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SCOM 2012: Run WebConsole in different application pool

During my session on how to prepare yourself I’ve showcased some tips and tricks which will make your live much easier when you upgrade your existing SCOM 2007 R2 installation to SCOM2012.

One of the tricks I’ve mentioned was to run the SCOM2012 web console in it’s own app pool. During the upgrade of your web console the application pool will be removed and you can only choose the default application pool to install the website which is in my opinion not a best practice.

So before installing the Web Console on your webserver perform the following tasks in IIS:

Open the IIS manager on your machine

Right click the application pools and choose “Add Web Site…”

Fill in the details:

Note: At this point you need to choose another port than the default 51908. You can change this again after the upgrade.

The site is up and running.

During the wizard for pre installation you’ll get at one point at the following dialog to choose your application pool. Here’s the reason explained why we can’t reuse the “old” site:

The Operations Manager WebConsole will be deleted during the upgrade so it will default to the default application pool.

Select the new created website and continue.

After the upgrade you’ll notice that the old site has been removed. At this point you can edit the binding of the application pool again to the default port to keep the same transparency towards your users.

More tips to follow so stay tuned!

SCDPM 2012 Beta: How to install

Well the beta is live now. So let’s start installing it. In this particular case I’m installing it on a Hyper-V machine in my test environment. The SQL is on the same machine as this is just a lab environment.

Always make sure to run the Setup.exe as administrator. When opened we get the familiar install screen of all the System Center products.

Click the “Data Protection Manager”.

Accept the license terms and conditions and click OK.

After this the DPM installer will install all the necessary prerequisites to get the install going. These are not yet the prerequisites for the DPM itself.

When these are finished the familiar DPM install screen appears. Nothing changed here so far. Click next to continue with the Prerequisites check.

As said before I’m running this purely as test in my lab so I’m using a Dedicated Instance of SQL Server and install it on my DPM server. Click “Check and install”

DPM will install the basic components.

Unfortunately there’s a reboot required after installing the SISFilter. If you want to avoid this you could install the filter in advance by downloading it here:

After reboot run through the process again and choose Next when all the prerequisites are installed.

Fill in unser name and Company and click next.

I’ve left the defaults here but you can easily change them if you please.

Put in a strong password to run the SQL Server service and Server Agent Service.

Use Microsoft Update choice. It’s up to you to use the Microsoft update or not. I prefer to put this on Microsoft Update to receive the updates when they appear.

CEIP data. Again a personal choice to participate or not.

A nice summary before the magic happens.

Clicking install still launches a Security warning to open the SQL 2008 setup file. Click Run to continue.

The SQL Server install will take some time. In my case 14 minutes. Note that this can vary in your environment but don’t worry it’ll get there eventually. If you have a remote instance this step is not necessary.

Everything went fine.

So let’s open the console for the first time to check it out!

Time to start playing and see the new features in action.

I’ll be installing the SCOM extensions as well shortly to check out the new remote manage capabilities.

Live meeting: How to prepare for SCOM 2012

On 20th of September I’ll be hosting a live meeting where we’ll go over the different steps to prepare yourself and your environment for the move from SCOM 2007 to SCOM 2012. The upgrade path has been said to be easier than the one from MOM2005 to SCOM2007 (god thank). But still there are some things to keep in mind and consider before moving towards the new version when it’s released.

So join me on the 20th of September to prepare yourself for the next version of the SCOM software family.

The abstract of the topics covered (more to come):

• Backup and Document your environment.
• Health Check your SCOM installation.
• Compare management packs for SCOM2007 and SCOM2012.
• Supported upgrade paths.

Link to join in: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032492077&Culture=en-US

I’ll be prepared for SCOM 2012… will you?

SCOM 2007: How to add Custom Field to monitor

In SCOM 2007 it’s possible to fill in custom fields with rules like you did in MOM 2005 as explained here: http://scug.be/blogs/dieter/archive/2011/05/13/scom-2007-custom-alert-fields.aspx

However this is not possible in monitors because there’s a fundamental change in how the alerts are created. In Rules the GenerateAlert module is used to create the alerts. In this GenerateAlert module it’s possible to pass extra data like the custom fields. In monitors the alert creation is slightly different. The alert is generate with parameters in the monitor itself so it’s not possible to pass extra data.

Case:

For a client I’m migrating MOM2005 to SCOM2007R2 and of course I would like to take advantage of the fact I can create monitors instead of rules. My client has a mainframe based problem management system (could also be any other system which doesn’t have a connector) which uses a mail scrubber to read out mails and scan for specific keywords to create tickets.

Problem:

The specific keywords were passed in MOM through the custom fields. This is also possible in SCOM but only by using rules and not monitors. A solution could be to create a monitor and create a separate alert generating rule for that monitor. This solves our issue but is not manageable because if things change you have to change both the monitor and the rule to make sure they reflect the new situation.

Solution:

Therefore I came up with another solution. Because there are only 15 possible combinations of keywords at my client I choose to use the Subscription / notification channel to insert the keywords in the dbase before I send it to the Problem management system. I could have just passed the parameters to the mail and send it but I prefer to update the dbase as well to also reflect the changes in the alert.

I’ve based my script on the script I used earlier on and is featured here: http://scug.be/blogs/dieter/archive/2011/05/11/scom-dump-alerts-to-text-file-and-mail.aspx

The main difference with the script above is that instead of reading the custom fields out of the dbase I pass them with the Notification Channel. Doing this makes the keywords centrally manageable when the keywords change.

The script:

As mentioned above I mostly reused the script of my previous blog post but for the record I’ll explain the script here once more:

First of all. You can download the script here: http://scug.be/members/DieterWijckmans/files/create_customfields_monitors.zip.aspx

Preparing the environment and reading the parameters:

The main difference with the previous script is the fact that we are not reading the data out of the dbase (in the $_.customfield fields) but inserting the data in the dbase through parameters by using the script.

Parameters: The “param” statement needs to be on the first line of the script. In my case I’m reading 3 parameters: The alertID (which is mandatory for the script), The Problemtype and the Objecttype.

The last 2 fields will be inserted in the $_.customfield dbase fields and are needed by the third party problem management solution to make the proper escalation.

RMS: Read the RMS server name of your environment. If you are using a clustered RMS it’s better to fill in the name of the cluster and comment the automatic retrieval of the name out to avoid problems.

Resolution State: The resolution state needs to be defined here and also defined in the SCOM environment (for more details on how to configure this in the SCOM environment check here: http://scug.be/blogs/dieter/archive/2011/05/11/scom-create-custom-alert-resolution-states.aspx

Loading the SCOM cmdlet

Culture Info: To make sure that the data format is correct you need to fill in the Localization. In my case it’s nl-BE.

Read in alert + fill in custom fields: The alertID which is passed as parameter is read in here and the data is retrieved out of the dbase. The other 3 custom fields which are required by the problem management system are filled in here and updated in the dbase. Technically there’s no obligation to fill in the fields in the dbase but to make sure that the custom fields are filled in when you open the alert in the console I update the alert anyway.

Error Handling setup to make sure we have proper error handling

The conversion before dumping the data to the file.

Note that I needed to make modifications to the date format to reflect the localization format here. All the data will be dumped to a file which is kept for future reference. The File path in yellow can be changed to reflect your location.

Mailing section:

Mailing the file to the problem management system or if in case an error occurred alerting the SCOM admin. Make sure you fill in the OK recipient, the NOK recipient and the SMTPserver to send out the mail.

Last but not least we are writing an event in the event log whether the operation was successful or not. This gives us the opportunity to monitor the problem creation script from within SCOM.

This solution works for me because I have a limited number of possible combinations.

A couple of things you need to configure before this script can be used in production:

1. Create custom resolution state in SCOM: http://scug.be/blogs/dieter/archive/2011/05/11/scom-create-custom-alert-resolution-states.aspx
2. Create a notification channel per combination of the values of the custom fields: http://scug.be/blogs/dieter/archive/2011/05/11/scom-setup-command-notification-channel-subscriber.aspx

1.  
   • The following data is needed for the notification channel
     •  
       • Full Path of the command file: In my case this is PowerShell as I would like to run a PowerShell script: C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Powershell.exe
       • Command Line Parameters: In my case I’m running a PowerShell script and I’m passing the AlertID of the specific alert, problemtype and objecttype as arguments which I’m using in my script. Again you can use any arguments here if you like: C:\scripts\monitorcustomfields\create_customfields_monitors.ps1 -sAlertid ‘$Data/Context/DataItem/AlertId$’ -Problemtype ‘OSSUP’ -Objecttype ‘server’
       • Startup folder for the command line: This is basically the path of your program you want to run. C:\scripts\monitorcustomfields

The script must be run on the RMS (if it’s a clustered RMS make sure that the script is on both clusters in the same location).

Note:  If you want to use more parameters or different names you have the change the following things:

• In the command line parameters: add –parametername ‘desired value’ to the command line
• In the script:
  • change the first line in the script to reflect your custom situation: param([string]parametername,…)
  • change the section where the custom fields are filled in to reflect your situation:
    • $oalert.customfield# = desired value

There are 10 customfields available in the dbase so you can pass up to 10 parameters in the script and thus into the customfields.

If you have remarks or questions regarding the script please do not hesitate to drop me a line or contact me on twitter http://twitter.com/#!/dieterwijckmans

Scug Event: System Center Orchestrator notes from the field

SCUG Belgium is holding it’s first offsite event after the summer.

Join us on Thursday 29th september 2011 to discuss the brand new version of SCORCH 2012(the product formerly known as Opalis).

This event will consist out of 2 sessions of an hour:

Session 1: System Center Orchestrator 2012 overview will go over the new version of SCORCH. How can SCORCH help you to automate tasks and create workflows. This session is given by Kurt Van Hoecke who’s a member of the SCUG and a SCSM specialist. You can find his blog here: http://scug.be/blogs/scsm/default.aspx

Session 2: System Center Orchestrator 2012 migration plan will give you an overview on what things to consider to migrate from a previous version to the new version. This session is given by Christophe Keyaert who’s a member of the SCUG and specialized in SCORCH / Opalis. You can find his blog here: http://scug.be/blogs/christopher/default.aspx

Don’t miss this great opportunity to view this new release in action and sign up here: http://scorch.eventbrite.com/

Update: We’ve added a live meeting to sign in as well so if you can’t make it to Belgium make sure to follow it by livemeeting!

See you there!

SCOM 2007: Utility to Count Total Instances in Your Management Group

Scom is a great product but from time to time you need a custom build tool or script to do just the thing, or change just that bit that’s not possible in the SCOM console.

I’m personally a huge fan of the Powershell cmdlet supplied with SCOM. For most of the tasks (whether it’s automating or extending SCOM) it does the trick quickly and easily.

From time to time there’s a tool passing by on the world wide web that fills a gap to make our lives as a SCOM admin more easy.

Yesterday another of these fine tools emerged: http://systemcentercentral.com/forums/tabid/60/indexid/88501/default.aspx?tag=

Note: You need to register to download the tool.

This is the first version of the nice tool to count the instances per management group. This can be helpful to troubleshoot your environment. The PowerShell script which was posted in the community a while back took sometimes 3 hours to complete the task while this nice .net program is taking minutes…

You need .net framework 4 to run the tool.

Keep an eye on the topic because I’m sure it will progress in the next days like the authors mentioned in the topic itself.

SCOM 2007R2: Ramp Up Guide

I came across an excellent list written by Sonda (MPFE in UK) of all the required resources you’ll need to get up to speed with SCOM 2007 R2.

There’s plenty of info for the absolute rookie and the novice.

You can find the exhaustive list here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/mspremuk/archive/2011/08/03/ramp-up-guide-system-center-operations-manager-2007-r2.aspx

If you are looking for a similar list of links to resource for Service Manager look no further. Kurt Van Hoecke created a nice list of all the resources you’ll need to get you going.

http://scug.be/blogs/scsm/archive/2011/05/02/system-center-service-manager-information-blog-overview.aspx

Happy reading

SCOM 2007: Cumulative Update 5 is released

Yesterday Microsoft released the Cumulative Update 5 (CU5) for Scom 2007 R2.

This new update contains some additional fixes for Operations Manager 2007 R2 + support is added for Red Hat 6.

You can download the CU5 package (948.0 MB) here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26938

The KB2495674 article apparently is not online yet but can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2495674

For instructions on how to install a CU package in general (blog is written for CU4 but best practices can be followed for installation of CU5 as well) you can check this :http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2011/02/01/opsmgr-2007-r2-cu4-rollup-hotfix-ships-and-my-experience-installing-it.aspx

System Center Unlimited blog + Overview of Team blogs

Just recently in my ever during quest for information I stumble upon a great blog post which basically gathers all the different product team blogs of System Center and feeds them into one blog.

System Center Unlimited

It’s named System Center Unlimited and is maintained by J.C. Hornbeck. All the different posts on the different product team blogs are fed into this ever growing and very active blog. If you’re looking for one place to get a full overview of the System Center products this is the place to go…

However…

If you’re looking for a System Center specific product blog make sure to check out his extensive list of all the different product team blogs RSS feeds which he monitors :

http://blogs.technet.com/b/operationsmgr/archive/2011/05/12/system-center-unlimited-all-your-favorite-system-center-posts-together-in-one-central-place.aspx

I’ve included the links below to the different product team blogs :

If there are things missing please don’t hesitate to drop me a line.

Hopes it helps you to find your way through the System Center universe