SCOMfaq@MMS2013

Posted on April 3, 2013 by

In a few days the MMS 2013 will open it’s door in Las Vegas. There is no better way of explaining what MMS is or means by taking the words from the MMS 2013 website.

About MMS

The Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) brings together the brightest IT professionals from around the world to increase their technical expertise through deep hands-on training, best-practice sharing, and interaction with innovators in desktop, device, and datacenter management, as well as cloud technologies.

When we say deep, we mean it – with session content delving into the 300 and 400 level. Only hard-core geeks will feel comfortable in this exclusive setting. With keynotes, sessions, hands-on labs, certification opportunities, and face-to-face access to Microsoft and industry experts, MMS provides a “can’t-miss” opportunity to be among the first to learn about new technologies.

If you need to convince your boss WHY you need to go to MMS 2013 there is even a page about it, check out here.

I am very happy and excited to be part of the MMS 2013 and looking forward to see or meet the brightest IT professionals from around the world.

I would like to give something back to the MMS world and therefore, if you like Swiss chocolate and you drop me a comment, mail or tweet you will have an even sweeter MMS.

Cheers,

Stefan

Posted in Recommended | 6 Comments

SCOM 2012 – Getting SCOM SNMP Device Properties in PowerShell

Posted on March 26, 2013 by

Have you ever tried to access a network device respectively network device properties in SCOM using PowerShell? Let’s say you want to access the network device’s IP address, vendor or description for using in a script? Well, I am sure you will run into a problem which you probably don’t expect. You might think, easy, I just run a cmdlet and select the IP address property of the object. Well, nope, that will not work…

Ok, let’s have a look at the device in SCOM. This is my network device…

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Notice here, the IP address is located as “SNMP Agent Address” and also other interesting properties like the “System Object ID” which is the device’s OID, the “Device Key” which is the device’s MAC address or “Description”. How can we access those values in PowerShell?

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SCOM 2012 – Fixing SLA Dashboard Weird ID Naming Problem

Posted on March 16, 2013 by

Some time ago, while doing some distributed applications and SLA dashboards I encountered a problem in the SLA dashboard. Instead of displaying the full readable name of the objects there were partially some ID’s from the management pack displayed.

I usually install an English Windows Server operating system and also the English version of the respective software. In this case I have an English Windows Server 2012 version and System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1. My regional settings on the management server are configured for German (Switzerland) of course.

I created for some testing purposes a distributed application like this…

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Posted in Configuration, Management Pack, Troubleshooting | Leave a comment

SCOM 2012 – Install SCOM PowerShell Modules Without SCOM Console Installation

Posted on March 13, 2013 by

Yes we all know less is sometimes more. This saying does not only belong to the human bodyweight, nope,  since the Windows Server Core area we all know less “*.dll” is better.

Like this saying, a few days ago I had been asked an interesting question. How can we use the SCOM PowerShell module without installing the entire SCOM console? I thought this is a very good idea and since there are many others which are interested in this scenario I decided to figure it out.

Here is how I did it…

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Posted in Configuration, Script, Troubleshooting | 3 Comments

SCOM 2012 – UPDATE: SCOM Task Collection MP

Posted on March 7, 2013 by

A few weeks ago I started with a Task Collection MP found on this post. As I am getting new ideas I will add more tasks to make life easier. In the latest version SCOM Task Collection MP version 1.2.0.0 I added 3 more tasks…

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Posted in Management Pack, Software | 2 Comments

SCOM 2012 – Server Boot Check and Availability HTML Report (PowerShell Script)

Posted on February 27, 2013 by

As there are many good ideas out there and so many bright minds, you just have to pull all this energy together mix it with your own ideas and you will create wonderful things.

A practical example would be the following story. A customer who likes simple things came up with an idea. Imagine you have a monthly maintenance window in your company where you are going to patch all your servers. As good practice you will put all your lovely servers into maintenance mode, great! After you applied your patches and you rebooted (?) your servers you probably want to check if all your servers rebooted, are up and running and healthy in SCOM.

Now the thing is, are you sure ALL your servers booted within your maintenance window? If you see a green agent in the SCOM console doesn’t guarantee you that the server rebooted. What if there are service desk guys who don’t know anything about SCOM and need a quick check to see if the server booted and is healthy, meaning available in SCOM.

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Posted in Script | 1 Comment

SCOM 2012 SP1 – Part 3: Audit Collection Services (ACS) Testing Cross Platform Logging

Posted on February 19, 2013 by

In part 1 and part 2 we installed ACS for collection Windows and Linux events. In part 3 I am going to show how the cross platform ACS works in an easy example.

In part 2 we had a close look at a specific rule called Delete User. I think this is a perfect example to see how the process runs.

First we create a user account, set a password for this account and delete this user afterwards. Sound silly, but it is a good example to see what happens. Ok, let’s do it…

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