opsmode

Word is that we will se Opalis 6.3 on 25th of November. Support for installing on Windows server 2008 and integration packs for more System Center products is the news there.

When it comes to the vNext versions of both Opalis and OpsMgr they will probably be releases under the names System Center Opalis 2012 and System Center Operations Manager 2012.

A little more here: http://ianblythmanagement.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/v-next-2012/

I see this question a lot in the technet forums:

“I don’t want to monitor the IIS on this server and have disabled the discovery, but the server wont disappear. How do I get rid of it?”

To resolve this you just need to open a Operations Manager Shell and enter: Remove-DisabledMonitoringObject

Description of cmdlet:
Removes all monitoring objects for which discovery is disabled. For example, if you created an override to disable discovery for a particular database on a database server, calling this cmdlet would cause the removal of this database from Operations Manager.

It is now official, OpsMgr now supports SQL Server 2008 R2 read more here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2425714

But remember where you read it first. ;) http://www.opsmode.com/2010/05/install-opsmgr-on-sql-2008-r2/

A new version of the Operations Manager Management Pack was released yesterday.

Download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=61365290-3c38-4004-b717-e90bb0f6c148

And a nice change is that they have made the rules that monitor failure of scripts, commands and WMI queries less noisy and easier to understand. The rules has also been renamed, new names is listed in the following table:

So if you have alot of script failuers and WMI errors import this MP!

The catalog accessible from the console has not been updated with the new version when this is published.

I couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure to beta test Dan Kregors tool OMWatcher. And I must say, this is a great tool that I will use at many customer sites…

This is the answer when some one is asking: “But who is watching the watcher?” Meaning, who is monitoring OpsMgr. Well the answer i OMWatcher!

Overview

The 1E OMWatcher tool for System Center Operations Manager 2007 fills an important, and often overlooked gap in every OpsMgr environment.

Arising from the question…

“Who’s watching the watcher?”

… 1E OMWatcher is designed to monitor the 3 critical service on the Root Management Server (SDK, Config and HealthService). 1E OMWatcher will proactively mitigate unnecessary and potentially expensive downtime by ensuring the RMS is active (via a ping), and taking remedial action should one of the core RMS services stop. In addition, 1E OMWatcher will notify administrators (via email) were an issue arises.

1E OMWatcher should be installed on a server other than the RMS (preferably on a secondary Management Server), and configured to run under an account that has local administrative rights on the RMS.

Key Features

• Actively pings the RMS at regular polling intervals, alerting (via email) should the RMS not respond (indicating the potential for the server to be offline).
• Checking the status for the 3 OpsMgr services, ensuring they are running. In the event that a service is stopped, OMWatcher will attempt to restart the service, and will alert (via email) that the service had stopped.
• Checking the startmode for the OpsMgr service, they are not set to disabled. In the event that a service is set to disabled, OMWatcher will set the service to Automatic, restart the service, and will alert (via email) that the service was set to Disabled and stopped.

More here: http://opsm.gr/2010/05/28/1e-system-center-watcher-tool-v1-now-available/
Download here (registration required): http://www.1e.com/Downloads/FreeTools/Index.aspx

When using a management pack designed to discover a 32bit application and that application is installed on a 64bit server OS the application will probably not get discovered.

This is because the 32bits app will write its registry keys in the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\ (because its a 32bit app on a 64bit system) and the discovery will look for keys and values in HKLM\SOFTWARE\

To resolve this you can either create the registry keys under HKLM\SOFTWARE or install a 32bit agent on the system.
If you install the 32bit agent it will bee replaced every time you do a upgrade from the console, and worse you wont bee able to monitor your 64bit system properly.

When author MP’s for OpsMgr 2007 R2 there is a new feature that can be used in the discovery.
<RegistryView>32bit</RegistryView>

Should go somthing like this:

<RegistryAttributeDefinition>
  <AttributeName>TheApplication</AttributeName>
  <Path>SOFTWARE\TheApplication</Path>
  <PathType>0</PathType>
  <AttributeType>0</AttributeType>
  <RegistryView>32bit</RegistryView>
</RegistryAttributeDefinition>

And this will make it look in the Wow6432Node

When installing OpsMgr on SQL 2008 R2 the installation will not find the SQL instance and give the following error: Microsoft SQL Server is required. Please see details

To go around this requirement, use the DBCreateWizard.exe that you find on the OpsMgr media \SupportTools\<architecture>\DBCreateWizard.exe

Observe that this is NOT TESTED OR SUPPORTED by Microsoft!!!

And that one will find the instance.

Observe that this is NOT TESTED OR SUPPORTED by Microsoft!!!

Some times when installing X-plat agents you get an error:

The server certificate on the destination computer (server:1270) has the following errors:    
The SSL certificate contains a common name (CN) that does not match the hostname.

The problem here is that Operations Manager uses the FQDN in the DNS, but the certificate will contain the server name taken from the server.
To solve this issue you can change the DNS record, change the server name or you can add the server name to the HOSTS file on the Root Management Server or the Management Server.

Example:
192.168.80.37 name.in.certificate

When scheduling an Operations Manager PowerShell script you have to load the powershell snapins.

Insert this in the beginning of your script

$ServerName = “hostname”
add-pssnapin “Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.Client”;
set-location “OperationsManagerMonitoring::”;
new-managementGroupConnection -ConnectionString:$ServerName;
set-location $ServerName;

Today when installing OpsMgr R2 agents on a couple of Solaris servers we ran in to a problem on the Solaris 9 servers.

The error we got in OpsMgr:
<![CDATA[Executing command: echo -e mail=\ninstance=overwrite\npartial=nocheck\nidepend=quit\nrdepend=quit\nconflict=nocheck\naction=nocheck\nbasedir=default\n > /tmp/scx-$USER/scx;uncompress -f /tmp/scx-om_unix/scx-1.0.4-248.solaris.9.sparc.pkg.Z

We found this on the Solaris box:
[ verifying class <config> ]
## Executing postinstall script.
ld.so.1: .scxsslconfig: fatal: libssl.so.0.9.7: open failed: No such file or directory
Killed
pkgadd: ERROR: postinstall script did not complete successfully
Installation of <MSFTscx> failed.
bash-2.05# ssh –version
Sun_SSH_1.1, SSH protocols 1.5/2.0, OpenSSL 0x0090700f
Bad escape character ‘rsion’.

And if you look in Appendix A in the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Operations Guide you se that OpenSSL is required. So after installing OpenSSL the agent install went fine!
Sun does not provide a version of OpenSSL for Solaris 9 SPARC. There is a version available from Sunfreeware.