Copy SCOM View Data to Excel

 I come across this post regarding SCSM and thought it worth pointing out that it works in SCOM as well.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2010/03/03/hidden-feature-export-data-to-excel-from-a-view.aspx

Go to a view (State or Alerts) and do Ctrl-A to select all the rows. Ctrl-C to copy and then paste the results into Excel. Instant spread sheet of the data in the view.  A lot easier than using PowerShell to export the data to CSV and then bring it into Excel. And it also brings in the column names as well.
This works best when not using the Group Items By feature. If the group by is closed then only the titles get copied and you cannot expand them in Excel. If they are expanded in SCOM then all the data will be copied but the Group Items By will just be another row in the spread sheet.
This does not work on performance views or any of the views in the Authoring area.

How to Create a New Override MP

 This is something that an OpsMgr admin does on a regular basis but I have added some additional bits to the process.

When a new override management pack is needed then the following steps are required.

If there is a specific alert that needs to be overridden then click on that alert and in Alert Details click on the Alert Rule/Alert Monitor.  This will show which Management Pack the alert was generated by.

 For example - the SQL Server 2008 (Monitoring) management pack.

It is best practice to create an override Management Pack for the sealed MP and put the overrides for the sealed MP into that MP. I prefer to create a new MP in the Administration tab so I can control the process rather than create the MP on the fly when overriding an alert.

Note that unsealed MPs do not need a separate MP as the override will be written directly into the MP.

Go to the Administration  tab and click on Management packs.

 In this case I have filtered the MPs to the SQL 2008 ones. 

 

 Double click on the SQL Server 2008 (Monitoring) MP.

The 2 important fields are ID and Name. The ID must match the filename of the MP and the Name will be the name that shows up in the list of MPs.

Highlight the Name and copy (Ctrl C).

 

This will give you the name of the MP – SQL Server 2008 (Monitoring).

Close the dialogue box.

Right click in the Management Pack area and chose Create Management Pack.

 

This will start the Create a Management Pack Wizard

 

 Paste the name that was copied into the Name field and add Overrides.

Some organizations put Overrides at the beginning of the name so that they show up in the MP list together. It is easy to find all MPs with overrides in the name using the Find search box on the tool bar. Therefore I do not think that  it is necessary to put the word overrides at the beginning. Putting it at the end means that the override MP shows up in the MP list next to the sealed MP so that you know that there are overrides for that MP.

 

 Note that it creates the ID name for you. But importantly does not include numbers. When the MP is created it is checked in the console to make sure it is unique. If the 2012 one was done next it would create an MP with ID of SQL.Server.Monitoring.Overrides0. This can be fixed later to match the version with the name.

The version can be any number but leave it at 1.0.0.0 for now.

 

 If you click Edit to add knowledge you will get this error message.

 

In order to edit Knowledge you must have Visual Studio Tools for Office runtime installed along with Word on the computer that is running the console.

 Once it is created it can be seen in the console. It can now be used for overrides but the following steps are recommended before you create overrides. If you go to the Monitoring pane you will see a new View folder with the name of the MP.

 

 All new MPs created in the console create a top level folder so that views can be created underneath. As this will only be used for overrides the empty view is not necessary and clutters the console.

Highlight the folder and press Delete.

 

Click yes.

 As noted earlier the MP created does not have 2008 in the file name. When the 2012 MP is made it will have a very similar name. I have found it is better to rename the filename to have 2008 in the name to make it easier to distinguish files outside of the console.

Go back to the Administration pane and click Management Packs.

Click on the new management pack and right click to Export Management Pack.

 

 Once exported open the MP in a text editor.

 The contents will now look like this.

 

 The key fields are ID and Name.

The ID has to be a unique name for the Management Group and MUST match the name of the file. If these two do not match you will not be able to import it back into the Management Group.

The Name is the friendly name that is seen in views and can be left.

Change the contents of the ID field from SQL.Server.Monitoring.Overrides to SQL.Server.2008.Monitoring.Overrides.

You must also change the Display String Element to match otherwise you will get a message like this.

 

The highlighted text shows that it is the Display String Element in the Language section that is wrong as it still refers to the original name.

 Change the version number to 1.0.0.1 to show that the view has been removed, that the file name has changed.

 

 Do a File Save As and ensure that the file name is the same as the ID.

  Import the new MP into the Management group.

 As this has a unique name (ID) it does not overwrite the original MP.

 

The 1.0.0.0 MP can now be deleted and the new MP is ready for overrides.

 Rather than going through the whole process again for the SQL Server 2012 overrides the existing XML file can be edited by changing 2008 to 2012 in the 4 lines highlighted.

 

Do a file save as SQL.Server.2012.Monitoring.Overrides.xml and the new MP can be imported in.

 

 This template can now be used for any new override MP.

 

 When a new MP is need replace FILENAME with the name of the file which reflects the MP name and must be unique with no spaces and in the 2 Name fields replace MPNAME with a friendly name.

 Here is the text file to use as a template.  

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<ManagementPack ContentReadable=”true” SchemaVersion=”2.0″ OriginalSchemaVersion=”1.1″ xmlns:xsd=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema” xmlns:xsl=”http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform” >
   <Manifest>
      <Identity>
         <ID>FILENAME.Overrides</ID>
         <Version>1.0.0.1</Version>
      </Identity>
      <Name>MPNAME Overrides</Name>
      <References>
         <Reference Alias=”SystemCenter”>
            <ID>Microsoft.SystemCenter.Library</ID>
            <Version>7.0.8432.0</Version>
            <PublicKeyToken>31bf3856ad364e35</PublicKeyToken>
         </Reference>
      </References>
   </Manifest>
   <LanguagePacks>
      <LanguagePack ID=”ENU” IsDefault=”false”>
         <DisplayStrings>
            <DisplayString ElementID=”FILENAME.Overrides”>
               <Name>MPNAME Overrides</Name>
            </DisplayString>
         </DisplayStrings>
      </LanguagePack>
   </LanguagePacks>
</ManagementPack> 

NOTE – when copying this text ensure that the quotation marks are the straight ones (“”) and not the curly ones(“ “). This can happen when copying and pasting from certain programs and web pages.

 

SCOM 2007 Versions

I thought that I would do an update list as it is quite useful to look this up when visiting customer sites.

SCOM 2007 RTM = 6.0.5000 23 Mar 2007
SCOM SP1 RC1 = 6.0.6246 5 Nov 2007

SCOM 2007 SP1 = 6.0.6278 22 Feb 2008

SCOM 2007 SP1 Update Rollup = 6.0.6278.100 (KB 971541) 13 Nov 2009

SCOM 2007 SP1 CU1 = 6.0.6278.112 (KB 2028594) 30 Jul 2010
SCOM 2007 R2 Beta = 6.1.6407 20 Nov 2008

SCOM 2007 R2 RC = 6.1.7043 25 Mar 2009

SCOM 2007 R2 RTM = 6.1.7221 23 May 2009

SCOM 2007 R2 CU1 = 6.1.7221.13 (KB 974144) 30 Jan 2010

SCOM 2007 R2 CU2 = 6.1.7221.15 (KB 979257) 29 Jun 2010

SCOM 2007 R2 CU3 = 6.1.7221.49 (KB 2251525) 1 Oct 2010

SCOM 2007 R2 CU4 = 6.1.7221.61 (KB 2449679) 31 Jan 2011

SCOM 2012 Public Beta = 7.0.8289.0 – July 2011

v.Next = 2012

I attended the event “War on Cost” run by Inframon on Friday 5th. There was a whole bunch of Microsofties from Redmond there on their way to TechEd. It was great hearing some of the stuff that will be coming out. As soon as they said that the new products are going to be called 2012 (SCOM, SCCM and SCVMM) I knew that there was going to be a delay. Microsoft name the products based on their financial year which is July to June and not the calendar year. That means anything that has 2012 in the title will not be released until at least July 2011.

OpsMgr will have a public beta in Q2 2011, RC in Q3 and RTM in Q4 (probably about Oct/Nov) – this is calendar year and not Microsoft financial year. Key points are that OpsMgr now has the networking technology from EMC Smarts that they announced a few years ago at a previous MMS, that you can do an in place upgrade from 2007 and at the moment the console looks very similar to 2007. With it being a year away from RTM a lot can change.

They were also very keen to keep a cadence going with the Cumulative Updates being released every quarter and they mentioned that new features could be added as part of the CU. I asked about certificates and DMZ scenarios in 2012 but it seems there will be little change in that area. Which is doubly annoying. Not only is it one of the trickiest areas for organisations to get right but as DMZ agents are often manually installed a quarterly CU means a lot of work to keep them up to date.

ConfigMgr 2012 takes on the System Center style console which is supposed to improve console performance. Flattening the hierarchy and better performance seem to be key areas. Having not looked at it for a while 2012 looks good.

Later this month Opalis 6.3 gets released with connectors for all the System Center products and a new improved one for OpsMgr. Microsoft is working their way through this product to make it more of a Microsoft product. The demos looked pretty good and it looks like another great buy for Microsoft and provides a glue that can link all the System Center products and provide Run Book style automation or even link into other systems. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

I have seen the AViCode stuff before but it was nice to see it demoed now that Microsoft have purchased it. A great tool for monitoring and analysing code and performance problems with web sites – especially .Net.

I am sure these will all be covered at TechEd in more depth so expect more announcements. The main thing that I took away from the day is that I will not be going to the MMS in March as it is too soon to get up to speed on the new version of OpsMgr. A shame as I have gone every second year to coincide with the major releases of the product.

Management Pack Catalog Revamp

After Microsoft moved the MP Catalogue to PinPoint (or PainPoint as I called it) it was incredibly difficult to find MPs. The site has been revamped allowing you to filter by product (OpsMgr, ConfigMgr etc) instead of all lumped together. Then you can filter by company that made the MP and also sort by release date or name. Brilliant. We are back where we started.

The link is here http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/systemcenter.

3 New System Center RTMs

As expected there have been announcements at this years MMS. The System Center team try and focus their release efforts around this event.

So we have

System Center Data Protection (DPM) 2010 – http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/data-protection-manager.aspx

and

System Center Essentials 2010 (SCE 2010) – http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/essentials.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenteressentials/archive/2010/04/19/sc-essentials-2010-is-released-to-manufacturing.aspx

Info on both here – http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter/archive/2010/04/19/the-right-tools-for-the-job-sce-2010-dpm-2010.aspx

The biggie that ties them all together and was expected last year.

System Center Service Manager 2010 – http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/service-manager.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/stefan_stranger/archive/2010/04/21/download-microsoft-system-center-service-manager-2010-eval.aspx

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb/archive/2010/04/21/service-manager-2010-rtm-eval.aspx

And some additional tools and visualisation for OpsMgr.

Following last Friday’s Office 2010 RTM. This release consists of two downloads:

1. Visio 2010 Add-in and Operations Manager 2007 R2

2. SharePoint 2010 Visio Services Data Provider

What’s new:

In addition to all the great functionality we added in the original Visio 2007 add-in, this adds,

•The Visio 2010 Add-in fully integrates the Visio 2007 add-in functionality into the Visio 2010 ribbon for a seamless user experience.
•The SharePoint 2010 Visio Services Data Provider leverages the power of Visio Services to provide the ability display Visio diagrams as live dashboards in SharePoint pulling health state directly from Operations Manager.

http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2010/04/20/visio-and-sharepoint-2010-extensions-for-operations-manager-have-shipped.aspx

This lot will take some digesting.

No More System Center Capacity Manager

The OpsMgr Product Team have just announced that SCCP has been discontinued.

Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner (SCCP) is formally being discontinued, effective immediately, as it no longer supports the current versions of Microsoft applications it was designed for.  The most recent version, SCCP 2007, is no longer available.   No new versions of this standalone capacity planning tool, as well as any new or updated application capacity planning models, will be developed.

As an alternative to SCCP 2007 for capacity planning, we encourage you to make use of the following resources:

• Microsoft Exchange Server – Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator, Mailbox Server Storage Design, and Performance and Scalability.
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server/Windows SharePoint Services – SharePoint Products TechCenter, SharePoint Team Blog, and To the SharePoint Blog.
• Microsoft System Center Operations Manager – R2 Design Guide and Sizing Helper.

We recognize that capacity planning/management is an important IT systems management discipline.  We will continue to evaluate how capacity planning/management functionality fits best in our System Center portfolio.

This comes as no surprise to me. I did a post on why I did not think it was up to the job (May 200). The concept was great but the execution did not come up to scratch. Back to the sizing spreadsheet. Well I never actually left it.

Post SQL MP

If you have installed SQL MP  v6.06648.0 (read Kevin Holman’s post on why you need it) issued on 23rd July 2009 you may think that you are now monitoring SQL. Not quite. Here are some things to consider.

SQL Agent Jobs

According to the MP Guide the discovery for  SQL Agent Jobs is not turned on but you can obviously override that. I had a customer complain that they found out a job had been failing but there was no alert. Luckily Jimmy Harper posted about this. Apparently the discoveries do not work if certain fields are blank with Description being the main culprit. The customer did not want to go through each job and put in a description but luckily Jimmy’s post contains new MPs to replace the discovery ones in the SQL MP. This worked a treat and the jobs started showing up in the console. The customer created a new SQL Agent Job with nothing in the description and that was picked up. A must have if you want to monitor SQL Agent Jobs. Nice one Jimmy. Hopefully that will be fixed in the next version.

The other thing that I had a long discussion about with the customer was SQL jobs failing. When they fail they are picked up but when the job is set to carry on with the rest of the jobs in sequence after a fail nothing is shown in the console. The customer appreciates why this is. After all if you do not think that one part of a sequence is important enough to stop the other jobs running you can’t call it a failure. They can see it if they look at SQL but in the OpsMgr console there is nothing. We tested it with a few jobs. They would like to see something – even if it is information. As they said if it fails once it is not important but if it keeps on failing it needs investigating. Something else for the next version of the MP.

SQL Replication

Replication is also not discovered by default. When turned on it discovers replication servers but there are no rules or monitors. So if you need to monitor SQL Replication you have to do it yourself.

SQL Mirroring

If you want to monitor SQL Mirroring pick up the Extended SQL Server MP by Matt Goedtel on OpsManJam.

Noisy DBCC Rule

DBCC Check comes up every now and then with an information alert that says no errors. I have always thought that bizarre but never had time to investigate. Jimmy Harper’s post on it explains why that is and how to fix it to give you useful warning and critical alerts when there are real problems with DBCC. Another good post from Jimmy.

SQL DB Properties

Jimmy also has a post on SQL DB properties not being discovered and how to fix it.

 SQL Server Full Text Search Service Monitor

As Jimmy Harper says it is mentioned in the guide but his post goes into great detail on it. This is usually the case for servers running MSDE like WSUS. Also mention by Kerrie and Cameron in their OpsMgr R2 by Example which goes into a lot of information about the typical alerts that come up for SQL MP and some resolutions for those. Required reading after the MP Guide.

SQL 2008

If you have SQL 2008 in your environment then you will need to install the SQL DMO bits as they are no longer shipped with SQL but the SQL MP still needs them. This shows up as no space performance counters for SQL 2008 DBs and event 4000 in the OpsMgr log.  Marnix Wolf (Thoughts on OpsMgr) has posted a good set of articles on this. First here which includes showing what to download and install and then problem with DMO Installation.

Conclusion. You may think that after you import the SQL MP that you are monitoring SQL. But unless you dig into the documentation and the MP you may find that critical bits are not being monitored.

Silect MP Studio v4.1

Silect have just released their latest version of MP Studio.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of our latest release of MP Studio available for upgrade now for all MP Studio customers currently on maintenance. MP Studio v4.1 has now added additional capabilities to help you further decrease complexity, speed implementation, eliminate risk and increase productivity with System Center Operations Manager:

MP Studio Enhancements Included in this Release:

New Column Creation Wizard for more flexible custom Management Pack Documentation reporting.  MP Studio’s already powerful MP documentation capabilities have been enhanced to include an easy-to-use column creation wizard, where users can extract a subset of data such as Event ID or Frequency and have the data neatly displayed in a dedicated column.

Override Management has become even more flexible with added support for targeting of Groups. Bulk override management has also been extended to allow users to modify the targets for the block of overrides they are creating.

The MP Development Center now supports offline creation of management pack contents such as Targets, Event Rules and Service Monitors. This new operation provides enhanced flexibility when developing an MP where access to a server hosting the line of business application may not be available.

Additional Installation and Administrative Features have also been enhanced in this new version.

Try it for Yourself:

Now is the perfect time to start a free trial of MP Studio for System Center Operations Manager to test drive these new features for yourself.

Request a Product Download or contact us today for more information or a demo of any of these exciting new features at info@silect.com.

Ian, Feb 2010

Forums for Technical Questions

I was away on holiday and on coming back I noticed a large number of comments. Most were the same question from one person. While I try and answer these questions sometimes time pressures (I have paid work to do) and sometimes being away on holiday means it is not possible to answer these questions.

A blog post is not a good place to ask a technical question. Especially when the post is al;most 2 years old. It is called a comment field for a reason and not Ask The Blogger a Technical Question. The best places to ask technical questions is on the forums. There are a few but these are probably the best two for OpsMgr.

Microsoft – http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/systemcenteroperationsmanager

SystemCenter Central – http://www.systemcentercentral.com/tabid/60/tag/Forums+Operations_Manager/Default.aspx

There are plenty of Microsoft Support people and MVPs as well as other people that know OpsMgr that go onto these forums to answer questions. That should be your first port of call for a technical question unless you have a support agreement with Microsoft and you can ask them direct.

Ian

PS I had a great time skiing by the way. It is nice to get away from technology now and again.