Category Archives: SCOM 2012 R2

SCOM: Veeam Management Pack™ v7 release and Special Offer!

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A name that that synonymous with monitoring VMware in the System Center Space, Veeam has now expanded their capabilities to give us the same depth and richness of features when monitoring Hyper-V.

Previously I wrote about the beta for the new Veeam Management Pack™ v7 adds support for Hyper-V. Well it has now been released and Veeam even has a special offer, you can get it for free!

“Limited Time Offer! Register today and get up to 100 sockets of Veeam Management Pack v7 Enterprise edition to manage your Hyper-V environment at no cost! Offer ends December 31, 2014.”

Here is a quick recap of the new features in v7:

  • Support for Hyper-V
  • Unique dashboards with customizable Veeam widgets
  • Veeam task manager for Hyper-V
  • Capacity planning for Hybrid Cloud
  • Monitoring and reporting for Veeam Backup & Replication Hyper-V environments

Go here for more information and to sign up.

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SCOM: NiCE releases management pack for zLinux

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It is always great when the  capabilities of Operation Manager are extended to monitor new areas that were previously outside of the general WinTel scope. The latest addition from NiCE is a zLinux management pack.

The NiCE zLinux MP is the first product of its class that provides monitoring of Linux server distributions on the IBM  system z platform using Microsoft System Center. IBM System z is a universal name used by IBM for all its mainframe  computers. These mainframe computers have gone through a number of name changes and are also known as System/390 or zSeries.

This management pack allows for inclusion of your zLinux components into your SCOM system which enables you to get a complete picture of the systems that are dependent on zLinux in a single end-to-end view.

Features
• Perform ‘Logical Disk Health checks’ i.e. easily ascertain the availability and performance of your Logical Disk (File System) instances
• Carry out ‘Network Adapter Health checks’ i.e. determine the availability and performance of your Network Adapter instances
• Execute ‘Operating System Health assessments’ i.e. effortlessly discover the availability and performance for Red Hat Enterprise
Linux Server Operating System instances
• Determine the health of your processor by effectively monitoring your processor instances

More information is available at the NiCE Customer Portal

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SCOM 2012 R2: Different coallation settings now supported.

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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.

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SCOM 2012 R2: UR2 New Widgets

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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.

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SCOM: New SQL 2014 MP

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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.

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SCOM 2012 R2: Update Rollup 2 Released

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Update Rollup 2 for SCOM 2012 R2 has been released and is availible for download here.

The update fixes the following issues:

Issue 1
This update rollup makes the stored procedure performance aggregate more robust against out-of-range values.

Issue 2
Adding multiple regular expressions (RegEx) to a group definition causes an SQL exception when the group is added or run.

Issue 3
Web applications fail when they are monitored by the System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 APM agent.

Issue 4
Service Level Objectives (SLO) dashboards sometimes load in several seconds and sometimes take minutes to load. Additionally, the dashboard is empty after it loads in some cases.

Issue 5
Operations Manager Console crashes when you try to override the scope in the Authoring pane.

Issue 6
The System Center Operations Manager console is slow to load views if you are a member of a custom Operator role.

Issue 7
This update rollup includes a fix for the dashboard issue that was introduced in Update Rollup 1.

Issue 8
SQL Time Out Exceptions for State data (31552 events) occur when you create Data Warehouse workflows.

Issue 9
This update rollup includes a fix for the Event Data source

Operations Manager – UNIX and Linux Monitoring (Management Pack Update)

Issue 1

All IBM WebSphere application servers that run on Linux or AIX computers are not automatically discovered by the Management Pack for Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) if multiple application servers are defined in a single WebSphere profile.

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SCOM 2012: Agent on Windows 2012 R2 servers can stop responding

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There is a known issue where SCOM 2012 agents stop responding on Windows 2012 R2 Domain Controllers but can affect other Windows 2012 R2 servers as well . Kevin Holman has posted an article with the resolution to this issue: Here

“This is caused by an issue in the Server OS (Windows Server 2012 R2), which is outlined at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2923126
There is a hotfix, which addresses the issue, which is included in the Feb 2014 update rollup hotfix:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2919394″

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SCOM 2012: Web based Maintenance Mode Tool

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A new web based maintenance mode tool has been released by Tim McFadden and is available for purchase here (with a 30 day free trial)

From the site “The new web based scheduler simplifies the process of scheduling maintenance mode for SCOM administrators and IT staff.  You can easily schedule a computer group or any object to maintenance mode in seconds.”

The tool looks very polished and comprised a web based interface as well as a windows 8 app. There is also a really nice feature included which allows a shortcut to be placed on any server desktop which when used will place that specific server into maintenance, now that’s cool.

Cost:
Site License with one year free updates $99
Site License with two years free updates $149

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System Center: Update Rollup 1 for System Center 2012 R2

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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.

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