http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/16174.microsoft-management-packs.aspx

Kevin Holman has blogged about this issue here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2012/09/27/opsmgr-mp-update-new-base-os-mp-6-0-6989-0-adds-support-for-monitoring-windows-server-2012-os-and-fixes-some-previous-issues.aspx

And a bit more is explained here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/saponsqlserver/archive/2010/09/24/windows-2008-r2-performance-monitor-processor-information-counters-have-replaced-processor-counters.aspx

The Windows Management Pack has been updated and has introduced an issue where by Windows 2008 Processor Information is not collected as the target object was changed from Process to Processor Information object (which exists on Windows Server 2008 R2 servers but not Windows Server 2008). 

How do we get data for Windows Server 2008 Servers?

And on the next window

You will now start collecting Windows Server 2008 Processor information.

News from the System Center Advisor Team - http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2013/03/06/system-center-advisor.aspx

There is a Virtual Academy course in System Center Advisor available here.

I'll do a run through of an install soon but some other good links are:

• To pick up SQL Server information, the Local System login to SQL (NT Authority\System) needs SQL SysAdmin rights. These are default settings in SQL 2008 and SQL 2008 R2 (but might well have been changed by SQL Administrators) but these are not default settings in SQL 2012 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2667175
  
  
• Run As Account for SharePoint - http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/advisor/hh923060.asp
  
  
• The Advisor on-premise software requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. 
  ==> For Windows Server 2008, you can download this package from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=131605.
  ==> For Windows Server 2008 R2, you can enable the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 feature by using Server Manager. For more information see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=133158.

This comes up on the forums recently and it is a fairly frequent request. So here I run through how to create a composite data source that allows you to create a rule that checks for x events in y minutes with both the event count and the time interval exposed as overrides.

Read More ...

There is a great article by Travis - here- "Using Data Properties From the Parent Work Items in Activity Email Templates"

The idea is two fold:

1) That when a Review Activity, that is part of a Change Request, goes "In Progress", the reviewers get an email providing the details of the Change Request. So you need details of the Parent Work Item (the Change Request) in the notification that is triggered by the the Review Activity changing status.

2)  That by leveraging the Exchange Connector, the reviewers can email back email approval \ rejection of the Review Activity,

The article works well in most situations but we found a couple of limitations:

• You can't use email enabled security groups as reviewers. Although this works for sending out the email, the Exchange Connector needs to match the email address to a reviewer. This just doesn't work if the Reviewer is a group.
• It doesn't work for Parallel Activities as it adds another relationship to the Review Activity \ Change Request.

We wanted to be able to leverage mail enabled AD groups to assign Reviewers to Review Activities to facilitate maintenance of Reviewers over time. We also wanted to be able to use Service Manager notifications to email out when a Review Activity went In Progress and to receive approvals and rejections from the reviewers. 

Read More for all the details

My previous post looked at adding a Review Activity to a Change Request on the fly.

What happens though if you want to build a Parallel Activity as part of a Change Request? It isn't actually any different - you just need one extra step to create the Parallel activity which then spawns 2 Review Activities as child items. These are built in the same way as my previous post. 

The additional step is the Create Parallel Activity:

The rest of the steps are the same - just one strand for each individual Review activity.

I recently had a request from a customer to build a Change Request on the fly which included a Review Activity and a Parallel Activity (which also had Review Activities). There are a number of ways to do this but Orchestrator is good way for non-developers to achieve this with minimal coding.

Here is an overview of the Orchestrator Runbook to achieve the first of those. Creating the Review Activity, and assigning the Reviewers based on an AD Security Group (this was stored as a variable within Service Manager to make maintaining the reviewers list easier and to facilitate the use of the Exchange Connector for emailing out Review Activities to the Reviewers and to enable the Reviewers to approve \ deny the Change by email.

1) We use the Monitor Object Activity, scoped to class Change Request

2) We then use the Get Object Activity to get the Change Request

3) We then use the Create Object Activity to Create the Review Activity

4) We then get the AD group which defines the Reviewers for this Review Activity

5) We then enumerate the AD group to find out the Reviewers

6) We then use the Get Object Activity to get the User object for the reviewer from Service Manager

7) We then create the Reviewer using the Create Object activity

8) We then create the relationship between the Reviewer and the User

9) We then email out the Change Request to the User

Full details ... read more ...

As SCOM 2007 R2 gave way to SCOM 2012, we saw the Avicode .Net monitoring capability evolving into Application Performance Monitoring (APM). In SCOM 2012 this was initially focused on WCF based web applications although some flexibility in what was discovered was available by configuring the relevant overrides.

SCOM 2012 SP1 has seen a huge jump forward in functionality not only in terms of what can now be discovered and monitored out of the box but also in terms of integration with Team Foundation Server (TFS). So what exactly does SCOM 2012 SP1 bring to the table:

• The ability to monitor Windows Services, not just IIS-hosted applications.
• Automatic Discovery of ASP.NET MVC3 and MVC4 Applications.
• The ability to monitor SharePoint web front-end components.
• Integration of Operations Manager and TFS

You can configure Operations Manager to allow APM alerts to generate and synchronise with TFS work items and APM exception events can be saved in IntelliTrace file format directly from Application Diagnostics enabling Developers to stay within their familiar environment to examine the complete exception call stack.

So SCOM 2012 SP1 both extends APM functionality improves the workflow between development and IT operations teams, improving efficiency and reducing the mean time to recovery for the problems detected by APM.

.Net Application Performance Monitoring Template

Integrating Operations Manager with Development Process

Here are the out of the box dashboards that GSM provide:

From the task list on the right hand side - Detailed Dashboard - List:

From the task list on the right hand side - Summary Dashboard - Map:

You can see how important naming is as this affects the dashboard display that you see. 

The details you enter when configuring monitoring show as follows:

-        Context = Name (on the page where you select the Management Pack to save the monitoring into). E.g. in the top Screenshot Microsoft Forums

-        Display Name = Name on the page where you specify the URL to monitor E.g. in the top Screenshot the Display Name allows you to select the tests to view

Web Application Availability Monitoring allows the monitoring of single URLs (or sets of single URLs) which don't require any authentication. I'll cover Visual Studio Web Tests in a later post which covers these requirements.

I'll run through setting up the monitoring of a single URL - this blog!

Lets start by running the template.

Click continue reading (bottom right) to see the complete article.

Within the SCOM Console, in Authoring, Management Pack Templates, you can now see 3 types of Web Monitoring Template:

The following table - from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj860375.aspx - should help you decide which Template is appropriate for which situation.

Global Service Monitor is a new service that allows you to monitor your web applications from points of presence hosted by Microsoft all over the world.  The service is provided as a benefit to software assurance customers.  

You can read more about the service and how to sign up here:

Step 1 - Management packs are dependent on the Alert Attachment MP (Microsoft.SystemCenter.AlertAttachment.mpb) which exists on the installation media for System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1

Step 2 - Configure File Attachments for Operations Manager Alerts in System Center 2012 SP1. This requires:

• creating a network share for the Management Servers to use
• creating a Run As Account for the Management Servers to leverage to access the share
• associating this Run As Account with the new Run As Profile - Alert Attachment Management Account - that is created. 
• Enabling the Alert Attachment File Share Discovery

Step 3 - Download the Management Packs from here. 

Step 4 - Make sure you have Windows Identity Foundation installed - either from roles \ services or download from here. This needs to be installed on all Management Servers that will leverage GSM (see steo 7 where you create the Resource Pool of Management Servers).

Step 5 - Run the installer that you downloaded in Step 3. This will extract the Management Packs to (by default) C:\Program Files (x86)\System Center Management Packs\System Global Service Monitor\

Step 6 - Import the GSM Management Packs

Step 7 - Create a Resource Pool of Management Servers that have Internet Access.

Step 8 - In Administration, Global Service Monitor, configure SCOM to use your subscription. You'll need to specify the Resource Pool from Step 7 and make sure that the Management Servers in the Resource Pool have internet access (you can specify a proxy as part of the configuration).

When all this is done, you should see:

I'll be starting a new series on GSM soon!

Cory Delamatar from Microsoft gave this excellent explanation about overrides – “Yes, this is a Best Practice. Create a new MP to store overrides for each logical grouping of MP’s. So, if you Import the three SQL MP’s, I’d create a new MP called SQL Overrides. Any Overrides you create that are targeted at SQL types, you should store them in that overrides MP you created.

The reason for this is that every time you create and save an override, that changes the MP that you stored it in. If the MP contains overrides (or anything else really) that’s targeted at something that every agent has (Windows.Computer for example) then that MP is going to get re-downloaded to every agent that has at least 1 instance of that type. So, if you save an Override for a SQL Database and store it into the Default Management Pack, that’s going to cause every agent in your environment to request a new copy

of the Default Management Pack. Now, if you were to save that SQL Database override into an MP that only has SQL Server stuff it in, then only the SQL Server agents will request a copy of that MP.

Bottom line, lots of small and highly targeted MP’s are better than the single monolithic Default MP with every override in it.”

Links:

Best Practice for Configuring Overrides

Guidelines and Best Practice

The Default Management Pack

Cleaning the Default Management Pack

Probably the easiest way to list overrides is via the Override Report (part of the generic reports library). 

You can also user powershell:
get-managementpack | get-override | format-list name,parameter,value

You can also see the overrides in the Authoring Pane on Operations Manager 2007 R2 although the scope only really works if the override is targetted at a specific class. If it is targetted at a group then only “group” is specified, not the actual group.

Kevin Holman also posted this on the technet forums if SQL is your preferred scripting solution:

select rv.DisplayName as WorkFlowName, OverrideName, mo.Value as OverrideValue,
mt.TypeName as OverrideScope, bme.DisplayName as InstanceName, bme.Path as InstancePath,
mpv.DisplayName as ORMPName, mo.LastModified as LastModified
from ModuleOverride mo
inner join managementpackview mpv on mpv.Id = mo.ManagementPackId
inner join ruleview rv on rv.Id = mo.ParentId
inner join ManagedType mt on mt.managedtypeid = mo.TypeContext
left join BaseManagedEntity bme on bme.BaseManagedEntityId = mo.InstanceContext
Where mpv.Sealed = 0
UNION ALL
select mv.DisplayName as WorkFlowName, OverrideName, mto.Value as OverrideValue,
mt.TypeName as OverrideScope, bme.DisplayName as InstanceName, bme.Path as InstancePath,
mpv.DisplayName as ORMPName, mto.LastModified as LastModified
from MonitorOverride mto
inner join managementpackview mpv on mpv.Id = mto.ManagementPackId
inner join monitorview mv on mv.Id = mto.MonitorId
inner join ManagedType mt on mt.managedtypeid = mto.TypeContext
left join BaseManagedEntity bme on bme.BaseManagedEntityId = mto.InstanceContext
Where mpv.Sealed = 0
Order By mpv.DisplayName

System Center Operations Manager 2007 RTM: Version 6.0.5000

System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1: Version 6.0.6278

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 RTM: Version 6.1.722.0

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cumulative Update 1: Build 6.1.7221.13

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cumulative Update 2 :Build 6.1.7221.15

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cumulative Update 3 :Build 6.1.7221.49

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cumulative Update 4: Build 6.1.7221.61

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cumulative Update 5: Build 6.1.7221.81

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cumulative Update 6: Build 6.1.7221.99

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cumulative Update 7 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2783850

System Center Operations Manager 2012 RTM: Version 7.0.8560.0

System Center Operations Manager 2012 RTM Cumulative Update 1: Build 7.0.8560.1021

System Center Operations Manager 2012 RTM Cumulative Update 2: Build 7.0.8560.1027

System Center Operations Manager 2012 RTM Cumulative Update 3: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2756127

System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1 RTM: Version 7.0.9538

System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1 Cumulative Update 1: http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/v7/site/Search.aspx?q=2784734

Note: Help, About in the console only shows Version numbers - not the actual builds.  

As many have found, the concepts of virtual networking which were introduced in System Center 2012 SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager are quite  challenging.

Nigel Cain and Damian Flynn have started a blog post series on the VMM blog to help people wrap their brains around it.

The first post in the series is here:  

http://blogs.technet.com/b/scvmm/archive/2013/01/08/virtual-networking-in-vmm-2012-sp1.aspx

The System Center 2012 SP1 Service Manager Authoring Tool is a tool for customization and extension of the built in functionality in System Center Service Manager.

Microsoft Download Center 

System Center 2012 S1 Integration Packs:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34611

There was a request on the Orchestrator forums for running different activities and Runbooks on different days of the week. To assist, I did a quick run through of how you could do this:

OrchestratorParameters.pdf

I'm currently setting up a new blog for the new year and for the new release of System Center 2012 SP1. Stay tuned!