I am very excited about the System Center Operations Manager 2012 management pack development effort I'm about to begin for Hitachi hardware leveraging WS-Management.  I plan to post discovery, monitor, and rule examples of how anyone can leverage WS-Management when working with Out of Band devices.

I will provide discovery samples that leverage the native Microsoft.SystemCenter.WSManagement.TimedEnumerateDiscoveryData module seen here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj130215.aspx.  In addition to the discoveries I will also provide an example of the http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj130253 which can be used for rules/monitors.

New Active Directory Management Pack Available

The March 2012 revision of the Monitoring Pack for Active Directory includes the following changes: 

• Corrected some Publisher names (for example, changed from PublisherName=KDC to PublisherName=Microsoft-Windows-Kerberos-Key-Distribution-Center)
• Updated rules to generate Alerts and not only go to the Event Viewer
• Removed unnecessary check for Event Source Name for all NTDS rules (for example, removed EventSourceName=”NTDS General”)
• Corrected event parameter validation
• Updated queries to search for correct event IDs
• Fixed spelling errors
• Added missing descriptions to rules
• Fixed problems with Health Monitoring scripts
• Removed user name checks from Userenv rules

Feature Summary 

• Replication
• Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
• Domain Controller Locator (DCLocator)
• Trusts
• Net Logon service
• File Replication Service (FRS)
• Intersite Messaging service
• Windows Time service
• Key Distribution Center (KDC)
• Service availability monitoring
• Key performance data collection
• Comprehensive reports, including reports about service availability and service health, plus reports that you can use for capacity planning

Release History 

• 3/30/2012 - Updated release, version 6.0.7822.0, with fixes to bugs reported by customers.
• 10/6/2011 - Updated release, version 6.0.7670.0, with fixes to bugs reported by customers and architectural issues to facilitate future Operations Manager's releases
• 11/3/2009 - Updated release, version 6.0.7065.0, with added Windows Server 2008 R2 support
• 11/7/2008 - Initial release for 2000/2003/2008, version 6.0.6452.0
• 03/26/2008 - QFE, version 6.0.6278.10
• 03/17/2008 - QFE, version 6.0.6278.3
• 1/15/2008 - Updated Guide - same version
• 3/23/2007 - Initial Release, version 6.0.5000.0

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=21357

New SQL Server Management Packs Available

New features: 

• AlwaysOn Monitoring
• Automatically discover and monitor availability groups, availability replicas, and availability databases for hundreds of computers.
• Health roll-up from availability database to availability replicas.
• Detailed knowledge with every critical health state to enable faster resolution to a problem.
• Seamless integration with Policy based management (PBM)
• Auto-discover custom PBM polices targeting AlwaysOn and database components.
• Rollup of health of policy execution within the SQL monitoring pack under extended health.
• Support for Mirroring and Replication Monitoring (only applicable to SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 version of management pack)
• Discover mirroring databases, witness, and mirroring group.
• Monitor database mirror state, database mirror witness state, and mirroring partners’ state.
• Custom diagram view to visually represent the primary and the mirrored databases.
• Approximately twenty rules to detect replication events.
• Improved Freespace monitoring with mount point support

Additional features:

• Support for Enterprise, Standard and Express editions of SQL Server 2005, 2008, 2008 R2, and 2012 and 32bit, 64bit and ia64 architectures.
• Support for both simple and complex SQL Server configurations such as clustered installations, multiple instances and 32bit roles running on a 64bit OS. For full details on supported configurations refer to the guide included with the management pack.
• Discovery and monitoring of SQL Server roles such as DB Engine, Reporting Services, Analysis Services, Integrations Services.
• Discovery of SQL Server components such as databases, the SQL Agent and SQL jobs.
• Views covering areas such as database free space, SQL Server related performance, SQL Server related alerts, and lists of the various SQL Server roles and components which are discovered and their related state.
• Discovery and basic monitoring for SQL Server Reporting Services and Integration Services.
• Reports for longer-term analysis of common problem areas related to SQL Server such as SQL Server lock analysis and top deadlocked databases, SQL Server service pack levels across discovered roles, user connection activity. Likewise the generic reports from the Microsoft Generic Report Library can be used against the roles and components discovered by the SQL MPs to review availability and performance across many systems and over longer periods of time.
• Role and component specific tasks which provide access to common tools, triage information, or corrective actions without needing to leave the Operations Console in most cases.
• Monitoring of databases covers database status, database free space, log shipping monitoring for both the source and destination, and transaction log free space.
• Monitoring of key SQL Server related services.
• Monitoring for persistent SPID blocking.
• Monitoring of numerous SQL Server events and performance data points. Alerts bring the issue to your attention and provide knowledge on the impact and possible resolutions.
• A low-privilege configuration for discovery and monitoring that eliminates the need for SQL Server sysadmin, dbo, db_owner, and box admin privileges

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=10631

System Center 2012 Is Now Available Through Volume Licensing Website

I was just checking the volume licensing website and noticed that SC 2012 is now available.
Happy downloading!

https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/servicecenter/home.aspx

Network Devices Supported for Discovery By Operations Manager 2012

For those of you who are wondering what network devices are supported and to what extent out of the box by SCOM 2012 Microsoft has published a spreadsheet.

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012 provides the ability to discover and monitor network routers and switches, including the network interfaces and ports on those devices and the virtual LAN (VLAN) that they participate in. Operations Manager can tell you whether network devices are online or offline, and can monitor the ports and interfaces for those devices.

Operations Manager 2012 can monitor network devices that support SNMP, and can provide port monitoring for devices that implement interface MIB (RFC 2863) and MIB-II (RFC 1213) standards.

You can find the list here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=26831

Why Isn't Performance Data included in Operations Manager Diagrams?

In Operations Manager we are provided Diagram views.  These views provide the user insight into the health of any object discovered by the product by graphical representation.  This form is the easiest for most people to consume.  These visuals are nice if you want to know that health of your object(s) but what about the other data that's being collected?  My question is why don't we add some more flavor to these views?  We have all this data we are collecting with the product and storing for lengthy periods of time (out of the box), let's show some more of it in a manner to which makes sense, diagrams.  Don't leave this functionality to third party vendors I say, bake it into the product and leave your user base in a satisfied state with yet another enhancement to the product.  

Today's Diagrams

A small sample of what I propose.  The configuration of the following graph is fairly simple.  The client was monitoring a web application with SCOM and had watchers nodes spread across to country to simulate both the availability and performance aspects of the application.  Each of the watcher nodes were configured to gather response time as a performance metric.  As a result that data is available to us through the databases so I was able to query it out and apply it to the objects. However this is not native and took some customization to do. The same actions are happening today within the product except for the monitors, so why not take it a step further and provide that performance related information?