Category Archives: Update Rollup

SCOM 2019: Update Rollup 5 is out!

UR5 for SCOM 2019 is available get it here!

A reasonable update with some quality-of-life fixes and enhancements, the most notable addition is the ability to discover SCOM MI instances in Azure which supports the hybrid approach to giving a single pane of glass across your on-prem and cloud IaaS estate.

Improvements

  • Discover Azure Monitor SCOM Managed Instance (preview) from SCOM console.

Issues that are fixed

Operations Manager 2019 Update Rollup 5 includes fixes for the following issues:

  • Fixed an issue where editing an existing Maintenance Mode schedule does not change the Reason and/or Comment.
  • Fixed an issue where when setting Maintenance Mode via PowerShell, the Availability Reports were not reflecting correct information.
  • Fixed the issue in which Member column in group View was introducing delay in group operations.
  • Fixed an issue of users getting HTTP200 error when trying to setup Log Analytics connection.
  • The script (GetOpsMgrDBPercentFreeSpace.vbs) which is part of System Center Core Monitoring MP monitor has been moved from VBS to PowerShell and, now reports Operations DataBase free space correctly.
  • A new registry key (for debugging purposes) to enable Bad.xml file creation is introduced in UR5 which does not exist by default but needs to be created. Registry key details below.
    • [HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HealthService\Parameters] – XmlDebugEnabled (DWORD) – default 0 and 1 for ENABLED

Security Enhancements

  • Fixed multiple Web Console Security Vulnerabilities.
    • Note: The Web.config files of both HTMLDashboard and MonitoringView web apps will be replaced, so any changes done to settings inside of these will have to be remade.
  • The organization of temporary files used for kerberos based authentication is further enhanced to prevent any misuse.
  • Fixed Data parsing issues in Linux agent that might cause the agent to crash.

Unix/Linux/Network monitoring fixes and changes

  • Fixed an issue where msgAuthenticationParameters needs to have 0 length during engine discovery of SNMPv3 devices. Also
  • Fixed an issue related to SNMP Discovery where we see MonitoringHost.exe crashes.
  • Fixed the issue where user was unable to run Get-SCXAgent and Invoke-SCXDiscovery remotely using Invoke-Command.
  • Fixed Linux agent crash issue caused by variable out of scope issue for _HandleGetClassReq.
  • Fixed an issue that would causes Linux agent to crash when DSC provider is installed.
  • Added supportability on Operations Manager Linux Agent for Rocky Linux 8, Alma Linux 8. systems with OpenSSL 3.0, RHEL 9.0 and Ubuntu 22.

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SCOM 2019: Update rollup 4 has arrived!

UR 4 is a fairly big update with a host of improvements and fixes, as always it can be downloaded from the catalog here now lets dive right in.

Overall some expected improvements to suppport later operating systems and versiosn of .net there are a tonn of fixes mostly around correcting minior issues which are too numerous to list here but can be found on the KB page

Improvements

  • Support for Windows 11
  • Enabled .NET4.8 support
  • UI improvements in Operations console:
    • Support for sort option by column, in Overrides Summary.
    • For Monitors, Rules, Task and Discoveries, Management Pack label text is selectable in the workflow Properties window.
    • Added new fields for Class Technical Name in the State Views. Added the same in the wizard for creating a new Alert, Event, Performance or State View.
    • Added Target Class Display Name to help identify the target of a rule while selecting rules during the creation of a new Performance View.
    • Added 3 new columns Management Pack, Sealed and Members in the Authoring pane > Groups.

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SCOM 2019: Update Rollup 3 released!

The much anticipated UR3 for SCOM 2019 is out as usual available through windows update or via the packages here

This is a solid update with many useful fixes and includes the security hotfix released last month for previous versions of SCOM 2019

Improvements and issues that are fixed

Operations Console fixes and changes

  • SCOM UI scaling issues for high resolution displays have been fixed to work seamlessly.
  • Some IPv4 resources were being discovered as IPv6 in a cluster where both resources co-existed. This logic has been fixed to ensure IPv4 resources are no longer discovered as IPv6.
  • The UR2 setup stalling issue at the “Removing backup files” stage has been fixed. The task wait time threshold has been set to 30 mins. It is also recommended to have Service Broker always enabled for smooth functioning of Operations Manager.
  • The assumption of having provider element to be the first reference in the connection string has been removed in the OleDB module.
  • Fixed the combo box related text issue regarding the domain of a new RunAs account getting incorrectly changed.This issue was arising when creating a new RunAs Account in the SCOM console for an account that belongs to an untrusted domain, the fix ensures that the domain of the newly created RunAs Account should remain the one initially specified during the account creation.
  • Fixed the “invalid class” error that was occurring when adding a subscriber with user details having more than 1024 attributes.
  • Daily aggregation of reports now takes date and time into consideration to ensure time-period calculation is accurate.
  • Fixed the monitoring agent related issue around formatted strings, these are now read from the provider dlls to show a localized string.
  • Fix has been provided for when the monitor erroneously turns critical due to the URL module incorrectly parsing the charset header value.

Web Console fixes and changes

  • The security issue regarding reverse tab nabbing has been fixed in the operations manager web console.
  • Fixed the filter issue that occurred when state view was created in “My Workspace” in the web console.
  • Global search option for Metrics section of Performance Widget in the Web Console has been fixed.

Other Fixes:

  • Updating Management Groups with a shared Data Warehouse to UR2 sometimes lead to issues with reports deployment. This is now fixed by restricting Installation of sealed MP with same version in the Data Warehouse.
  • Migrate SSL Admin certificates to Microsoft PKI – Pinning Thread for Agents
  • Fixed the issue that was occurring when the UR2 SQL patch is executed again on a previously patched database.
  • The deadlock issues arising when SCOM agents are put into maintenance mode using SCOM API with parallelism have been resolved by adding indexes and updating the SQL queries.
  • Performance improvement of the DB function fn_ManagedEntityLifetimeDependency.
  • Updated the scoping logic used in some State View queries and Console Cache Refresh queries for performance improvement.
  • Added “Recompile” flag for sprocs “p_SelectForTypeCache” and “p_SelectForNewTypeCache” for SCOM perf improvement.

Unix/Linux/Network monitoring fixes and changes:

  • The issue with SSH call failure leading to memory corruption has been fixed .
  • Fixed a thread race condition that was leading to Linux script based monitoring fails due to child process that failed to start.
  • Fixed an infinite loop condition, which was leading to the 100% CPU related issue.
  • The issue of the MonitoringHost.exe process crashing on the Management Servers that run the Unix/Linux workflows has been fixed.
  • Fixed the memory leak inside of the WsMan modules when UseMIAPI is enabled with workflows that have SplitItems set to TRUE for the EnumerateAsWA WriteAction.

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SCOM 2016: UR10 released!

Update rollup 10 for SCOM is out you can get it here.

This is a reasonably solid update with a few fixes for some long outstanding issues.

Improvements and issues that are fixed


  • Management Pack Import is now compatible for SCOM 2007 –> SCOM 2016 Upgrade version when upgraded directly or Indirectly.
  • The exception which blocked further progress when the user attempted to configure web application availability monitoring has been fixed.
  • The security issue regarding reverse tabnabbing has been fixed in the operations manager web console.
  • Fixed the Cross-site Scripting (XSS) related security issue in the operations manager web console.
  • The cmdlet Export-SCOMEffectiveMonitoringConfiguration has been fixed to give a correct summary of the applicable monitors, rules and overrides on an object.
  • Quarterly report end date will be shown correctly for the first quarter when the “From” field is selected as “First day of previous quarter” and “To” field is selected as “Last day of previous quarter”.
  • Reports have been fixed to not show objects which have been deleted before the selected start time.
  • VB scripts for partition and grooming, calculate operations manager free space and detecting duplicate agent will now run without failure even if SNAC or MSOLEDBSQL are not installed.
  • The issue regarding the TLS 1.2 compatibility in the OleDB module has been fixed. It is no longer mandatory for the provider element to be the first reference in the connection string.
  • Fix has been provided for when the monitor erroneously turned critical due to the URL module incorrectly parsing the charset header value.
  • The  .NET API  issue regarding scheduling reports via the schedule management wizard has now been fixed.  
  • Performance improvement: Added “Recompile” hint to the stored procedures “p_SelectForTypeCache” and “p_SelectForNewTypeCache” that run frequently on SCOM DB.

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SCOM 2019: Update Rollup 2 Released!

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.

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SCOM 2016: UR9 released!

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\MemoryTrimmingEnable – 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.

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SCOM 2019: UR1 has been released!

The much anticipated release of UR1 for SCOM 2019 is here and you can get it from the update catalog.

There’s quite a bit to unpack here so lets have a look

The big changes are of course support for gMSA which I for one have been looking forward to for a while. The security benefits are obvious and I can say while it does work well be aware that it is complex to implement so read those instructions thoroughly.

The one click upgrade experience is also a step in the right direction making things much simpler for the SCOM admin, just note it only includes the server update so you will still need to upgrade your console, reporting etc manually.

See below for a complete list of all the changes

Improvements and issues that are fixed


Web Console Fixes/Changes:

  • State widget now supports sorting by health and age. 
  • Alert widgets can now be searched on Date Time and sorted based upon age and severity.
  • The alert link in email notification when browsed throws an error, “Your session with the Web Console server expired” even though the user was not logged in web console . You will now see the login page post this fix.
  • Alert summary view in SCOM Web console was fixed in size.  This can be expanded as required now.
  • When Alert state is changed to some custom state, then these alerts are not displayed in web console. Alerts with custom resolution states will be displayed now.
  • Few additional scrollbars appear when a customer widget is created in web console or browser window size is reduced.
  • Improvement: SCOM views will load/save much faster than before. 

Unix/Linux/Network Monitoring Fixes/Changes:

  • SCX by default does Info level logging which causes SCX logs to be filled up soon. With 2019 UR1, Warnings and Errors will be logged by default not Info.
  • In the network device monitoring, if the node property is changed to null/empty, it displays the old value of the property not the null value. The actual value will be displayed now which includes null.
  • In a scenario where multiple (~500) virtual network interfaces are running on agent, SCOM sometimes received heartbeat failure alerts for such agents. SCOM will monitor only physical interfaces hosted on these machines. For monitoring virtual interfaces, you need to set “enumvif” to true. 
  • SNMP GET or SNMP WALK resulted monitoring host to crash when the network object ID is equal to ULONG Max. There is an error with event ID 4000 due to this crash.
  • For linux distros servers, when the kernel version >= 4.18, then file system related performance data is shown as 0 in SCOM. This is fixed in FS provider to make it kernel version agnostic and collect file system stat info.
  • Use of Async Windows Management Infrastructure (MI) APIs is default functionality from SCOM 2019 UR1 for scalability improvements.More details here

 Admin Console Fixes:

  • When admin created “one-time maintenance mode schedule” for non-English locales, SCOM console displays an error “The client has been disconnected from the server. Please call ManagementGroup.Reconnect() to reestablish the connection”. Admin would be able to create one-time maintenance schedule now.
  • When SCOM agent is multihomed, then SCOM 2019 MS always displays logon type as “Interactive” for this agent. The correct logon type will be displayed now.
  • Unit monitor to check correct logon type for Run as Account had incorrect name and Operational State.
  • “Operations Manager Products” view in Admin console did not update the “Version” column for the installed component version. This column will now reflect the updated version of all the components listed.

Others:

  • When system proxy is configured on the Reporting Server; proxy overrides are ignored by the “Report Console Watcher Monitor” and “Web Console Watcher Monitor” and as a result HTTP/HTTPS access fails.  With UR1 fix, “Set proxy Direct” parameter of the mentioned monitors can be set to true and URLs will be accessed.
  • SCOM did not discover Windows Cluster which are deployed on servers with IPV6 network only enabled. IPV6 network will be supported for cluster monitoring now.
  • When the Domain controller is moved to a different AD site, then SCOM does not display the correct site name. Any dynamic group which are created for SiteName will also fail

 In addition to these, all the issues fixed in SCOM 2016 UR8 and prior UR for SCOM 2016 are also fixed in SCOM 2019 UR1. Details of the fixes are below.

  • In a scenario where SCOM monitors 100s of virtual machines hosted on a single Hyper-v server; every hour the healthservice.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\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)

  • Historical data do not appear, if input reporting end time is before group creation time. With this fix, historic data for a group (if data is available for objects in the group) would be displayed irrespective of group creation time.
  • Maintenance mode state changes which are recorded in MaintenanceModeStage table requires grooming when table grows. If the table is large, grooming takes longer and the operation times out with SQLTimeOut exception.
  • If a group is renamed in a Management pack, then console shows the new value but Powershell command Get-SCOMGroup returns the old name of group. Database Updates functionality was inconsistent for SCOM group renaming through MP and SCOM Console.
  • CPU Spike issues because of workflows running on all agents at the same time is addressed through script optimization and removing the sync time. 
  • Improvement: Sometimes SQL stored procedure “p_SelectForNewTypeCache” takes long time to complete, and SDK service fails to start. This is fixed and above SQL stored procedure will complete faster now.
  • Improved the performance of SCOM console in listing the groups.
  • Users of a scoped group are not able to use the Console.
  • SCOM console crashes while trying to connect to Azure Log Analytics and Azure Monitor.
  • SCOM Network Device Re-Discovery now probes for SNMP V3 devices too.
  • Agents by Health State report shows duplicate agent names.
  • Fixed an issue that prevented addition of a group in the Storage Spaces Direct 2016 management pack dashboard.
  • Linux agent is not able to get the correct version and port details for JBoss EAP 7.1.
  • An issue that lead to creation of multiple empty temp files in the /tmp directory of Linux servers has been fixed.
  • Fixed the formatting issue with the output for the task ‘Top10 CPU Processes’ when using Windows Management Infrastructure (MI) APIs.
  • Fixed an issue that caused the corruption of /etc/login.cfg file on AIX 7 machines during install/upgrade of the agent.
  • AIX Agent is now transitioned to 64-bit package to accommodate more stack and heap space if needed to avoid any stack/heap overflow which occasionally leads to heartbeat failure.
  • Free memory calculation accommodated appropriately on RHEL-7 platform.

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SCOM: News from Ignite

This year at Ignite SCOM had it’s own dedicated session which is great to see. Here is a summary of the new upcoming features in UR1.

Version Agnostic Management Packs
Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) MP
RHEL 8 Support
One click patching experience
Support for gMSA
Relability and Performance Improvemennts for Linux Agent
Common Management Pack for Linux
Resource Group monitoring in Azure MP
Azure MP Web Console Dashboards

The ones I’m most looking forward to are of course the support for gMSA, with security being so critical in today’s IT real-estate this features adds an additional layer of peace of mind to your SCOM monitoring.

The one click patching experience is also a nice quality of life improvement, I had the privilege to see this in action and I like the direction this is going.

More agnostic management packs are also on the way which will simplify administration of products the same way we’ve seen them improve the SQL monitoring experience.

What do you think of this update? Leave a comment or if you have an idea head over to the SCOM Uservoice https://systemcenterom.uservoice.com/forums/293064-general-operations-manager-feedback and let the product group know.

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SCOM 2016: UR 8 is now available!

Update Rollup 8 for SCOM 2016 is now available, as usual you can get it through windows update or via the download catalogue here

Improvements and fixes


  • Fixed: In a scenario where SCOM monitors 100s of virtual machines hosted on a single Hyper-v server; every hour the healthservice.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\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: Historical data do not appear, if input reporting end time is before group creation time. With this fix, historic data for a group (if data is available for objects in the group) would be displayed irrespective of group creation time.
  • Fixed: Maintenance mode state changes which are recorded in MaintenanceModeStage table requires grooming when table grows. If the table is large, grooming takes longer and the operation times out with SQLTimeOut exception.
  • Fixed: If a group is renamed in a Management pack, then console shows the new value but Powershell command Get-SCOMGroup returns the old name of group. Database Updates functionality was inconsistent for SCOM group renaming through MP and SCOM Console.
  • Fixed: CPU Spike issues because of workflows running on all agents at the same time is addressed through script optimization and removing the sync time.
  • Fixed: If the registry key under “Computer\HKey_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft Operations Manager\3.0\Setup\UseMIApi” is set and a Unix/Linux Script task without a parameter is executed then this task fails. 
  • Improvement: Sometimes SQL stored procedure “p_SelectForNewTypeCache” takes long time to complete, and SDK service fails to start. This is fixed and above SQL stored procedure will complete faster now.

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SCOM 2016: UR7 is Live

Update rollup 7 for SCOM is now available as usual you can get it through windows update or here

How to guide – here note the known issues and slight change to getting started.

A decent update with quite a few fixes listed below:

Improvements and issues that are fixed


  • Fixed: Cannot use SQLOleDB.dll to probe databases like Oracle/MySQL.
  • Improved the performance of SCOM console in listing the groups.
  • Operations Manager grooms out the alert history only on an alert closure.
  • Agents by Health State report shows duplicate agent names.
  • Users of a scoped group are not able to use the Console.
  • Fixed an issue that prevented addition of a group in the Storage Spaces Direct 2016 management pack dashboard.
  • SCOM Network Device Re-Discovery now probes for SNMP V3 devices too.
  • Fixed re-registering for SNMP Traps in the Proxy Management Server.
  • Windows Computer Property “NetbiosDomainName” is not discovered properly.
  • SCOM console crashes while trying to connect to Azure Log Analytics and Azure Monitor.
  • Linux agent is not able to get the correct version and port details for JBoss EAP 7.1.
  • An issue that lead to creation of multiple empty temp files in the /tmp directory of Linux servers has been fixed.
  • Fixed the formatting issue with the output for the task ‘Top10 CPU Processes’ when using Windows Management Infrastructure (MI) APIs.
  • XPlat agent now supports monitoring of SUSE-11 SP4 platform with Security Module installed on it for TLS 1.2 compliance.
  • Fixed an issue that caused the corruption of /etc/login.cfg file on AIX 7 machines during install/upgrade of the agent.
  • AIX Agent is now transitioned to 64-bit package to accommodate more stack and heap space if needed to avoid any stack/heap overflow which occasionally leads to heartbeat failure.
  • Free memory calculation accommodated appropriately on RHEL-7 platform.

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