I have blogged about Ziemek’s free disk space report before. I have run this at a customer site and they were very impressed with the report. The MP, XML and SQL query are all available at Ziemek’s blog.

There are a number of things though that you need to be aware of.

As I mentioned previously if you use System Center Data Protection Manager it creates very long names for the disk drives and that skews the report so that it does not print out well or export to PDF without creating multiple pages. I have found exporting it to Excel first works well.

I tried it on a system with 395 servers and it would time out. Rerunning would often do the trick and get the report. There is a timeout value of 9999 in the XML. I am not sure if that can be increased. The obvious solution would be to use groups to then do the reports in smaller chunks.

And that leads to the third issue. When you use the drop down list it does not show all groups but just a selection. I asked Ziemek about that and he has actually coded it in as he did not want all the computer groups to drop down in his environment. What it does is look for computer groups that do not contain : but do contain Computers. So if you create custom groups that has the word computers in it but without : they will be picked up.

If you look at the XML file you can see the query.

- <Query>

<DataSourceName>DataWarehouseMain</DataSourceName>

<CommandText>SELECT FullName, DisplayName FROM OperationsManagerDW.dbo.vManagedEntity with (nolock) where Path is null and FullName not like ‘%:%’ and DisplayName like ‘%Computers%’</CommandText>

<rd:UseGenericDesigner>true</rd:UseGenericDesigner>

</Query>

So you could always change that line in the XML if you want more groups of if you create custom groups with your organisations name it then you can swap that for computers so that only those groups show up in the drop down list. Note that this query shows up twice so I presume you need to change both.

Even with these caveats it is still a great report. And one that should have been in 2007 from the start.

Ian

One of the nice things about Operations Manager even from the early versions is the ability to run the prerequisite checker so you know what is required before you start the install. I recommend using this before starting to do any installs. It saves time later.

From the Quick Start Guide

When all components are selected, the Prerequisite Viewer checks for the presence of Windows Server 2003 SP1, SQL Server 2005 SP1 or higher, SQL Server Reporting Services SP1, MDAC version 2.80.1022.0 or higher, .NET Framework version 2.0, .NET Framework 3.0 components, WS-MAN v1.1, and Windows Power Shell. It then checks to ensure that the WWW service is running and set to automatic startup mode.

The checker does not mention the SQL version required but as the notes above say, it needs to be at least SQL 2005 SP1 which is the same as OpsMgr 2007 SP1.

This checker can check for all components or you can just check the components that will be installed on the server that you are checking.

All components

Database

Server

New requirement for Cross Platform Extentions – WS-management 1.1. This is only a warning (so it will not stop the install) as it is only required if you are pushing out agents to UNIX or Linux servers.

Console

Console with PowerShell

Web Console

This is a new requirement for the web console – ASP.NET AJAX 1.0. As this is a failure the install will not be allowed.

Note that after it is installed the requirement is no longer shown.

Reporting

Data Warehouse

To get the missing bits

· WS-MAN v1.1, available at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=133219

· .NET Framework 2.0, available at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=64221

· .NET Framework 3.0 components, available at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=71270

· Windows PowerShell, available at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=71311

Links to Optional Prerequisites

The Operations Manager 2007 R2 Prerequisite checker does not confirm the presence of the following items and you must install them manually if you want that functionality

· For creating and editing product or company knowledge in management packs you must install Microsoft Office Word 2003 (or 2007) with the .NET Programmability feature and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System, available at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=53267

· If you will install agents manually, you must install MSXML 6.0, available at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=76343. MSXML 6.0 requires Windows Installer 3.1, available at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=77051. MSXML 6.0 is automatically installed with the agent when the agents are pushed out.

MP Authoring Console

Although this does not have a prerequisite checker it still does a check and if it fails you can check the log.

Note that the .Net requirements are higher than for the other components.

Hope this helps in your planning and installations.

Ian

www.cosiris.co.uk

One of the nice things about attending the MMS is that you get a DVD with all the sessions on it so that you can watch the ones that you missed. Makes it a lot easier when there are multiple sessions that you want to see. Just a pain that it takes so long. Just received this e-mail.

Dear MMS 2009 Attendee,

This e-mail serves as confirmation that your MMS 2009 DVD set has been shipped and you should be receiving it within 1-2 weeks (International locations may take longer).  The DVD set has been sent via the U.S. Postal Service to the address included with your registration information.  

Just a few more weeks now. Luckily I downloaded a number of the videos from the MMS site when I was there and could watch those. Actually if you are an attendee you can still logon on to the site and download the presentations and videos. But it is nicer to have the DVD.

It reminds me that one of the OpsMgr sessions that they should have ran was how to deal with certificates. I am sure that would have been popular.

That is indeed the question.

This was something that I was concerned about but with the release of the new Exchange 2007 MP it is confirmed – this is an R2 only MP.

This is great if you are on R2 but as R2 is a Software Assurance release there will be organisations that bought OpsMgr without SA and so will not be able to use this MP. This brings up the question of support. After all the Microsoft standard for support is 5 + 5 which means that MOM 2005 is still supported but how many new 2005 MPs have you seen?

If the OS or application is only using some events and perfmon counters it can not be too hard to create MPs for MOM 2005, OpsMgr 2007 SP1 and OpsMgr 2007 R2. Notice that I don’t expect anyone to create an MP specifically for OpsMgr 2007 RTM. That is because SP1 is free and fixes so much with the RTM version that you would be foolish not to implement it. But creating 3 MPs would be hard work for complex products that use health models and lots of synthetic transactions. Like the Exchange MP for example. Still I think it is something that MP creators should aspire to. It would be interesting if there were any figures on deployments of MOM 2005 v 2007 and how how many organisations bought 2007 with SA. If Microsoft can show that 90% of organisations have moved to 2007 and most of them have SA then there is a stronger case for R2 only MPs. But there is still a need to support people on older versions. This presents an interesting challenge for Microsoft. I still come across organisations using older OSes and applications. As much as Microsoft would like everyone to move to the latest version the fact is that they don’t but still need to be supported as long as they are in the 5 + 5 timeframe.

It would be nice to see a white paper covering creating MPs for the 3 versions to help MP authors. I think that with the modular nature of OpsMgr it should be possible to create the base MPs for SP1 and have addition MP files that you can import if you have R2 that utilises the extra features and functions in R2. That would mean a different approach to creating a Management Pack but it would help in the long run. Mind you testing would be more complicated. And Microsoft’s track record on testing MPs before releasing them has not been that spectacular.

By the way I have been informed that there will be a native Exchange 2007 MP for SP1 that is due out in Q3. Good news on that front.

Having posted about the hard disk free space report a few days ago there are a large number of posts recently concerning hard disk monitoring. Hard disk monitoring is one of those givens that all organisations expect from a monitoring solution.

Setting The Thresholds

One area that causes confusion is the double threshold that the disk space monitor uses. Both figures have to be breached to create an alert.

Having talked to a few customers I have found the best way to discuss it is to use the spreadsheet created by Jonathan Almquist. This allows you to put in figures for typical hard disks and see when the threshold will be breached and whether it was MB or % that did it. Pump in some larger figures (as suggested by Anders) and the threshold changes to the other etc. It is a great visual tool to use with customers. It is a good article that explains the monitor really well.

Hard Disk Script Alert

Scott Moss at MyITForum updated his MOM 2005 script last July and turned it into an MP. There was a need for this type of script in 2005 and I used part of Scott’s along with Geeky Girls to create my own 2005 disk space script. He has redone his MOM 2005 script to ignore the MB threshold and added the ability to set a threshold on an individual disk using a percentage value using the DiskThreshold.MOM file, or disable alerting all together on a per disk basis using the NoDiskAlerts.MOM file. I find that with the 2007 monitor I have not needed to run a custom script. Understanding the double threshold makes it easy to customise and the fact that you can now create overrides for individual disks is useful and something that was not possible in MOM 2005. I suppose if you need to give other people the rights to make those changes then having the 2 files on the servers that they can change is a good idea. But I am happy with the default monitor.

Getting the Hard Disk Free Space Info

Here is a script to extract the percentage free disk space on all servers in a SCOM environment, and email it to an administrator. From Electric Bunnies (aka Geeky Girl aka Vanessa). I have not tested this one.

I was talking to Stefan Stranger at the MMS and he has a SQL query which returns all the disk space for the servers regardless of the OS rather than running a report per OS.

Run the query against the DW database in SQL Management Studio. Change the dates to dates that you want the info on. You can click the top corner of the table like a spreadsheet and copy and paste the info to a spreadsheet for further work.

Query in doc text file – SQL Query for Disk Space

Updated Disk Space Report

And Zeimbor (Ziemek Borowski) has posted a new version of his disk space report which looks a lot better that the “proof of concept” one that he originally did. He provides the MP as a .MP and .XML.

He also provides the SQL query and has redone the zip file which seem to cause a lot of problems for other people. And the MP can be downloaded with the zip file which contains the XML file. It shows up as a directory called Board in the reports. I don’t know why but if you use the XML file you can change that. I like the way you can put in a figure for free space like 20 and all server hard disks with less that 20% free will show up as a red graph bar on the right. It is a really great report now and highly recommended. My big disappointment (and others from the correspondence I have received on this subject) is why didn’t Microsoft do a report like that out of the box.

I did find an issue with it (well not really with the report) as System Center DPM creates a large number of mounted disks with very long names which throws the report a bit. Exporting it as a PDF is a nightmare but I found that exporting it to Excel tames that column and still shows all the nice info in the report.

I have tried Ziemek’s report on R2 and it works on that as well. Good news.

Although the docs and the eval version of OpsMgr R2 have been released the actual production code will not be available until 1st July according to the Microsoft Product Team bloggers such as Justin.

1st July! Really? Well yes, even though the eval RTM bits (build no 7221) was made available on 21st May. So that is about 6 weeks. The question most people will ask (rightly) is why it takes so long to copy some files to the main download centres such as Select, TechNet Plus and MSDN?

I know a group of us went through the same questions with the release of MOM 2005. There is some process that is linked to the sending out of the DVDs which was a weak excuse 4 years ago and is pathetic now that even TechNet Plus can be bought “diskless”. There is also some legal process from what I can remember. Microsoft makes a big deal about process and MOF around the management products. It looks like someone at Microsoft needs to take a serious look at their own processes. In these days taking 6 weeks to release code which has RTMed is ridiculous as most people download and do not use the DVDs. More so as the quote at MMS was “availability in 30 days” and not just announcements. To most people that means the production bits. Come on Microsoft – get your act together. It is the 21st century now.

By the way don’t even ask your Microsoft team to cut you a DVD. It was possible to do that years ago but then Microsoft made it a dismissible offence.

According to the Upgrade Guide you can upgrade from the R2 eval or even to the R2 Release Candidate. You can not directly upgrade from a pre SP1 version. Kevin has a good post on his upgrade from SP1 to R2. If you want to go R2 before July the only option is to use the eval version and then do an upgrade when the production bits are out. Not very satisfactory. Can someone from Microsoft post an official and reasonable reason why it takes 6 weeks and will break the promise made at MMS?

Well it looks like the team have got the RTM code out before the 30 day target. Good news

So far on the downloads are

The OpsMgr 2007 R2 Evaluation (1.29 GB)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=93ddf25b-1ef0-4851-81b0-5fb9a2f76181
(Although it does not say how long the eval copy is for)
Also the requirements are now saying 4 GB for the server roles rather than 2 GB for SP1.

The R2 Documentation (9 docs and an XML file – all have to be downloaded individually – it would be nice to have a single zip file as well with all the docs)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=19bd0eb5-7ca0-41be-8c0f-2d95fe7ec636

And at 4.9 MB -  The Service Level Dashboard Management Pack 2.0 for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 assists you in tracking, managing, and reporting on your line-of-business (LOB) application service levels. It displays a list of applications and their performance and availability against service level goals.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1d9d709f-9628-46a8-952b-a78f5dd2bdd9

They are showing new R2 pages on the download pages but these ones are still talking about the Release Candidate so that they have not been updated yet,

Related Resources

1. Operations Manager 2007 R2 Home Page
2. Operations Manager 2007 R2 product documentation
3. Operations Manager 2007 R2 TechNet page

We just need the full version to be released which should be soon if the eval version is out.

This post relates to OpsMgr 2007 SP1 with Exchange 2007 MP v6.0.6461.0.

Normally I ensure that there is an agent on each Exchange server before deploying the MP. This ensures that the underlying OS and IIS are OK before getting involved in the Exchange MP. But on this occasion the customer had one Exchange server that they did not want to have an agent on as it was a temporary server used for migration and was being decommissioned in a month.

After deploying the MP I received the usual alerts from the Test-OwaConnectivity, Test-ActiveSyncConnectivity, and Test-WebServicesConnectivity rules which indicated that the script New-TestCasConnectivityUser.ps1 needs to be run to create the test mailboxes as per the MP Guide. This was done but I was still seeing some alerts but looking closely at the detail they showed that although the alerts were coming from the Exchange server with the agent they were actually referring to the mailbox server that did not have the agent. The Cas_GUID part showed that the GUID was one that I had not seen on running the script originally. I ran the New-TestCasConnectivityUser.ps1 script on the server without an agent and that resolved those alerts. It created the CAS_GUID account with the same GUID that I had seen in the alert.

Initially I could not run the script as the server had a recovery storage group on it. As that can not have mailboxes added the script fails. You need to remove the recovery storage group before running the script on that server,

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125197.aspx

You need to run the commands get-storagegroup and get-mailboxdatabase to get the information to get the right one to remove.

Another alert I saw was that there was an error for the external OWA test. In the MP Guide it says

To set an external URL, you must run the Set-OwaVirtualDirectory Exchange Management Shell command. The syntax of the command is: set-owavirtualdirectory “<Server name>\owa (Default Web site)” -externalurl:https://<Fully Qualified Domain Name>/owa

I checked and found that this was already set correctly. I then discovered that the Exchange server needed Rollup 7 whereas these ones only had Rollup 6. This is because the domain name that the client uses is different from the FQDN that they have and so have a disjoint namespace.

Note that Rollup 8 has been released.

As they announced at the MMS that OpsMgr R2 should be released with 30 days (28th April) that means that it should be out in the next 7 days if they are going to keep to that day.

At a session by Daniel Savage and Vitaly Filimonov on the new features of reporting (Service Level Tracking with integration into SharePoint – different from Service Level Dashboard, new report model for Report Builder and more) in R2 Vitaly demonstrated building a report using SQL queries which he built up to get a table report which included disk space and disk free. This is the report that everyone has asked for and from my previous blogs (here and here) on this particular report that generated the most comments and e-mails.

Although the screen shot above does not show the disk free column it is there just cut off on the slide.

Vitaly provided the SQL Query that he used in the demo so if the other columns like processor, memory are not needed then they can be removed. The other thing about R2 is that once you create a new report you can save that as a management pack and then export it and import it into other systems.

When I get back from Vegas I will be looking at this in my test environment running R2 RC and will report back on this report once I have tested it. But it is looking good for getting this most requested of reports. At last!

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:-

At today’s MMS session on the SLD Solution Accelerator they announced that the release of this new version for R2 will RTM at the same time as R2. The beta is available on Connect if you are looking at the RC of OpsMgr R2.

https://connect.microsoft.com/programdetails.aspx?ProgramDetailsID=2249

V1 used SRS but v2 uses WSS (the free version of SharePoint that comes with Windows Server) and makes the template more friendly and easier to deploy.

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!

At the keynote at the MMS they announced that OpsMgr 2007 R2 would be available in 30 days.

Remember, R2 is only free to organisations that have bought OpsMgr 2007 with Software Assurance. If you have OpsMgr without SA then you would need to buy new licences for all your management servers and agents. From what I have seen so far R2 is good with some nice new features and improvements. And for SA organisations and buying new R2 is a given. But I am having trouble envisaging a killer feature that would mean an organisation would pay for new licences rather than just wait for the next full version which I guess will be OpsMgr 2011. Especially in the current economic climate.

The biggest new feature is support for UNIX and Linux. But large organisations tend to have a separate team from the Windows team to look after those servers with their own tool. Smaller organisations may only have a few Linux servers and so would have tool to manage those if they are critical or an add-in from Jalasoft or Quest to monitor those from OpsMgr. So while it is a great addition I can not see it driving sales of OpsMgr to R2. I would be interested in hearing about organisations that are planning to upgrade.

I arrived at Las Vegas on Saturday so I had some time to get over the 8 hour time difference. It was nice to be able to walk around on Sunday in the sunshine. The Venetian is a great hotel and it is a lot quicker to get to the convention from the rooms compared to when they held it at Mandalay Bay.

Monday is not the official first day but they hold a number of hands on labs and some sessions. But to be honest, although the event does not officially start until tomorrow with the keynote, with the number of sessions running and attendees around it looked like a normal day. At one point it looked like there was not going to be food or drinks but they brought them out for lunch. Although they way they did the sessions meant that there was only 15 mins for lunch.

I did a couple of hands on labs this morning and then a series of sessions by Brian Wren based on the concept of creating an MP. I wish Brian had done this session 2 years ago! The labs were OK but there was some bits which were just standard OpsMgr and not new for R2 which I found frustrating but may have been good for people new to the product. I still find it amazing that they create these labs with mistakes in them when they are showcasing to a large audience. I did a couple of HOLs a few years ago and I got a friend who was not in IT to walk through to ensure that there was no mistakes and I had not jumped steps. Quality control please.

One thing though that I did notice is that the OpsMgr R2 console in the HOL was very quick even though it was running as a VM. Very promising. I am compiling a list of likes and dislikes as I get more exposure to the product that I will turn into a post later.

I was about to install the HP MPs but thought that I would check and found that there are new versions on the HP site since my last download but there are no dates on the web site. The new versions are 1.2 for Proliant and 1.7 for Blade Systems.

http://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductsList.do?groupName=HP+Server+integrations+with+Microsoft+System+Center+products

The Blade MP was dated 24th Nov 08 after unzipping and the Proliant was 19th Dec 08. I did not see any announcements of these and the MP Catalog is still showing the previous versions dated March 2008.

Why isn’t the catalog updated? Is it Microsoft’s responsibility or is it up to HP to tell Microsoft? Either way someone needs to take responsibility as these MPs are months old.

As we get closer to the MMS at the end of April we are getting closer to the release of R2. Yesterday OpsMgr 2007 R2 RC (6.1.7043.0 build) was released on connect along with a bunch of documentation which will provide the foundation for the RTM documentation.

It is a big download at 1277 MB.

Good timing as I am back from holiday and I can install it and have a look. Usually, but not always, with a release candidate it is feature complete so it is now in the bug testing phase.

The AD LSASS process is checked on a regular basis. There is a project at the customer site that I am at to replace the old DCs but in the meantime we have the OpsMgr agent on them. This monitor keeps on coming up a lot so I extended it to taking 5 samples instead of 3 and upped the threshold to 90% instead of 80%. Which helped. Now only a few alerts get created. Here is an interesting breach of threshold – 148%.

I bet you wish you had magic CPUs that could do more than 100%. I am not sure why they are replacing them if they can do more that 100%.

I was investigating a problem with a SQL server having 100% CPU spikes. I found that Sysinternals Process Monitor invaluable in helping me see what was going on. What was happening was that a large number of scripts were running at the same time and as it was a SQL cluster with multiple instances (this customer was doing a SQL Server consolidation) then it was exasperated as the scripts run for each instance at the same time. This has been confirmed by Microsoft as being a problem with the SQL MP (v6.0.6460.0) when running on a cluster with multiple instances all running off one active node.

To improve the situation I created a group with the cluster members and went through all the discoveries that had generic targets (like  Windows Computer or Windows Server) and put an override on them to stop them. This cluster is only going to be used for SQL Server and so there is no need to discover anything else. The main ones that really helped were eliminating the discoveries of SRS, Integration and Analysis Services as those were getting run for each instance. The active node is down to running about 15% which the SQL DBA thinks is dreadful but at least there are no 100% spikes now.

In my investigationI found some strange things. The IBM Director Agent script was set to run every 20 seconds – targeted to Windows Computer. I don’t even run discoveries that fast on a demo system! That was definitely changed.

Here is a list of more reasonable times for discoveries and what they are in seconds that you can use for overrides.

1 hour        3600 seconds
2 hours        7200 seconds
4 hours        14400 seconds
8 hours        28800 seconds
12 hours    43200 seconds
24 hours    86400 seconds
1 week        604800 seconds

I have always thought that one of the advantages of the application since MOM 2000 has been its automatic discovery and downloading of MP rules. This meant that if someone installed IIS on a server and forgot to tell the monitoring team it would not matter as the discovery would ensure that IIS was found and the rules downloaded. With 2007 using Cscript it seems that there is more chance of hitting 100% CPU which was pretty much unheard of in 2000 and 2005. Yet I have seen threads on forums about this for the AD and DNS MPs and now SQL on clusters with multiple instances.

In contrast I have been looking at the beta of the new Exchange 2007 MP which has been written for 2007 rather than converted from 2005. One of the things that struck me immediately when reading the MP Guide was that the majority of discoveries are switched off by default and when they are enabled the default is a rather more sensible 24 hours. After all how often do you change server roles in a production environment? This is a philosophical change as in the past all discoveries were targeted to all servers. The only discovery in this MP that does this is a light weight discovery that just checks registry keys. Once that has been done then the other discoveries (when switched on) are targeted at just those servers. That type of behaviour is seen in a number of MPs where a general discovery is run against Windows Computer but then other specific discoveries are targeted towards the class that is discovered. Obviously this puts less load on servers that are not running that application – especially if the discovery uses big scripts and/or WMI.

I like this idea. I have suggested in the past that the Exchange MP is split into two with the basics (event monitoring) in one and the advanced stuff that needs configuration (synthetic transactions) in a second. While this is not how the Exchange MP has been done it is split into multiple roles so you can just install the mailbox monitoring or the CAS or Hub MPs. This will make it easier to tune as you can put in one bit at a time.

I would recommend that you have a look at your discoveries and how often they are running and ask yourself what frequency is good for your environment. I would suggest a long period like a day or even a week for most as you can always create an override for a shorter period if you need to speed things up temporarily.

I was hoping to add the almost obligatory 1 line PowerShell script to show you how to get that information but although there is a get-discovery command it does not include the actual frequency of the discovery. You can always use the excellent MP Viewer (from Boris Yanushpolsky) but that can only look at 1 MP at a time. But it can examine an MP before you import it. It has a node for discoveries and will tell you the target, whether it is enabled or not and the all import frequency (in seconds).

Reading Aidan Finn’s post about having problems with agents as he used the 32 bit MOMCertImport.exe tool on a 64 bit server reminded me of a post I wanted to do.

I had a similar problem in that the server build team wanted to build the servers with the OpsMgr agent which was fine. But for DCs they got hold of oomads.msi but were using the 64 bit version on a 32 bit server. So obviously it did not work. And then came to me with the problem.

The files are different sizes but why can’t Microsoft call them oomads32.msi and oomads64.msi etc. If you download KB patches they name the patches differently. One I downloaded recently was 354607_ENU_i386_zip.exe with the 64 bit as 354627_ENU_x64_zip.exe. In the OpsMgr directories there are the various directories for the different versions. Would it be that difficult to name them to reflect the OS version? It would save a few PSS calls I am sure.