To create a monitor simply start the Create a Unit monitor wizard.

Make your choices:

Give the monitor a Name select Monitor target and choose if it will be enabled.

Select how often your script will run on the agent.

In the Shell Command details you need to provide your command or path to binary/script without line breaks. So my little script that checks if a file exists.

#!/bin/bash
if ! [ -f /tmp/OPSMGR.SE ];
then
echo "Error"
else
echo "OK"
fi

Needs to be put in a file on the agent or as a one-liner. Otherwise it wont be possible to continue the wizard and a red exclamation will show, like in this picture

Putting the script in one line makes it look like this, I removed #!/bin/bash so the line wont be marked as a comment..

if ! [ -f /tmp/OPSMGR.SE ]; then echo "Error"; else echo "OK"; fi

Specifying the Error Expression

Specifying the Healthy Expression

Finish the wizard and your monitor is now running.

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If you like me wants to be able to connect to both a 2012 beta management group and a 2007 R2 management group you can run 2 consoles on the same workstation. Just start with running the OpsMgr 2012 beta setup on your workstation, if an OpsMgr R2 console is already installed it will be upgraded, otherwise just install the console. If you don’t want to go through the setup GUI just run this from an elevated command prompt: setup.exe /silent /install /components:OMConsole /UseMicrosoftUpdate:[0|1]

When this is done, load your R2 media and install the console from that one.

This will give you two folders in %programfiles%:

And also on the Start menu and Programs and Features:

Now we are able to run the consoles simultaneously

But you will soon notice that the Connect to Server.. windows is showing now and then when opening a console. This is also mentioned in this post:
http://www.opsmode.com/2011/03/manage-multiple-management-groups-with-powershell/

To get rid of this I edit the shortcut and add /Server:OPS-OMbeta-MS01.opsmgr.se for my 2012 console and /Server:OM.opsmode.local for the 2007 R2 console
"C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\Microsoft.MOM.UI.Console.exe" /Server:OM.opsmode.local
"C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2012\Console\Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Monitoring.Console.exe" /server:OPS-OMbeta-MS01.opsmgr.se

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Go to Administration, right click Management Packs (you can right click anywhere) and chose Download Management Packs.

Chose your download location and then click Add

Search for the MP you want to download, and select it in the list. Then click Properties

And there you have it!

A nice feature here would be to right click and Save As, but that doesn’t work. How ever you can click it and it will open in Word, if you don’t have Word installed you can mark it and copy the the link with Ctrl+C and paste it in a browser to open it on another machine.

Post from: www.opsmode.com

• Recommended processor speed: 2.8 GHz or faster.
• Minimum memory: not less than 2 GB.
• Operating System: Windows Server 2008 R2
• Processor Architecture: must be AMD64
• Internet Information Services (IIS) v7.5 or later, with the IIS Management Console and the following role services installed:
  • Static Content
  • Default Document
  • Directory Browsing
  • HTTP Errors
  • HTTP Logging
  • Request Monitor
  • Request Filtering
  • Static Content Compression
  • Web Server (IIS) Support
  • IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility
  • ASP.NET
  • Windows Authentication
• Default website: must have an http or https binding configured
• Both .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and .NET Framework 4 is required for setup to run. For more information, see the following.
  • .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 redistributable package
  • .NET Framework 4 redistributable package

The role services is easily installed with powershell, which makes it a little quicker then using Server Manager GUI:

Import-Module ServerManager
Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework-Core,Web-WebServer,Web-Static-Content,Web-Default-Doc,Web-Dir-Browsing,Web-Http-Errors,Web-Asp-Net,Web-Http-Logging,Web-Request-Monitor,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-Filtering,Web-Stat-Compression,Web-Mgmt-Console,Web-Metabase

As you might see I’ve also added NET-Framework-Core  (.NET Framework 3.5.1) there as well.

When the IIS install is ready you should install .NET Framework 4. (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17851)

If you installed .NET Framework 4 before installing the IIS you’ll get an error:

The ASP.NET 4.0 handler is not registered with IIS 

To fix this, the Operations Manager 2012 Deployment document states that you should run:

%WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_regiis.exe -r

I suggest that that you add the -enable option (%WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_regiis.exe -enable -r), that enables the ASP.NET ISAPI extension. And gets rid of this prerequisites error:

Web Console cannot operate properly because the ISAPI and CGI Restrictions in Internet Information Services (IIS) are disabled or missing for ASP.NET 4.0.

Lastly do a restart of the server before running the setup again.

Post from: www.opsmode.com

If we want to control this, there is a switch when opening console:
Microsoft.MOM.UI.Console.exe /Server:OPSRMS01.opsmgr.se

So for the console we can create different shortcuts for the MG’s with the switch..

When it comes to the Operations Manager Shell there isn’t any switch to do it the “easy way”. I do like this:

First I makes as many copy’s of the file Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.ClientShell.Startup.ps1 as I have Management Groups. Renaming them to the different MG names, for example:
Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.ClientShell.StartupOPSMGRdev.ps1 for my development environment.

Second I open the ..StartupOPSMGRdev.ps1-file in my preferred editor and change line 10

Just adding your RMS fqdn (remove : “”)

Third I make a copy of the Operations Manager Shell shortcut for every MG and change the .Startup.ps1 to the name you gave the Startup file, in my case it will be:
Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.ClientShell.StartupOPSMGRdev.ps1

So now I have a shortcut for every Management Group in my environment.

Post from: www.opsmode.com

I’m really glad to get this kind of recognition!

So what is the MCC Award you ask.. Microsoft Community Contributor Award

Post from: www.opsmode.com

We have one team that administrates the infrastructure, Active Directory, MS Exchange, SQL server, Operations Manager etc. Then we have a application team that operates the business applications, for example Microsoft Dynamics CRM and a web application called DinnerNow.

The application team wants to be able to see alerts and status as well as changing thresholds and doing overrides on "their" applications and all dependencies like storage, databases and web sites in the OpsMgr console. On top of that they also wants to get notified trough e-mail in non business hours.

Console
So in this case we focus on the group that is administrating DinnerNow and Dynamics CRM.
First we need some groups, I’ve created one main group (OpsMode Application Team) with 8 subgroups containing the various components of Dynamics CRM and DinnerNow.

• DinnerNow Databases, contains objects from the SQL 2008 Database class
• DinnerNow Storage and logging, contains objects from the Ubuntu server class
• DinnerNow Web sites, contains objects from the IIS7 Web sites class
• Dynamics CRM Application Servers, contains objects from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Server class
• Dynamics CRM Data Disk, contains objects from the Logical Disk class
• Dynamics CRM SQL components, contains objects from the SQL 2008 Database and SQL 2008 Agent Job class
• Dynamics CRM Web sites, contains objects from the IIS 7 Web sites class
• Dynamics CRM Windows Servers, contains objects from the Windows Computer class

Second we need to create a User Role. I base this User Role on the Advanced Operator role, because the team need to do overrides and similar.

The Advanced Operator profile includes a set of privileges designed for users that need access to limited tweaking of monitoring
configuration in addition to the Operators privileges. A role based on the Advanced Operators profile grants members the ability to override the configuration of rules and monitors for specific targets or groups of targets within the configured scope.

I name the user role, and add the members of the team. In this case its Marsellus Wallace and Vincent Vega.

Then I chose what groups this user role will be able to handle.

When choosing what views will be available I also check Active Alerts, Windows Computers, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Windows Internet Information Services and Microsoft Windows Server.

I then finish the wizard. (All the settings set in the wizard can later be changed if we would like.)
Now we have a new User Role:

And if I now log on the console with the user Vincent Vega I now only see the views we chose in the User Role Wizard.

We can create overrides on all management packs but only to computers that are members of a group that we chose in the wizard.
When doing an override for a group, we only get to chose from the groups chosen earlier.

Notifications

So now the team can view and take care of the monitoring in the Console. They also wants to get critical alerts through e-mail on times they are not in front of a console, ie non office hours.

So to set this up we can use the groups created earlier. I assume that you have a working Notification Channel and your subscribers all set up, otherwise check these:

How to Create and Configure the Notification Action Account
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744866.aspx

Enable an E-mail Notification Channel
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd440883.aspx

Create Notification Subscribers
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd440875.aspx

Creating a criteria for the subscription, it could look like this.

This will send New Critical alerts from all the above groups classes to the subscriber.

Post from: www.opsmode.com

$rmsServer=”RMS.fqdn”
add-pssnapin “Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.Client”;
Set-Location “OperationsManagerMonitoring::”;
$mgConnection = New-ManagementGroupConnection -connectionString:$rmsServer;

Set-Location $rmsServer;

$unixClass = get-monitoringclass -name "Microsoft.Unix.Computer"
$monObject = Get-MonitoringObject -monitoringclass:$unixClass
$mmServer = $monObject | where {$_.displayname -eq "unixserver.fqdn"}

New-MaintenanceWindow -MonitoringObject $mmServer -Comment "Enter maintenance mode reason here" -StartTime (Get-Date) -EndTime (Get-Date).AddMinutes(60)

Post from: www.opsmode.com

Now the answer is a great Powershell script written by Stefan Stranger.

It is to be found here:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_stranger/archive/2010/11/30/what-monitors-rules-and-discoveries-are-running-on-an-opsmgr-agent.aspx

Post from: www.opsmode.com

Here is som release-interviews with the Engineering team http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/archive/2010/11/19/opalis-6-3-release-interviews-with-the-engineering-team.aspx

In the package are Integrations Packs for SCCM, DPM, OpsMgr, SCSM and SCVMM.

I’m really looking forward to start using this new version and IP’s!

Happy automating.. =)

Post from: www.opsmode.com