SCOM

document your SCOM 2012 environment

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This is quite huge for me, because I’ve been working on this script for the last two months and finally decided, to release the script to public, although I know that it’s still far from complete.

Document your Operations Manager 2012 environment

You should know your environment and what happens in it and you should be able to show people what exactly has been configured in your environment. This is quite important for consultants, but also for admins. Consultants need to create a documentation after implementing Operations Manager 2012 at a costumer’s site and admins should be able to know how their environment looks like at any given time. read more

demoted Domain Controller still present in SCOM

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If you demote a Domain Controller, SCOM will generate a lot of alerts. By design, there is no automatically undiscovery for the Rules and Monitores for the Active Directory Roles.

Solution 1

This solution will remove all disabled Class instances from an existing object. it will not change any other properties of the object.

  • Open the Operations Management Shell
  • type in this command:

  • Stop the System Center Management service
  • Delete the folder C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager\Agent\Health Service State
  • Start the System Center Management service

Solution 2

This solution will clear only the agent cache. Sometime this will be sufficient, if the server discovery / undiscovery was already done well:

  • Stop the System Center Management service
  • Delete the folder C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager\Agent\Health Service State
  • Start the System Center Management service

Solution 3

This solution will remove the entire object and then recreate the object with it’s discovery. The new object wouldn’t be discovered as Domain Controller. The new object will have an new guid and any overwrites to the old object will be lost. read more

delete orphaned computers from SCOM

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after renaming a Active Directory computer, the computer was automatically detected in SCOM with the correct new name. but after short time, I detected, that the originally agent was already there, but not reachable. so I deleted the old computer under Device Management – Agent Managed.

normally after maximum 3 days, the agent isn’t visible in the computer view. the delay of 3 days is by design. so don’t delete the computer manually to early.

If you still see the Computer showing up – even after 3 days – then in most cases, there is still a discovery associated with it. To find the discovery, use this query:

in my case, I didn’t found any discovery for this computer and it was still available in the Windows Computer view one week after deletion of the agent. read more

Create SCOM Dashboard for SharePoint in Visio

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This week I created a DashBoard for SCOM in Visio to present it on a SharePoint site. Normally you could use the Visio 2010 Addin for SystemCenter – Operations Manager. But this addin has some special prerequisites for the presentation on the SharePoint site, like installing SCOM components and special configurations on the SharePoint Farm. Also it has the limitation, that it can only present monitor states, and can’t present rule values (for example: disk usage).

So I created my own solution, which I will describe here. An overview to the steps: read more

SCOM 2012 agent communication issue

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This days, I had a very special problem with some new SCOM agents. I installed some new servers and installed the SCOM 2012 agent on it. But after some time, they appeared in the Agent Managed view, still as not monitored.

first I looked up the event logs on the new servers and found this errors:

06-01-2014 07-57-40

06-01-2014 07-58-04

According to this errors, I found a lot of blogs about network and certificate issues, like this one: http://geertbaeten.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/scom-agent-or-gateway-certificate-issue/

but I don’t have a Certificate authority and I also assumed not have a network problem. read more

new SNMP simulation tool

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In the last time i have a lot to do with creating and testing SNMP monitors in our monitoring system. Rather than being surprised when a SNMP monitor doesn’t work correctly, i would like to test my newly created monitors against a SNMP simulation tool.

So i was looking for an SNMP simulating tool. But the only ones i could found, are to expensive for me or not useable.

Cause of this, i started to develope my own SNMP simulation tool running on Windows system.

The currently planed features are: read more

Create a calculated SNMP monitor

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Sometimes you need a SCOM monitor which was calculated from one or more SNMP values. Maybe the values have to be calculated, cause the value is in an unhandy format or unit. In this example i will monitor the input frequency for an for an UPS. The originaly readed value is in 1/10 Hz, but i like to monitor in Hz.

Create the monitor

Select Timed Script Two State Monitor and select the destination managementpack.

Insert this code to the field Script:

As you see, you have to define the SNMP OID in the script. After this you can calculate with the returned value and define rules for the GOOD and BAD state. read more

schedule subscriber notifications with exception

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I have created a few subscribers and they work perfectly, but there is one problem. If you define a schedule exception, you wouldn’t receive a notification at the defined weekdays. In my example i have a subscriber which should receive alert notifications only outside the business hours (monday to friday, 07:00 – 16:00). My first setup looked like this:

The result was, that the subscriber received alerts on saturday and sunday, but didn’t receive any notification on the other weekdays. To solve this problem, i changed the schedule like this: read more

Create a calculated SNMP Rule in SCOM

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Sometimes you need a SCOM Rule which was calculated from one or more SNMP values. Maybe the values have to be calculated, cause the value is in an unhandy format or unit. In this example i will create a Rule and a Performance View to show the autonomny time for an APC UPS. The originaly readed value is in 1/100 seconds, but i want it to show in minutes.

Creating the Rule

Insert this Code to the field Script:

As you see, you have to define the SNMP OID in the script. After this you can calculate with the returned value. To get the devices ip address and communitystring, you have to define this parameters, which could be readed by the script with Wscript.Arguments: read more

VariantTypes

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When you manualy edit a monitor or rule in the SCOM Authorin Console, maybee you have to edit the field @VariantType. The VariantType describes the type of the value that is returned.

The variant types are:

  • Empty = 0
  • Null = 1
  • Short = 2
  • Integer = 3
  • Single = 4
  • Double = 5
  • Currency = 6
  • Date = 7
  • String = 8
  • Object = 9
  • Error = 10
  • Boolean = 11
  • Variant = 12
  • DataObject = 13
  • Decimal = 14
  • Byte = 15
  • Char = 16
  • Long = 17