Markus Baeker has posted a connector to link SCOM and Nagios. Normally the blog is in German but this post is in English as there is now an English instruction manual and you can define English status messages.
http://www.mbaeker.de/2009/07/scom2nagios-1-2/
It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
With the purchase of Engyro Microsoft purchased the ability to link into other systems. The connectors work initially with OpsMgr R2 and will eventually also work with Service Manager. This uses WS-Man and Open Pegasus which is the same as R2′s ability to monitor Linux/UNIX servers.
The first set will be
They announced at the MMS today that these will be available 30 days after R2. The beta is available at
Connect Site under the System Center TAP/Beta https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?SiteID=446&DownloadID=18150
They will be focusing on connectors for Service Manager and the next ones for OpsMgr will be:-
If you have been reading any other OpsMgr blogs you will know this by now but Beta 1 of OpsMgr SP2 is now available from Connect. No mention of a SCE version.
There are three downloads. A highlights document (Word – 69 pages – if that is the highlights what is the full document going to be like! Most of it appears to be about Xplat), release notes (HTML) and the download exe which is 1,126.42 MB. If you are downloading this one make sure you have a fast connection!
Some bits that have intrigued me from the highlights:-
You can browse the management pack catalog directly from the wizard and import it directly or save it to a file.
A new template you can use to easily create process monitors.
In the Windows Service management pack template, you can use wildcards when you specify the service name that you want to monitor.
The Health Explorer has been added to the Web console. (Much need if you use the web console as that is the best way to find information on monitors.)
You can install the Operations Manager 2007 R2 databases on SQL Server 2008.
When you create a dashboard view a search tool helps find the views you want quickly. In addition, the search also includes views that you have created in your My Workspace. (That last one is great as that has frustrated me before.)
You can put a whole computer into Maintenance mode. This automatically puts the Health Service and the associated Health Service watcher into maintenance mode, which suppresses all alerts on that computer. (Hurrah!)
In Operations Manager 2007 R2, the Operations console performance has been greatly improved. These improvements are most evident in:
• Opening new views in the monitoring space
• Pivoting between views
• Selecting multiple items in the results view and rendering the details pane more quickly
• Indicating that a view is in the progress of loading
(Well we will see about those! But any improvement in performance is greatly welcomed.)
The notification feature has been restructured to make it easier to configure.
You can create a new subscription directly from an alert and to add the parameters from the selected alert to an existing subscription. (This will save messing around with all those PowerShell solutions.)
Support has been added to natively monitor IIS 7 without having to enable the backward compatibility APIs or legacy management features
Operations Manager 2007 R2 supports monitoring as many as 2,000 URL monitors per management server.
The new version of the authoring console adds several user interface enhancements, and now includes the ability to edit any element in a management pack.
(And one that I have blogged (complained) about in April and Kevin Holman has blooged about. ) Reporting – it is easier to find the objects that you need to customize a report. The object picker has been enhanced to enable search and filtering by name or class of object, which makes it easier to find the objects.
So I now need to find the time to download the beta and get it installed and see if all the promises above are worth the upgrade. This is a beta so there will be bugs and performance improvements are generally done near the release but it certainly looks interesting.
And as I mentioned before it is not a free upgrade unless you have Software Assuarnce. And to confirm that they say on the site:-
“R2 is a new version of Operations Manager 2007 and it is not a free upgrade”
New post from the Xplat team.
We are happy to announce that the Cross Platform Extensions Beta 1 refresh is now available on the Microsoft connect site – http://connect.microsoft.com. We appreciate the feedback on the product received to date and hope you will continue this. Please let us know if you have any questions.
This Beta refresh adds three new features to the product that customers have been asking for:
· Support for OpsMgr Server running on 64-bit systems
· Gateway role support
· AIX 5.3 support
If you are not sure what Xplat is all about I did a review and you can get the PDF here – http://ianblythmanagement.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/xplat-part-2-the-install/.
The Cross Platform Extensions were announced at the MMS and I wrote a post about the elements you need to test it. Here is the next part showing the install and the views and reports you get. I started this a month ago and it was delayed for various reasons so Cameron Fuller has a similar post out but as I did a lot of work I though I might as well finish it and publish it. Mine has a section on reporting.
xplat-evaluation-24june2008-pdf
This PDF is 3.3MB and 50 pages long. There are an awful lot of screen shots. This is designed not so much for people who want to install it (the existing documentation is very good) but people who do not want to or do not have the time to install it but would like to see what it looks like. This document goes through the install of the components and has screen shots of the various console areas and a section on reports out of the box and customising reports.
My summary:
I am very impressed by
I believe that this is a breakthrough product for Operations Manager and Microsoft. I can see organisations that went for the framework and either ignored OpsMgr or relegated it to a role of being an element manager for AD or Exchange suddenly finding a lot to interest them with this product – especially when they see what it can monitor out of the box with no configuration.
I can not wait until the final release which is projected for early 2009.
So you have read the PDF, watched the video and subscribed to the blog. You may even have read Anders’s post on setting up Xplat with SUSE with some good screenshots or even Daniele Muscetta’s post where he edited the files to manage CentOS which is not officially supported. (By the way on the beta newsgroup they have said that they will be supporting more OSes at RTM such as AIX).
So what do you need? OpsMgr SP1 (eval OpsMgr SP1 Eval), the Xplat beta from Connect (only works on x86 – x64 will be a later beta release) and a supported OS (unless you want to try Daniele’s approach). Also needs WinRM (WS-Management for Windows). This was introduced with Windows 2003 R2 but the download for 2003 non R2, which is v1.1 also updates R2 servers.
Supported for the beta at the moment are
HP-UX 11iv3 (PA-RISC and IA64)
Sun Solaris 10 (SPARC and x86)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1
I wanted to setup a system to test it myself and the company I am working for currently wanted it in their test lab. They use VMware and I use Virtual PC. There are convertors and the VHD to VMware looked best as the Microsoft one (also free) requires ADS and other components although I did come across a convertor but did not try it. So if I had a choice the VHD route was best as I could convert rather than do it twice.
VMware convertor to transform VHD files (30 MB and needs you to supply details but it is free)
http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/
If you have a subscription contract you can download the Enterprise version http://www.vmware.com/downloads/login.do.
I do not have Solaris or HP-UX so Linux looks like my best bet for a VM. I looked at the Red Hat site but could not find out how to download a test system with having to pay them money up front. I thought that Novell may be the same so I considered Fedora but looked at OpenSUSE. I thought this might be the best bet. Unfortunately after downloading a 4 GB ISO file it was corrupted. After another quick search I found that Novell has SUSE Enterprise Server 10 SP1 on VHD format ready for download. This is a 2.6 GB download which worked this time. You need to create a Novell login in order to download it.
The documentation is a bit sparse but I eventually found that the user is interopt with the password of novell. No mention of Root but trying novell as the password worked for that user as well. It does not have an IP address but gets one from DHCP. You may want to change that. So far I have not had to put in an activation code.
So I have all the pieces now and I am ready to get started. I will post later with how I got on.
PS if you are trying the beta you may want to subscribe to the newsgroups (need a login from the Connect site).
microsoft.connect.opsmgr.xplat.docs
microsoft.connect.opsmgr.xplat.general
microsoft.connect.opsmgr.xplat.hp-ux
microsoft.connect.opsmgr.xplat.mps
microsoft.connect.opsmgr.xplat.redhat
microsoft.connect.opsmgr.xplat.solaris
microsoft.connect.opsmgr.xplat.suse
