System Center Virtual User Group Weblog

Next Meeting of the System Center Virtual User Group is 9/4/2008

The next meeting of the System Center Virtual Users Group is on the calendar, and we have some first rate speakers ready to share their knowledge. We're touching on some topics surrounded by considerable interest in the System Center community.

Meeting and Registration Details

Date: Thursday, September 4th

Time: 7:00 p.m. Central Standard Time (1am GMT)

Agenda

• 7:00PM-7:10PM: Introduction (Pete Zerger) 
• 7:10PM-7:40PM: Steve Rachui (Microsoft) - Targeting in Operations Manager 2007
• 7:40PM-8:10PM: Cameron Fuller (MVP - OpsMgr) - Community Extensions for Operations Manager and Essentials 2007
• 8:10PM-8:40PM: Pete Zerger (MVP - OpsMgr) - SNMP Device Monitoring in Operations Manager 2007
• 8.40PM-8:55PM: Q & A / Closing

Event Registration 

To sign up for this event, register at the following URL: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=130906

Speaker Profiles

Steve Rachui (Microsoft) - Steve Rachui is a Manageability Support Escalation Engineer in the Product Support Services group at Microsoft. He has supported SMS since version 1.2. Steve can be reached via his supportability blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/steverac/.

Cameron Fuller (MVP) -Operations Manager MVP, is a Managing consultant for Catapult Systems, an IT consulting company and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Cameron is the co-author of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Unleashed and System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed. Cameron can be reached via is blog at http://cameronfuller.spaces.live.com/.  

Pete Zerger (MVP) -Pete Zerger is a consulting partner with AKOS Technology Services and has nine years of experience in the IT industry. He focuses on design and deployment of enterprise operations management, directory services, and messaging solutions. Pete holds an MCSE for Messaging, an MCTS for SQL Server 2005, and he is a Microsoft MVP for Microsoft Operations Manager. He is founder of System Center Forum, a popular community site covering Operations Manager 2007, Essentials 2007 and the System Center Suite.

70-400 Exam Study Notes: Sections 5B, 5C, 5D - Client Monitoring

To make it easier to keep track of all the exam study notes published, we'll link to each post on the 70-400 Exam Study Guide here on the System Center Virtual User Group web site on the 70-400 Exam Study Guide Homepage. Watch the System Center Virtual User Group blog for regular updates

There are three levels of Client Monitoring in Operations Manager 2007.

1. Agentless Exception Monitoring
2. Collective Client Monitoring
3. Business-Critical Client Monitoring

Agentless Exception Monitoring

AEM enables you to monitor operating systems for crashes and applications for errors and crashes. Error reporting clients are configured with group policy to redirect error reports to an Operations Manager 2007 Management Server, instead of reporting directly to Microsoft. By staging error reports on a Management Server, Operations Manager 2007 is able to provide detailed views and reports that aggregate error data across your organization. The views and reports provide knowledge about failures and offer solutions, as available, to help resolve the issues.

For steps on how to configure AEM, see the whitepaper titled Agentless Exception Monitoring in Operations Manager 2007, available for download at System Center Forum.

http://www.systemcenterforum.org/wp-content/uploads/AgentlessExceptionMonitoring.pdf

Collective Client Monitoring

Agentless Crash Monitoring gathers only application and system crashes, so this information does not provide any insight into the availability or performance of an organizations’ client systems. To gain this level of insight, administrators need to deploy an agent that can gather performance data. Collective Health Monitoring is performed by gathering event and performance data from many machines and aggregating the data together based on groups of systems for reporting and analysis. For example, individual memory performance data is gathered from Windows XP and Windows Vista clients on different types of hardware. Collection Health Monitoring will aggregate this data together and provide reports based on memory performance for specific groups of systems, such as by operating system or by hardware vendor. This makes analysis of overall performance easier than digging through long lists or individual system performance reports.

There are two steps for configuration of Business-Critical Monitoring:

1. Install an Operations Manager 2007 Agent on the target workstations
2. Import the Client OS Management Packs

To import a Windows Client Operating System Management Pack, ensure that all dependent libraries are imported and then import the appropriate client Management Packs. You can import all needed client Management Packs at one time.

For information about importing Management Packs, see the Import a Management Pack in section 2A of the 70-400 OpsMgr Exam Study Guide.

The default configuration of the client operating system Management Packs is for Collective Client monitoring. If you are using this level of client monitoring, no additional setup or configuration is necessary.

The Windows Client Operating System Management Pack consists of the following files:

• Microsoft.Windows.Client.Library.mp (required for both Windows 2000 Professsional and Windows XP)
• Microsoft.Windows.Client.2000.mp (for Windows 2000 Professional clients)
• Microsoft.Windows.Client.XP.mp (for Windows XP clients)

Business Critical Client Monitoring

In some cases, client systems are critical to the business’ operations. Point-of-sale terminals, kiosks, bank ATMs, or certain employee workstations, such as bank traders or manufacturing engineers, are examples of critical client systems. If a critical client system goes down or has significant performance problems, the business will lose money. These systems need to be monitored as if they were servers. Business Critical Monitoring uses the same agent as Collective Health Monitoring; the management packs are simply tuned differently for the critical systems to allow for the individual alerting and reporting.

There are three steps for configuration of Business-Critical Monitoring:

1. Install an Operations Manager 2007 Agent on the target workstations
2. Import the Client OS and Business Critical Client Monitoring MPs
3. Add the target workstations to the appropriate business critical computer groups (see below for detailed configuration steps)

If you plan on using Business Critical Client monitoring for either Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP computers you will also need to import the following Management Pack, in addition to the Client OS MPs imported for Collective Client Monitoring:

• Microsoft.Windows.Client.BusinessCritical.xml

Management Packs Imported for Collective Client Monitoring are:

• Microsoft.Windows.Client.Library.mp (required for both Windows 2000 Professsional and Windows XP)
• Microsoft.Windows.Client.2000.mp (for Windows 2000 Professional clients)
• Microsoft.Windows.Client.XP.mp (for Windows XP clients)

If you want to use Business Critical Client monitoring, you must also add those computers designated as mission-critical to the Business Critical Client computer group. This group has several overrides targeted at the group members. These overrides enable individual monitoring and alerting so that these computers can be monitored in much the same way that a server is monitored.

To Add Target Workstations to Business Critical Client Monitoring:

1. In the Authoring pane of the Operations Console, click Groups. The following three business-critical groups, along with others, appear in the results pane: All Business Critical Windows Clients, All Business Critical Windows 2000 Clients, and All Business Critical Windows XP Clients.
2. Add client individual clients to these business-critical groups. Right-click the group name, and then click Properties.
3. On the Explicit Members tab, click Add/Remove Object.
4. Add the Windows-based client computers to the group: From the Search for drop-down list select Windows Client 2000 Computer and Windows Client XP Computer.

To make it easier to keep track of all the exam study notes published, we'll link to each post on the 70-400 Exam Study Guide here on the System Center Virtual User Group web site on the 70-400 Exam Study Guide Homepage. Watch the System Center Virtual User Group blog for regular updates

Adobe Flash Media Server Management Pack (contest download)

Here's a sample entry from the Scripts category of the System Center Solutions Contest.

by Raphael Burri, the Adobe Flash Media Server Management Pack monitors the health of Adobe’s FMS 2 and 3, installed on Windows Computers. It provides discovery, availability, performance collection rules, performance reports and FMS related tasks. The management pack requires at least Operations Manager 2007 SP1.

Great work Raphael!

Download the script at the URL below:

http://www.systemcenterusergroup.com/files/folders/contest/entry146.aspx

Thanks again to our contest sponsors

70-400 Exam Study Notes: Section 2A - Import a Management Pack

To make it easier to keep track of all the exam study notes published, we'll link to each post on the 70-400 Exam Study Guide here on the System Center Virtual User Group web site on the 70-400 Exam Study Guide Homepage. Watch the System Center Virtual User Group blog for regular updates

Section 2b of the “Skills measured” list says importing Management Packs is covered on the exam. There are two ways to do this in Operations Manager 2007:

1. 1. Through the Operations Console
2. 2. Through the Command Shell

Instructions for both methods are shown below.

Import a Management Pack Through the Operations Console

1. Log on to the computer with an account that is a member of the Operations Manager Administrators role for the Operations Manager 2007 Management Group.
2. In the Operations Console, click the Administration button.
3. Right-click the Management Packs node and then click Import Management Pack(s).
4. The Select Management Packs to import dialog box displays. If necessary, change to the directory that holds your Management Pack file. Click one or more Management Packs to import from that directory, and then click Open.
5. In the Import Management Packs dialog box, which displays the Management Packs that you selected, click Add or Remove to edit the list of Management Packs to be imported. When the list is complete, click the Import button.
6. After the import process is complete, and the dialog box displays an icon next to each Management Pack indicating success or failure of the importation, click the Close button.
7. The Management Packs pane of the Operations Console lists all imported Management Packs.

Import a Management Pack Through the Command Shell

You can import a Management Pack through command shell using the Install-ManagementPack cmdlet. Be sure to pass the Name (not display name), including the path to the MP file, as shown below.

install-managementPack c:\mp\Windows.MyMP.mp

Custom Free Disk Space Monitoring Script (MP) for Operations Manager and Essentials 2007 (contest download)

Here's a sample entry from the Management Packs category of the System Center Solutions Contest.

By Scott Moss, his Custom Free Disk Space Monitoring Script (MP) eases and issue that's been around from the MOM 2005 days.

Download the script at the URL below:

Operations Manager 2007 free disk space script monitor had the same problem the original mom 2005 script had. It required a disk to cross both a percent free and free megabytes thresholds before an alert would be fired off. This script only works on logical disks, not mount points. Monitoring of mount points is done by another script/monitor.

This management pack contains one Monitor named Logical Disk Free Space – Customized that runs the modified Operations Manager 2007 free disk space script. The monitor is setup to run every 15 minutes on the hour. The monitor is disabled by default. There are four rules to catch possible errors that are written to the agents Operations Manager event log.

http://www.systemcenterusergroup.com/files/folders/contest/entry141.aspx

Thanks again to our contest sponsors