Category Archives: XPost

Azure Monitor and SCOM: Together in a hybrid world

I recently published an article on LinkedIn with my thoughts on monitoring Hybrid cloud with Azure Monitor and SCOM, I am cross posting on my blog for my record but if you prefer you can also read it here https://lnkd.in/d8PvWsH

With the shift of the IT landscape towards public cloud and then toward hybrid there has been some confusion as to which monitoring solutions are the best fit. People with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) are wondering about the product life-cycle and others are wondering where Azure Monitor comes into the picture.

Hopefully I can shed a little light onto this puzzle.

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First lets look at SCOM, well good news, it’s not going anywhere for quite some time. The current iteration 2019 has a commitment of 10 years of support from Microsoft with an Update Rollup release every 6 months. If you have any on-premise real estate then SCOM is still a strong contender to manage those systems with it’s powerful proven track record, extensible custom monitoring and data-center focused features. If you have extended your network into the cloud you can also leverage these features for your data center-like IaaS components such as VMs.

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Now for your cloud needs, let’s talk Azure Monitor. You may be thinking “but I’m not using Azure” and that’s ok because have I got more good news for you, Azure Monitor can integrate with VM’s running on other clouds, additionally with Azure Arc you can now make use of Azure services and features on any cloud.

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Azure Monitor is a cloud first monitoring tool as such it’s designed to manage and monitor a wide range of cloud components and services leveraging not only the real-time capabilities of Azure Metrics but also the power of Log Analytics both of which feed into a wide variety of insights, visuals and analysis tools. This allows you to have a complete in-depth picture of your cloud real estate from a single location. Azure Monitor is also designed to be configured to monitor only the items you deem most critical which, when done properly results in a lean noise free monitoring experience.

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So what should I use to monitor my Hybrid Cloud scenario?

The short answer is: No matter where you are you are on your cloud journey there’s a monitoring scenario that has you covered.

Regardless of whether you are migrating your VMs to an IaaS platform; refactoring your on-premise applications to leverage PaaS/SaaS services or have some applications which reach back into your on-premise environment, you have options and you don’t have to use a single tool either

Lets unpack this a bit.

If you have a large on-premises environment then certainly a data center designed tool such as SCOM will meet your needs and it can also cater for any VMs that you have migrated into the cloud. This will of course give you the on-prem monitoring experience that you are familiar with, which does offer a level of comfort while preparing to move to more cloud focused services.

Similarly if you are nearing the end of your cloud journey then Azure Monitor has got you covered from Billing to Subscriptions and everything in-between. Not only will you be able to proactively handle your tenant and resources through automation but you will also have access to rich interactive reports in the form of workbooks as well as machine learning capabilities.

However if you are between these two scenarios you can use both tools, in fact I’d even encourage it, they work very well together and leverage each others strengths to give a comprehensive single pane of glass across any Hybrid environment.

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XPost SCOM 1801: Caveat when upgrading from 2012R2/2016

Just a quick cross post from my college Robert Bird original posting here.

Be aware that when upgrading to SCOM 1801 in order to upgrade reporting successfully you need to install the SCOM console onto the SSRS instance first otherwise the upgrade will fail.

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Xpost: SCOM getting resource pool members with powershell

A post I came across from Ian Blyth with a short powershell script to show which Resource Pools your management servers are part of. It’s quite useful to see all of the resource pool members in one place without having to open each one in the console, particularly in larger environments.

For a single managementserver

$Member = Get-SCOMManagementServer -Name “FQDN”
$Pools = Get-SCOMResourcePool -Member $Member
$Member.DisplayName
$Pools.DisplayName

For all management servers

$Members = Get-SCOMManagementServer
foreach ($member in $members)
{
write-host “”
$Pools = Get-SCOMResourcePool -Member $Member
write-host “Management Server – “$Member.DisplayName
$Pools.DisplayName
}

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XPost: Warning Base OS MP version 6.0.7303.0!!!

Kevin Holman updated his MP post with the following warning,:

***WARNING***  There are some significant issues in this release of the Base OS MP, I do not recommend applying this one until an updated version comes out.

Issues:

  • Cluster Disks on Server 2008R2 clusters are no longer discovered as cluster disks.
  • Cluster Disks on Server 2008 clusters are not discovered as logical disks.
  • Quorum (or small size) disks on clusters that ARE discovered as Cluster disks, do not monitor for free space correctly.
  • Cluster shared volumes are discovered twice, once as a Cluster Shared Volume instance, and once as a Logical disk instance, with the latter likely cause by enabling mounted disk discovery.
  • On Hyper-V servers, I discover an extra disk, which has no properties:

So best to hold off on this one folks. This of course comes back to some big questions about MP quality control as we’ve had many issues with the recent SQL MP releases and now this.

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XPost: How to discover a Windows Computer as a Network Device in SCOM 2012

Kevin Holman has written a post on how to  to discover a Windows Computer as a Network Device in SCOM 2012.

The design choice to not allow snmp discovers of windows devices was questioned heavily when it was announced and caused vendor management packs such as  Netbackup not to work.

This is a welcome discovery you can read the full article here. The below is for my record.

 

On the management server which will run the network discovery rules – browse to the following directory:
\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012 R2\Operations Manager\Server\NetworkMonitoring\rules\discovery

There is a file present in this directory named ic-post-processor.asl
Make a backup copy of this file, I like to name it ic-post-processor.bak, and place this backup copy in the same directly.  Now, edit this file, and change the following lines:

ISWINDOWSHOST(systemObj) do {
if (systemObj->Type == “HOST” && systemObj->Vendor == “MICROSOFT”) {
return TRUE ;
}
if (SEARCHSTRING(systemObj->Description, “Windows”)) {
return TRUE ;
}

systemOIDCheck = “.1.3.6.1.4.1.311.1.1.3.1” ;
if (substring(systemObj->SystemObjectID, 0, sizeof(systemOIDCheck)) == systemOIDCheck) {
return TRUE ;
}
systemOIDCheck = “.1.3.6.1.4.1.99.1.1.3.11” ;
if (substring(systemObj->SystemObjectID, 0, sizeof(systemOIDCheck)) == systemOIDCheck) {
return TRUE ;
}
return FALSE ;
}

to:
ISWINDOWSHOST(systemObj) do {
    if (systemObj->Type == “HOST” && systemObj->Vendor == “MICROSOFT”) {
        return FALSE ;
}
if (SEARCHSTRING(systemObj->Description, “Windows”)) {
return FALSE ;
}
systemOIDCheck = “.1.3.6.1.4.1.311.1.1.3.1” ;
if (substring(systemObj->SystemObjectID, 0, sizeof(systemOIDCheck)) == systemOIDCheck) {
return FALSE ;
}
systemOIDCheck = “.1.3.6.1.4.1.99.1.1.3.11” ;
if (substring(systemObj->SystemObjectID, 0, sizeof(systemOIDCheck)) == systemOIDCheck) {
return FALSE ;
}
return FALSE ;
}

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XPost: What SQL maintenance should I perform on my SCOM 2012 databases?

Kevin Holman has updated his article on which SQL maintenance to perform on your SQL databases to now cater for the SCOM 2012 data structures.

The article which is available here and makes special mention of the types of maintenance which is run by SCOM itself which does not need to be handled by a SQL DBA.

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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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