Operations Manager: Management Packs

Exchange 2003 Management Pack for OpsMgr 2007, version 6.0.6387.0

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:22:26 GMT

In June 2007, we posted OpsMgr by Example: Configuring Baselines (http://ops-mgr.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3D3B8489FCAA9B51!183.entry), which discussed working with the baselines in the Exchange 2003 management pack for OpsMgr 2007.

Microsoft released the most recent update to the Exchange 2003 management pack 8/21/08, available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=9FF454F4-6D34-4FB9-9E0B-F5B68C6EDC4F&displaylang=en&displaylang=en. This newest version of the MP lowers the sensitivity of Self Tuning Threshold (STT) rules and monitors, increasing the threshold at which the monitors alert.

In addition, the following Self Tuning Threshold monitors were disabled and replaced with static "consecutive samples over threshold" monitors:

MSEchangeIS\RPC Averaged Latency
MSExchangeIS Mailbox\Send Queue Size
SMTP Server\Remote Retry Queue Length
SMTP Server\Local Queue Length
SMTP NTFS Store Driver\Messages in the queue directory
MSExchangeIS Transport Driver\TempTable Current
SMTP Server\Remote Queue Length

For additional information, check the "How to Configure Self Tuning Threshold Monitors" section of the management pack guide, OM2007_MP_ExSrvr2003.doc. This section describes how the STTs work.

We see this change in the Exchange 2003 management pack as a logical step forward, and were glad that community sites like this one are having an impact in the product evolution.

Pilot of the Windows Server 2008 pre-release MP

Thu, 08 May 2008 18:32:09 GMT

In April 2008, Microsoft made available to selected testers (including the MOM MVPs) a pre-release version of the Windows 2008 Base OS and IIS management packs (MPs) for OpsMgr 2007. Having these MPs is important since without a MP designed to monitor Windows Server 2008 systems, those servers with Windows 2008 running an OpsMgr agent show a "not monitored" state in the Operations console, since the Windows 2003 and Windows Server libraries cannot monitor Windows 2008.

When these management packs are imported into an existing OpsMgr 2007 management group, you are able to enjoy accurate OS health state for those Windows 2008 servers with OpsMgr agents installed on them, rather than showing the not monitored status.

A word of caution from Microsoft: Installing the pre-release Windows 2008 management packs into a production management group is not supported; in fact, it will cause any such management group to be specifically unsupported by Microsoft! These management packs should only be deployed in your lab and test environments.

OpsMgr 2007 agents can be push-installed to Windows 2008 systems, including those Windows 2008 servers installed with Core functionality. If you look at the screenshot below, you can see there are new target types (object classes) installed by the new MPs; and there are separate discoveries for Windows Server 2008 Core Computer and Full Computer types:

To test the management pack, we wanted to install OpsMgr on a Windows 2008 server that hosted an "all-in-one" management group, then import the pre-release Windows 2008 MP so that the server can monitor its own OS.

Installing OpsMgr 2007 on Windows Server 2008 is not yet fully supported by Microsoft, but fortunately Microsoft’s System Center Program Manager Satya Vel’s posting on the MOM Product Team blog was key to get to getting OpsMgr 2007 installed on Windows Server 2008:

http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2007/12/17/steps-to-install-opsmgr-2007-db-and-reporting-on-windows-server-2008-longhorn.aspx

(Also, see http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2008/05/07/opsmgr-2007-with-sp1-support-for-windows-server-2008-update.aspx for the current supportabiilty statement for running OpsMgr in a Windows 2008 environment.)

Like MVP Anders Bengtsson also discovered (see http://contoso.se/blog/?p=245), we did not encounter the “<remove name=…” sections Satya mentions, maybe because we didn’t install the Windows 2008 IIS compression features. Otherwise Satya’s article was all we needed to get OM 07 installed on a Windows Server 2008 “all in one” platform (including SQL 2005 SP2 installed locally).

We installed using a low-privilege scenario for our Data Warehouse Writer Account (DWWA) and Data Reader Account (DRA) services:

Both the DWWA and DRA required the Log on Locally right
We had to grant the DRA account permission to write to the file C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.2\Reporting Services\ReportServer\rsreportserver.config.

After OpsMgr 2007 (with Reporting) was installed on our Windows 2008 server, we installed the downloaded pre-release Windows 2008 MPs. One is for the Windows 2008 OS, the other is for the IIS component of Windows 2008. Both MP installs place a number of libraries and MPs in the %Program Files%\System Center Operations Manager Management Pack folder. You can select all the MPs in both install folders and import them all at once.

Give OpsMgr few minutes, and the Windows 2008 OS and IIS health and configuration data will populate the console, giving the same look and feel as with the existing Windows 200/2003 Server MPs. Microsoft has added the “copyright symbol” (©) to the Microsoft and OS names so that is a quick tip-off you have the new Windows 2008 OS MP installed. What you are actually looking at here is the DisplayName for the Operating System class, which is populated using a generic discovery that runs against all OS versions in the Microsoft.SystemCenter.Internal management pack. The value is taken from the Caption property of the Win32_OperatingSystem WMI class; apparently the introduction of the symbols was made in WMI for the first time with Windows Server 2008.

Here is the Health Explorer for the Windows 2008 server OS core Windows service rollup:

Authoring Management Packs

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 05:25:39 GMT

Will Kaiser left a message that he was looking for authoring resources. He said:

I've designed and implemented 3 different OpsMgr environments and will soon be starting my 4th. I'm looking to dig further into custom authoring via the authoring tab in the console, and have found very little information aside from a few very basic log files and vbscript examples. Do you cover this in your book? Do you know any other good resources that are out there?

(This was after he told us he's been following our blog since October and it has proven to be invaluable. Comments like that make the work of maintaining a blog worthwhile!)

Regarding the "authoring tab", Microsoft is developing an Authoring console, which we do discuss in our forthcoming book. The Authoring console is currently at release candidate status, and it will require OpsMgr 2007 Service Pack 1. Whether or not the two will be released concurrently is a question for Microsoft, but the console certainly won't be available before then.

Even with the Authoring console, some things will still need to be done with XML, but the new console reduces those considerably. We document these in the book in Chapter 23.

Meanwhile, you can download the RC version from Microsoft's connect website, if you want to start working with it. See http://ops-mgr.spaces.live.com/default.aspx?_c01_BlogPart=blogentry&_c=BlogPart&handle=cns!3D3B8489FCAA9B51!288 for information on getting the console. The Authoring console has come a LONG way from its early beta versions!

Viewing Management Pack Content

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 21:41:13 GMT

We were asked: "When you create overrides in a custom management pack, how could you view the content in that management pack? ... When I create an override I do not see the configuration in the console, only in the XML file when imported. If there are a lot of overrides, the xml file would be difficult to read ..."

Boris Yanushpolsky of the MOM Team has come to the rescue with several utilities he wrote.

The MPViewer is a utility that displays rules, monitors, views, tasks, console tasks, and reports. It also shows you the knowledge associated with the particular management pack item. See http://blogs.msdn.com/boris_yanushpolsky/archive/2007/10/11/what-s-in-my-management-pack.aspx for the script to dump the contents, and http://blogs.msdn.com/boris_yanushpolsky/archive/2007/10/11/what-s-in-my-management-pack-take-2.aspx for the viewer itself.
Boris also wrote the Override Explorer. This utility provides two views, type-based and computer-based. The type-based view shows types for rues/monitors/discoveries for which overrides were created. The computer-based view is basically a resultant set of overrides that apply to a computer. It also allows you to drill in and see what overrides are applied to various components such as the OS, databases, and websites. See http://blogs.msdn.com/boris_yanushpolsky/archive/2007/08/09/override-explorer-v3-3.aspx for more information and to download the Override Explorer zip file.

Boris develops some great utilities (offered "as-is"), keep an eye on his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/boris_yanushpolsky/.

Capturing a FSMO role change

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 20:18:05 GMT

If you're wondering how be notified if you have an AD Operations Master role change, we discovered an undocumented event id that is logged. And of course, if it is logged, MOM can watch for it!

Event 1458 in the Directory Services log is logged regardless of which role is changed. The description of this event is:

The operations master role represented by the following object has been transferred to the following domain request at the request of a user.

The event is logged to in the Directory Services event log for the new role master, and the message description also indicates the domain controller previously holding that role.

When creating the role, the provider is Directory Services, and the eventid is 1458.

Removing a MOM 2005 Management Pack

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 20:25:52 GMT

Have you ever installed a management pack and then decided you wanted to remove it?

Removal of management packs is a more complicated process than adding them; there is no completely clean process to remove a management pack, although we believe it will be available with Operations Manager 2007. The following steps remove most of a management pack:

Mark all the rule groups as disabled and wait one week. The "one week" time period is because a rule group can't be deleted until MOm has groomed out any live data. If you have a four-day retention period before grooming, you would wait 4 days.
Delete the rule groups(s).
Delete the computer group(s).
You can delete any scripts that were used as part of the management pack - but be careful! Verify that the scripts are not used by any other rules.

Microsoft did have a knowledge base article discussing several methods to uninstalled management packs, but it has been pulled. In case it comes back, the link is http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918278.

Perhaps the easiest way to keep a management pack from functioning is through disabling the computer groups it uses (if they are not used elsewhere) or disabling its rule groups. Making a management pack non-functional is less work and a less risky process than actually deleting it.

Computer Group problem with Windows OS Desktop MP

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 04:37:24 GMT

If you have installed the Windows Base OS Desktop MP, you may have noticed some interesting results ... like your Windows 2003 systems are being monitored using the rules from the Desktop MP. This is because the Microsoft Windows XP Computers Group has a formula that identifies any OS greater than version 5.1 as Windows XP.

The problem with this formula is while the version for Windows XP is 5.1.2600, Windows 2003 is version 5.2.3790 (the third set of digits is the build number); so rules from the Desktop MP will target Windows 2003 servers!

To add to the fun, Windows XP Professional x64 edition is also version 5.2.3790, and we do want to target those systems.

Let's look at a way to modify the formula. The formula for the Computer Group delivered with the management pack is:

AttributeValue(Microsoft Windows Current Version)>=”5.1”

To change it to ignore Windows 2003 Server, you could modify the formula to:

(AttributeValue(Microsoft Windows Current Version)>=”5.1” AND AttributeValue(Microsoft Windows Current Version)<”5.2”)

Unfortunately, this modification will not pick up 64-bit versions of Windows XP, which would have to be manually added to the computer group. It will also exclude Windows Vista systems.

This computer group rule is in version 05.0.3000.000 of the management pack.