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.

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.

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.

MMS Keynote – Brad Anderson

Brad Anderson did this morning’s keynote. This was more focused than yesterdays but was still quite low energy with not much excitement or feedback from the audience. Most of his talk was futures and about focusing on the client and end up with a demo of the next version of Config Manager showing that an application can be set to follow a user on a number of devices and use different ways of presenting that app depending on the device. If the PC is the users primary device then it installs, if it is not a primary device then a Remote App session shortcut is presented and on some devices they will just get a message saying that the subscribed app is not available on this device.

Service Manager was demoed and that is building up for a release next year.

My old colleague, Jeff Wettlauffer, demonstrated the new OS upgrade method of SCCM installing Windows 7 RC on XP but keeping all the data on the PC without having to copy the data up to a server and back down. Also showed the app compatibility toolkit and then getting that old app to run on Med-V which is basically a copy of Virtual PC with XP but seamless so that the user only sees the app.

The most interesting demo was the new System Center Online tool which builds on WSUS and is like a web based version of WSUS, ForeFront and Config Manager in the cloud that you can log onto and then start managing your desktops with this tool. No servers to buy and no software to buy, install configure and look after. I can see this being very popular in small organisations if they get the pricing right.

Key dates for next major versions

For 2011

• System Center Operations Manager
• System Center Configuration Manager
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager
• System Center Service Manager

For 2010

• System Center Service Manager
• System Center Data Protection Manager
• System Center Online Desktop Manager
• System Center Essentials

See slide http://www.scom2k7.com/system-center-roadmap/

No mention of System Center Capacity Manager!

MMS Announcement Predictions

An interesting article that Techlog highlights mentions that Microsoft should buy companies to fill in the gaps in their heterogeneous monitoring to compete with the Big 4 (Tivoli, CA, HP and BMC). The article also mentions that perhaps there may be announcements at MMS. The trouble buying companies is integrating them. And there is the problem of them working – remember software metering in SMS v2? Worked OK on small numbers but could not scale to the numbers SMS dealt with. I remember Kirill Tartarinov saying that he was against buying companies based on his experience at BMC. But he has moved on so perhaps the strategy will change.

Well it is always fun to second guess the announcements. From last years MMS I would have expected the big announcement to be the RTM of System Center Service Manager but we know that is now delayed. SCOM has had SP1 delivered and SCCM has SP1 in RC form. But SP’s are not much to talk about. They could always talk about how they have renamed Business Desktop Deployment to Microsoft Deployment! That is sure to get a standing ovation.

I am hoping that they will announce the SCOM model for Capacity Planner as it is over a year now since SCOM was released and the “official” sizing tool is still not here even though SCCP RTMed at the beginning of February. And SCOM has had SP1 released.

So what is there left? Next versions of SCOM, SCCM and SCVMM? They are still a bit young to have new versions I would have thought. I will be interested to see what the big announcements are as I can not think of any although another SP or R2 release for SCOM to fix the remaining issues would get my vote. If they have decided to buy a company it will be interesting to see what that will bring and if it is as good as the purchase of SoftGrid which I thought was one of Microsoft’s best purchases.

What would you like to see announced next week?

Engyro Connectors

Techlog had a conversation with Eric Berg and he said that the reason they bought Engyro was due to the connectors. Not only for SCOM but for Service Manager. So my educated guess was pretty good. To get Service Desk into organizations that have invested in products like Remedy and Peregrine then a good bidirectional connector is a must.

I was a bit concerned about the comment about dropping the non Windows agents, especially as the Product Group had made a commitment to more heterogeneous monitoring. Which means that they have something up their sleeve already. I guess we will just have to wait and see what they announce on this front. Although Bernardo from Jalasoft left a comment pointing at this announcement.

http://www.jalasoft.com/jalasoftweb/jsp/company/news/Jalasoft%20Strengthens%20Market%20Position%20Press%20Release.htm

“Jalasoft is becoming the sole provider of a product portfolio which enables its customers to monitor the widest range of heterogeneous devices for System Center Operations Manager.”

“… and will shortly make important announcements about its Smart Management Pack Generator product.”

Hmm!

I did see Jalasoft demo their new product for 2007 at the MMS and was very impressed with the improvements that they had made over the 2005 product. Interesting times ahead.

System Center Engyro

One of the big announcements for management at TechEd was the purchase of Engyro and the picture that Techlog took showed it as System Center Engyro which seems to suggest that they will keep it as a separate product (with the same initials as System Center Essentials – confusingly) rather than make it part of SCOM. It will be interesting to see the pricing and licensing details.

I remember talking to the product group about connectors for MOM 2000 – long time ago! It was a difficult sell to get MOM into a big enterprise without being able to link into Tivoli, HPOV etc. The Product Group then funded Engyro who created the first two connectors for MOM 2000 which Microsoft gave away free and created the MOM Connector Framework. So the link with Engyro goes way back.

Since then Engyro have grown and as well as connectors have MPs for VMWareESX, Linux (RedHat and SuSe), UNIX (Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX), Oracle, MYSQL and Apache. This begs the question of what will become of companies like Skywire, Jalasoft and eXc Software. One of the big areas of concern from customers was getting their MOM components from different suppliers. This announcement plus the announcement in March at the MMS about EMC Smarts being part of the next version of SCOM puts Microsoft up there with a single heterogeneous monitoring solution with connectivity. Talking to a few MOM specialists over the last two months about what they were planning to use for some monitoring and Engyro came up consistently.

Engyro also made components for Tivoli. I can not see that carrying on.

The other big gain will be for System Center Service Manager as it will now have ready made connectors to the big monitoring systems and be able to link into existing helpdesks to transfer the data.