settings. In the past you had to use SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS, this was due to the data warehouse being installed with this setting by default regardless of the SQL server collation setting. This was a nice addition which has been due for a long time, having collation mismatches between your OpsDB and DW can cause a whole host of issues which are well documented.
Of course the new settings only apply to fresh installations, when upgrading the previous collation settings will still be used.
Click here for the complete supported configuration.
Here is the full list of supported collations:
SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
Latin1_General_100_CI_AS, // EN, IT, DE, PT-BR, NE, PT-PT
French_CI_AS
French_100_CI_AS
Cyrillic_General_CI_AS
Chinese_PRC_CI_AS
Chinese_Simplified_Pinyin_100_CI_AS, // CN simplified
Chinese_Traditional_Stroke_Count_100_CI_AS, // CN traditional, CN-HK
Japanese_CI_AS; Japanese_XJIS_100_CI_AS
Traditional_Spanish_CI_AS
Modern_Spanish_100_CI_AS
Latin1_General_CI_AS
Cyrillic_General_100_CI_AS, // RU
Korean_100_CI_AS
Czech_100_CI_AS
Hungarian_100_CI_AS
Polish_100_CI_AS
Finnish_Swedish_100_CI_AS.
Although this is similar to alerting when a user is added to a security group there are a few things that need to be changed.
Target: Windows Domain Controllers
Log: Security
Event ID: 5136
EventDescription contains: “Name of Distribution Group”
User added
EventDescription contains: %%14674
User removed
EventDescription contains: %%14675
Veeam has recently announced version 7 of their Veeam Management Pack for System Center. The most exciting new feature is the inclusion of support for Microsoft Hyper-V which has been a long awaited addition.
It is currently in public beta which does not include the support for VMware and requires Microsoft System Center 2012 and later and Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 and later.
Click here for more information and to sign up for the beta.
Press release available here.
Here is an article from the OpsMgr Engineering Blog detailing an issue with SCOM discovering Ckuster Resources
“If a Cluster has orphaned object entries in ClusterHive registry key, the System Center Operations Manager agent may not discover some or all Cluster resources. This can occur with System Center Operations Manager 2007 (OpsMgr 2007) or System Center 2012 Operations Manager (OpsMgr 2012).”
The article details a fix which envolves locating and then removing the orphaned objects:
“First, use the Failover Cluster PowerShell commands Get-ClusterResource and Get-ClusterGroup to get the list of Resources and Groups. Then, using the output, check for Resources/Groups that appear as Offline and verify if these can be seen in the Failover Cluster Console. Verify with the Cluster administrator whether these are still valid, then assuming they are not and you’ve identified which ones that are orphaned, delete them using these commands from an elevated CMD Prompt (Run As Administrator):
For orphaned resources: Cluster RES “<RESOURCE_NAME>” /DELETE
For orphaned groups: Cluster GROUP “<GROUP_NAME>” /DELETE
Once this is done the missing cluster resources should now be discovered.”
One of the additional features of the recent Update Rollup 2 for SCOM 2012 R2 is new widgets, these are made availible by completing the import of the new manegements packs portion of the Update Rollup process, which includes Microsoft.SystemCenter.Visualization.Library.mpb.
This article contains a list of the new widgets as well as a brief description of each. There are some welcome additions which should enable a much richer dashboard experience.
Microsoft has released version 6.5.0.0 of the SQL MP which enables the discovery and monitoring of SQL Server 2014 Database Engines, Databases, SQL Server Agents and other related components. This Management Pack is designed to run by Operations Manager 2007 R2 (except dashboards), Operations Manager 2012 or Operations Manager 2012 R2.
For more information, including a list of new features and improvements go here.