David Allen - Cloud & Datacenter Management MVP

Tech.Days Online UK Starts Tomorrow!

David Allen MVP — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:51:26 GMT

So, Tech.Days UK starts tomorrow and runs through until the end of Friday, and it is all available online. Take a look at the session schedule here, https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032543696&Culture=en-GB&community=0, and register if you want to attend any of the sessions.

And, if you want to hear me present, I am presenting on Friday morning, "Appy Monitoring with System Center 2012". :-)

Enjoy!!

David

MVP Speaker Series

David Allen MVP — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:51:21 GMT

Hi All,

This week sees the start of a new MVP Speaker Series covering Windows Server and System Center technologies. Many of the presentations will be sessions that couldn't be accommodated at MMS, and others will be brand new, but they will all be available online for everyone to attend through the use of Lync!

For more details, check out this post by Travis, http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/archive/2013/04/22/windows-server-system-center-mvp-speaker-series-starting-this-week.aspx.

My session, "Tips & Tricks to Using the Visual Studio Authoring Extensions", will be next Tuesday (April 30th). I look forward to seeing you there :-)

David

VSAE – Include File Content

David Allen MVP — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:23:40 GMT

One of the features I love in the Visual Studio Authoring Extensions is IncludeFileContent. This feature enables you to include script files into a management pack, without needing to write the script with the relevant XML tags such as <ScriptBody>.

In MP development up to now, you would need to write your script in the XML of the management pack, like this:

<ScriptBody><![CDATA[
Option Explicit

SetLocale("en-us")

Dim oAPI
Set oAPI = CreateObject("MOM.ScriptAPI")
….
….
]]>
</ScriptBody>

Now, with VSAE you can write your script in a VBS, PS1 or JS file just as you would outside of SCOM and then include it in the MP, like this:

<ScriptBody>$IncludeFileContent/Scripts/MonitoringScript.vbs$</ScriptBody>

To do this is very simple, just right click in your MP project and select Add -> New Item…, select Templates, and then select the relevant script type with a relevant name.

Once you've added your new script, you can add the contents of your script to file.

Once you have your script completed, you can now include it in your management pack. In the example below I have included my new MonitoringScript.vbs file in a task using the Microsoft.Windows.ScriptProbeAction module.

The include syntax in this example is $IncludeFileContent/Scripts/MonitoringScript.vbs$, and this is generated based on the path of the file. In this MP, I stored the VBS file in a folder called Scripts, which is why "Scripts/MonitoringScript.vbs" is added to "IncludeFileContent".

I think this is a great feature as you can use it wherever you need to use a script. This means you can you store all your scripts under one folder in your project which makes them easily accessible and makes editing much safer, as now you can just simply edit the script with no risk of a typo in the XML of the MP itself.

I encourage everyone to use this feature.

Happy MP writing!

Infront MMS Full Conference Pass Winner has been Announced

David Allen MVP — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 18:09:52 GMT

The winner of the Infront Consulting Group Full MMS Conference Pass giveaway has been announced by Rory McCaw in a video on Facebook. Get over there now to see if you’re the lucky winner, http://www.facebook.com/InfrontConsulting.

David

Win a Full MMS 2013 Conference Pass from Infront Consulting Group!

David Allen MVP — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:30:52 GMT

Enter to Win One Full MMS 2013 Conference Pass from Infront Consulting Group

Hello everyone,

Infront is pleased to give away one full conference pass to MMS 2013 worth $2195.

We would love to give it to an individual who really wants to attend. And, because time is short, we need to give this away quickly to give the winner enough time to arrange travel and a week away from work. One lucky winner will be drawn on Friday March 22, 2013.

Each entrant can receive one full point for completing any of the tasks below. Each point qualifies as one entry so perform them all and increase your odds of winning. You can earn up to a maximum of 8 points.

Send an email to info@infrontconsulting.com with the subject MMS Conference Giveaway. Enter your full name, phone number, and company name in the body of the email.
In the email make reference to any training or consulting your company has done with us or Infront Management Packs (even free ones) that you use.
Post a positive review on PinPoint for training / services / MPs that you've taken or worked with.
Like Infront on Facebook.
View our Triage and Audit MP videos on YouTube-like them and post a comment.
Tweet about the Infront giveaway with #orangef and #mms2013.
Connect with Infront on LinkedIn.
Invite others from your company to do the same by forwarding this mailer.

Please note that this pass does not include food, hotel or airfare.

The contest closes at midnight Thursday March 21st. We will make a random drawing on Friday March 22, 2013 at 5:00 p.m. EDT, and notify the winner directly afterward. Look for the video announcement on our Facebook page.

Please ensure that you are fully able to attend before entering.

Good luck!

SCOM Sessions at MMS 2013

David Allen MVP — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 11:28:42 GMT

Want to know all the OpsMgr sessions that are going to be on this year at MMS, well here they are. http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2013/03/12/system-center-operations-manager-sessions-microsoft-management-summit-2013-4-8-4-12.aspx

The listed includes all sessions by the product engineering team at Microsoft, and the sessions by MVP’s and partners.

Take a look and add the sessions that interest you to your schedule builder!

David

SCOM Management Packs – Wiki

David Allen MVP — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 12:48:23 GMT

There has been a very useful TechNet Wiki page posted that lists all the currently available management packs, and the relevant links to download them. The page also includes all management packs currently in pre-release that are due for release in the near future. As this is a wiki page, it can be easily updated when new MP’s or updates are released, so hopefully this page will stay up to date.

Visit the page at, http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/16174.microsoft-management-packs.aspx.

Be sure to check out the subscription options via email or RSS on the right hand side of the page, so you are notified when changes are made to the page.

David

SCOM Management Packs – Microsoft Raising the Bar

David Allen MVP — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:28:10 GMT

Over the years there has been a number of management packs from Microsoft that have left some customer wanting, with both the level of monitoring and knowledge provided within them. That being said, over time the quality of most management packs has improved, but not at the pace everyone had hoped for, and every now and then another “bad” management pack made it out to release.

Now, to help understand what is being done to make management packs from Microsoft more consistent, and what is being done to raise the quality bar, Daniel Savage at Microsoft has released the first of a series of blog posts that provide information on the latest MP initiatives and management packs due for release in the near future.

Read the Daniels’ post at, http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2013/03/12/mp-blog-consistent-world-class-manageability.aspx.

David

VSAE – Management Pack Template Groups

David Allen MVP — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 11:37:09 GMT

Using the Visual Studio Authoring Extensions to build your management packs, one extremely useful piece of functionality is the ability to create multiple rules/monitors/discoveries/tasks/views etc. using management pack template groups. The reason this functionality is so good is because:

1. Easy to Create

Working with Visual Studio will put a lot of IT Pro's off using the Visual Studio Authoring Extensions, so they have to as easy as possible to use, and the management pack template groups are certainly easy to create and use! All you need to do to create a new template group is simply right-click in your solution and select Add -> New Item...

and then pick the relevant template...

and then name as required.

DONE!

2. No XML required

VSAE adds a UI to create monitoring components such as rules and monitors. Using this UI it is possible to configure all the available settings such as name, target, data source, ID, description etc etc. and it will configure all the relevant display strings automatically!

--- OK, so I'll be honest here... Sometimes there may be a requirement to work with the XML a little bit. When working with some items, like rules, you need to configure the data source type the rule is going to use, and usually the data source type will require some configuration items to be passed, and it is this configuration that you will need to configure in the XML. The screen clipping below is displaying the configuration XML for the data source selected.

This isn't as bas as it seems though, as you can use intellisense to return the configuration items required in the XML. Simply hit Ctrl+Space and the configuration item will be available to select, as you can see with SyncTime above. Once the SyncTime has been configured, hit return and do Ctrl+Space again to see if another configuration item is required.

3. Copy & Paste

One of my biggest issues with the SCOM 2007 R2 Authoring Console was that it was not possible to copy and paste. In many cases I had the requirement to create tens, if not hundreds, of rules that were all identical apart from a couple of minor configuration changes, and in the old authoring tool I would have to create each one manually or break out into the XML and copy and paste the relevant rule and display strings. Neither of these solutions were great as they were both very time consuming, but this issue is now resolved using VSAE as after I have created my first rule, I can simply copy and paste and then simply edit the configuration items as required.

It's not just rules that can be copied and pasted though, any template item can be. The next item below covers all the available template types.

4. 14 Templates Available

There are 14 templates available which will cover the majority of your authoring needs! They are:

Agent Task (Custom)
Agent Task (PowerShell Script)
Agent Task (Windows Script)
Assembly Resource
Discovery
Monitor (Aggregate)
Monitor (Dependency)
Monitor (Unit)
Rule (Alert)
Rule (Custom)
Rule (Event Collection)
Rule (Performance Collection)
Snippet
View (Custom)

5. Auto-Generated MPX

When using template groups, an MPX file is created automatically which enables you to view the XML behind the UI if you so wish.

WARNING: Do not edit the .mpx file as these changes will not be saved.

MPX files are management pack fragments, and you can have multiple MPX files within an MP. When you build the MP, all the MPX files are combined to form the management pack.

So, they are my top reasons for what makes template groups so good! There are many more as well, but these are the key ones in my opinion that cover all the the different template types.

Happy MP writing all :-)

David

System Center 2012 Operations Manager Unleased is Unleashed

David Allen MVP — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 15:32:36 GMT

Today the System Center 2012 Operations Manager book became available in Amazon. I would recommend this book to anyone that works with Operations Manager!

Purchase the book (paperbook or Kindle) here, http://www.amazon.co.uk/System-Center-Operations-Manager-Unleashed/dp/0672335913/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1361888853&sr=8-1.

Congratulations to Kerrie, Cameron, John, and Pete!

David

SCOM Dashboard – Is Monitor Alert

David Allen MVP — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:04:18 GMT

Using the alert widget in the new dashboards in SCOM 2012 exposes a very useful new column, which is worth knowing about, "Is Monitor Alert". This new column simply informs you whether the alert was generated by a monitor or a rule, and the reason this is really useful is because it helps you to decide which alerts you can close, and which you need to leave. In general, most monitor generated alerts will not need manually closing, as they will close automatically when the state of the object returns to Healthy (there are a few exceptions, like manual reset monitors), however alerts generated by rules do need to be dealt with. Traditionally in SCOM, the easiest way to tell if an alert was generated by a monitor or rule was to right click the alert and see whether there was an option to "View or edit the settings of this monitor" or "View or edit the settings of this rule".

Now, we can use the alert widget in a dashboard to make this information more accessible.

When configuring the Alert widget within a dashboard, you just need to select the "Is Monitor Alert" column for it to be displayed.

Once the alert widget configuration is complete, you will see the relevant alerts, and if they are monitor based alerts you will see the monitor icon under the Is Monitor Alert column.

Unfortunately, this column is only available when using the alert widget on a dashboard, it is not available as a column to display in a traditional Alert view. Hopefully this will come at some point in the future, but for now, if you want a full page to display alerts with this column you will need to create a single pane dashboard and add the alert widget to the pane.

Happy dashboard building!

David

VSAE – Go To Definition

David Allen MVP — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 15:02:28 GMT

For the past couple of months I have been using the Visual Studio Authoring Extensions quite extensively to build management packs for System Center, so I thought I would share some of what I have learnt, and I am starting with “Go To Definition”. Now, for experienced users of Visual Studio this will be nothing new, but if you are starting with VS because of the Authoring Extensions, this is really helpful.

The Go To Definition command is a neat little command to take you straight to the definition of a module that you are using within a management pack. To show the usefulness of this, here is a little example.

You start building a new MP in VS, and you start writing your registry discovery….

You get to the point where you want to call the Microsoft.Windows.FilteredRegistryDiscoveryProvider to use as a discovery data source, but what configuration items need to be passed to this module?

To find out, simply right click the TypeID, in this case “Windows"!Microsoft.Windows.FilteredRegistryDiscoveryProvider” and select Go To Definition. This will open the referenced management pack in a new tab in VS and take you straight to that module, where you can view the configuration items required for the module (highlighted in yellow).

I find this extremely useful and a great time saver, as not only does it take you to the correct line in the referenced MP, it also means you don’t have to worry about unsealing the referenced MP!

More (hopefully) helpful tips to come.

David

SQL Server Guide for System Center 2012

David Allen MVP — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:26:57 GMT

My good friend and colleague Paul Keely just posted a SQL Server guide for System Center 2012 on the TechNet Gallery. Here’s the description of what document covers:

“This is a guide to help you make design decisions and maintenance plans for SQL Server 2008 R2 to support System Center 2012. In the guide you will learn to make server and instance specific changes to support SQL server for the different workloads that System Center requires. We will look at the install requirements per product, what we need to move the data bases and how we should back them up.”

As Paul states in this document, it will not tell how to configure your SQL Server, but does instead provide details of all the things you should consider and what they mean.

I recommend you download and take a look at, http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/SQL-Server-guide-for-8584c403.

David

Web Monitoring–Display Properties in Alert Description

David Allen MVP — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 22:40:20 GMT

Back in 2007, Kevin Holman at Microsoft compiled a list of variables that can used to display monitoring data within an alert description, http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2007/12/12/adding-custom-information-to-alert-descriptions-and-notifications.aspx. This is extremely useful, but is not a complete list of every possible variable, as that would just be massive.

Today on the MS forums (http://goo.gl/M5GPe), someone asked about displaying data from web monitors in the alert description. Web monitors typically return loads of data which could be very useful when troubleshooting as issue, however it isn’t obvious how you would display this data in the alert description. The question on the MS forum asked how to display the ResponseBody in the alert description; this can be achieved using $Data/Context/RequestResults/RequestResult/BasePageData/ResponseBody$, but what if you want to display other instead or in addition???

There are two ways to achieve this, one is to use the workflow analyzer and assess the data that’s returned, and the other is to return all data in the alert description and use then to find the correct variable. As the second method can be achieved in the Operations Manager console with no additional tools, this is what I am going to show here.

First of all I created a new web transaction monitor simply to check whether a webpage returns a good status code, and perform a content match that I know will file. For this example I created a web monitor to assess http://www.systemcentercentral.com and a content match that will cause a critical alert if the word “DavidAllen” is not found on the web page (as I want it to generate an alert). Once the alert is generated, I opened the Health Explorer and went into the properties of the Content Match monitor. You have to access this monitor from the Health Explorer as the alert is generated from an Aggregate Rollup monitor, not the Content Match monitor itself. Once in the properties of the monitor, I opened the alerting tab and checked the box for “Generate alerts for this monitor” and added $Data/Context$ in the alert description.

This now means that an alert will be generated specifically from this monitor, not from the rollup, and the alert description of this monitor will contain all data returned from the web request. After clicking OK, I leave things for a few minutes and I then receive the new alert and the description field is full of information.

To make this information more readable and useful, I copied the text out of the description field and pasted it into a text file which I saved as “web.xml”, which I then opened in Internet Explorer. As you can see in the image below, I now have some correctly displayed XML which I can use to build my variable.

As this is a monitor I know I need $Data/Context… to query data from the workflow. I can then use the XML returned to build the rest of the variable. For example, if I want DownloadTime in my alert description, I start with $Data/Context and then add RequestResults/RequestResult/BasePageData/DownloadTime$, so in full you would put this in your alert description… $Data/Context/RequestResults/RequestResult/BasePageData/DownloadTime$

So, as I’m sure you can see you can display a lot of data from the web monitoring workflow in your alert description.

Hope that’s clear, and that you are able to update your alerts as required.

David

SCOM Reports–Changing the Default Banner

David Allen MVP — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 13:43:38 GMT

On my old blogging site (www.aquilaweb.com) I had an article about how to change the default banner on reports in SCOM. Unfortunately my old website content got “lost” by the provider at the time, and I lost all the content on the site. Since then, I have had a number of requests about a particular article I had on changing the report banner in SCOM, so I thought I would post about it again…

As SCOM relies on SSRS for reporting, all you need to is connect to the reports webpage and replace the “banner_landscape.jpg” and “banner_portrait.jpg” files with the jpg banner files that you want. The easiest way to do this is to log onto the server that hosts your SCOM SSRS instance and open a web browser to http://localhost/reports. When the webpage loads, you will see the two banner JPG files as named above, just rename these files and then use the “Upload file” link on the web page to upload your new banner files (and make sure they are named “banner_landscape.jpg” and “banner_portrait.jpg”).

If you would like to keep your banners the same size as the default ones, they is 772 x 62 pixels.

Once the banner files have been replaced, run a report and you’ll see your new banner.

Enjoy!

David