Kirill Tatarinov

At an MOM event recently that I was presenting at, my ex colleague Paul Butterworth was also presenting and at the break we got around to reminiscing as you do. In 2001 Microsoft decided that the System Engineer role (when we were still called that before we homogenised with the naming convention in the States as they were not allowed to use the word engineer in their titles) needed to be split into two with some focussed on accounts and others in specialist areas. Paul and I did the management area in the UK with Paul covering SMS while I did Application Center and this newly released product called MOM 2000. 

Our colleagues thought that we were mad. SMS was still on v2 and although SP2 had been released which stabilised the product it did not have a stellar reputation even though it had reasonable market share. And server monitoring was a new field for Microsoft so people did not know about MOM. But SMS 2003 came along and it was a good release and it has been enhanced with patch management, OS deployment with Windows Imaging technology, PDA add-on and recently the purchase of AssetMetrix and Softricity which I talked about in a previous post. With the next version due for release in 2007 it has come on tremendously. MOM went from 2000 which was good but needed work to 2005 which is a great product. And with OM2007 in beta looking to take it to new heights the world of Microsoft management technologies looks bright.   

So I got to thinking about how things changed and I think that the pivot was the hiring of Kirill Tatarinov as Corporate VP of the Windows and Enterprise Management Division (WEMD). He started of just looking after the management division but his role has expanded to include the management technologies in Windows as well. Kirill was one of the original Patrol developers and Senior VP and CTO for BMC. See bio at
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/kirill/default.mspx
and
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/Press/2002/Jul02/07-16KirillPR.mspx
.  

His vision was apparent when he started the role and the Dynamic System Initiative (DSI) and System Center is the result. I have had the chance to meet him a few times. He is a quiet and thoughtful man and when he answers a question you can feel the focus that he gives to the answer. He sees MOF (basically a Microsoft slant on ITIL) as a key area and wants Microsoft to have products that can fulfil that vision which is why there are a slew of System Center products coming.  

Kirill is quiet and focused but that quiet focus is driving Microsoft management technologies to greater heights. So from 5 years ago when SMS was not highly thought of and Microsoft had no presence in the server monitoring market Microsoft has two incredible products with improvements to those ones in the pipeline and more on the way. It is a good time to be involved with System Center technologies. Thanks Kirill.

Monitoring Lotus Domino

An organisation I was talking to is interested in putting in MOM but wanted to know about monitoring Lotus Domino. I know that there is the XMP from NetIQ but as I am not sure if they will develop it for SCOM 2007 I looked around for alternatives and found an offering from eXc Software but using SNMP traps from the Domino server. So not ideal. 

I then asked myself whether it would be possible to create a basic custom MP. Unfortunately they way that Domino works is that it stores all its events in a Notes database which is proprietary. This means that it is easy for them to port Domino onto Linux, UNIX, AS/400 etc (it was originally designed to only run on OS/2 in the early days) but makes it harder for an external program to get that information. Although you have a choice of using a Notes database or a standard web log for the web server part of Domino. In version 7 there is a new feature called Domino Domain Monitoring (DDM) which consolidates all the events into a single database but it is still a Notes database. 

There is the Lotus Domino service and some performance counters that I found (on Domino 6.5) so you could use the Custom Management Pack Wizard to create an MP for those but no events. I looked around to see if there were any utilities that could dump the Notes database entries into a log file in real time but did not come up with anything. There are some monitoring utilities but they seem all to be stand alone and from what I gather even those have to get their information using the API provided by Lotus. I am not a programmer so I did not fancy going down that route. Most of the programs were a hybrid of administration tasks and well as some monitoring but most lack interfaces to then push that information into MOM. Although I did find one that would do SNMP traps from GSX. In fact when you look at their web page they are using Domino for their web site. 

So I would be interested to learn how organisations that use Domino monitor it (whether or not they use MOM) and how good they have found that program.  

Or I could always suggest they migrate to Exchange with SharePoint and LCS. Everyone else seems to have done so. J

SCE – First looks

I installed System Center Essentials beta 2 and the install was fairly simple. The slides I saw from the MMS said it could be done in 10 clicks. Similar claim to MOM 2005 Workgroup and someone told me CRM v3 as well. What is the obsession with installing in 10 clicks or less? If it is 11 clicks does Microsoft think that we won’t install it in case we get RSI? There are a number of prerequisites but they are similar to SCOM 07 and as I had previously installed that on this particular VM I did not have too much more to do. The checker works well and if there is a missing bit it gives you the link to the page. In my case for the .Net 3 bits. Why does it need .Net 2 and 3 though?

 

The console takes in a version of SCOM that has been tuned for the mid market which Microsoft size at 50 to 500 PCs. It also uses WSUS v3 (in beta separately as well) and it does some simple hardware (about 30 attributes) and software asset (from add/remove programs) collecting and reporting. The surprise for me was the software distribution module which can distribute exe’s and well as MSI files and is very simple to use and it keeps track of and reports on deployments. There are some bugs (well it is beta). All the groups I created were given long names that were nothing like my names which I never saw again. Some of the reports are not in this version yet. I set of a couple of tasks and the dates were shown as 01/01/0001 but all other dates showed correctly. I tried to set up an MSI for distribution and it errored whereas the exe was fine. 

 

I could still do clever things like use one of the monitoring template to monitor a web site (very much like the Web Sites and Services MP for MOM 2005 but simpler).  The great thing is that this is designed to integrate with SCOM 2007 for service providers that look after multiple customers unlike Workgroup which was not allowed to link into MOM Enterprise. Well worth reading the white paper on this is you are a service provider. It is great to get a breakdown of issues by customer. For companies that need monitoring, patch management, software distribution and some basic asset management it looks like a winning package depending on how the price it, licence it and what its limits are for server and client numbers. My only beef is that I find the monitoring part (which comes from SCOM 07) too complex. I do like in the in place taks though. They are great. I think the interface is confusing in SCOM as well but that may just be my familiarity with MOM 2005. Still if it could simply the interface to monitoring in SCE then it would be really great. SCE Overview
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/sce/sce_overview.mspx

Good white paper –
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/sce/demo/index.html

HP StorageWorks MP – Avoid!

This must be the worst management pack for MOM 2005 that I have ever seen. I know Blake seemed to get it to work but in the short time I had with it I didn’t. Well maybe I did but I could not be sure. It felt like the MP was designed by someone who had just been given a 5 minute overview on MOM and had come from a UNIX background and that the person who wrote the technical documentation wanted to be a fictional author. What is so bad about it? For a start it does not use an attribute to determine where the StorageWork management server is but uses the search parameters – for all servers! Someone has not cleaned it up as there are two server names left in the include tab – presumably for testing – which Blake picked up on as well. And then it wants to run commands from the management server. And before you know it every server (as they are all in the group) is erroring with SNMP errors as by default that is not switched on in Windows servers. It runs a service on the management server that listens for XML on a certain port which means if you have multiple management servers it will not fail over. According to Blake HP are fixing that in the next version. 

You need to run a command on the StorageWorks server which sets it to send these XML strings for the service on the management server to pick up and turn into alerts. There is supposed to be a test file but the documentation did not match the names (and how to use it). On the web site the FAQ said another file name (which did not exist either) but at least it gave instructions on how to use this mythical file. The documentation said that logging was off by default and gave instructions on how to turn it on but it was already on. I have always felt that people who write documentation should give it to someone who has never performed that task and they can only watch and not interfere as they try and follow the instructions. That would at least show them obvious mistakes in the documentation. Why did they not use an attribute that put the StorageWorks server into a computer group? Then the program running on it (DESTA) could send events to the event log which a standard MOM rules could pick up, transport and use. I suspect it is to try and be “neutral” to management solutions. Or perhaps the server attached could be UNIX but in this environment it was Windows – I am not familiar enough with the StirageWorks range. Well the MP is just a big mess. Do not use it unless you are prepared to put in some work. A lot. 

This is all the more disappointing as the HP Proliant/Insight MP has been a stalwart of MOM since MOM 2000. What is more surprising is why Microsoft let this through onto the MP catalogue. Shame on both of you for this monstrosity. It is the sort of thing that can give MOM a bad name. Mmmh. Perhaps it was written by someone from the HPOV division!