Documentation for SCOM 2012 online

The documentation for OpsMgr 2012 Beta is online 


For the beta release of Operations Manager 2012, the following documentation is available online and for download.

• Quick Start Guide for Operations Manager 2012 Beta
  
  The Quick Start Guide provides a summary of what’s new in Operations Manager 2012, as well as step-by-step procedures for installing Operations Manager 2012 and exploring the new features.
  
• Operations Manager 2012 Supported Configurations
  
  Supported Configurations lists the hardware and software requirements for installing Operations Manager 2012.
  
• Deployment Guide for Operations Manager 2012
  
  The beta version of the Deployment Guide contains instructions for upgrading an Operations Manager 2007 R2 management group to Operations Manager 2012 and installation procedures for some deployment scenarios. Additional content on planning your deployment and maintaining your Operations Manager infrastructure will be included in later releases.
  
• Operations Guide for Operations Manager 2012
  
  The beta version of the Operations Guide includes some administrative, monitoring, reporting, and operating tasks typically performed by an administrator or operator. It follows the Deployment Guide in order of use during an Operations Manager implementation project, but does not assume that the administrator or operator participated in the installation of the Operations Manager infrastructure. Additional content will be included in later releases.

"Cannot login to database" SCOM alerts

Today, J.C. Hornbeck has published a really good article on this common SQL alert 'Cannot login to database'


Usually, this issue is due to the rights of the Agent Action account (account used to run the SCOM agent) or SQL Monitoring Account (Account used to monitor the SQL database/runas account used by the SCOM agent). Most of the time, the account used does not have rights to the SQL database.


There is a property called 'Auto Close'. If :

• If TRUE, the database is closed, and its resources are freed when no user connection accesses the database.
• If FALSE, the server maintains the database in an open and ready state regardless of user activity.

( cf : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms135094.aspx)

Changing to False can solve the issue that you have 

System center Operation manager 2012 Beta released

System Center Operations Manager 2012 provides the solution to the challenges mentioned above by:

•  Delivering flexible and cost effective enterprise-class monitoring and diagnostics while reducing the total cost of ownership by leveraging commodity hardware with standard configurations to monitor heterogeneous environments.
• Helping to ensure the availability of business-critical applications and services through market-leading .NET application performance monitoring and diagnostics plus JEE application health monitoring.
• Providing a comprehensive view of datacenters, and private and public clouds.

Here’s what’s new

• Rich application performance monitoring and diagnostics for .NET applications plus JEE application health monitoring
• Support for monitoring heterogeneous environments
• Integrated network device monitoring and alerts
• Simplified management infrastructure
• Common console across datacenter and clouds with customizable dashboards

System Center Operations Manager 2012 Beta is LIVE! - System Center Operations Manager - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

Export the pinpoint MP's catalog into a single html page

If, in your company, people asks you all the time is there any management pack for monitoring this or this application and you give them all the time the link to the pinpoint catalog  (where you can find all provided MP by Microsoft or third party) but never take the time to click or search, than you are like me.... :)


You might need to publish this list on your sharepoint server (or any web server) or just send this list by mail.


That's why I have created this script to export the catalog in an HTML document to be shared in my organization.


The following script parse the pinpoint catalog and retreive the information in order to be exported in a simple HTML document.


Source script: here

###################################################################################
# Parsing and exporting the pinpoint systemcenter catalog to get it in one page #
# The purpose is to be able to distrib this catalog inside company's organization #
# #
# Author: Laurent De Berti #
# v1.0 - 17/7/2011 #
###################################################################################

# We need 2 Internet Explorer
# 1st one is to retreive the list of all MPs
# 2nd one is to retreive the description for each MP

$oIE=new-object -com internetexplorer.application
$oie2=new-object -com internetexplorer.application

#$count is the 1st page
$count = 1

$res=5
$baseurl="http://systemcenter.pinpoint.microsoft.com"
$mp=@()

# Looping for each page of Management Packs
while ($res -ne 1) {
"Page $count"

# Let's retreive all the page
$oIE.navigate($baseurl + "/en-US/applications/search/operations-manager-d11/management-packs-b200073?page="+$count+ "&sort=released&q=")

while ($oIE.busy) {
    sleep -milliseconds 250
}

# By using the HTML dl tag, we check how many MPs are return.

$res=0; $oIE.document.getElementsByTagName("dl") | % { $res+=1 }
$oIE.document.getElementsByTagName("dl") | % { 
$HTMLPart= $_.IHTMLElement_innerHTML
$title = $HTMLPart| select-string -Pattern 'title="(?<hid>[ 0-9a-zA-Z-]+)'| select -expand Matches | foreach {$_.groups["hid"].value}

# if title is set as "Best Match", we skip this line 'headline of the table
if ($title -ne "Best Match") { 

# start recording and parsing the web page for each MP
$record  = New-Object system.Object
$record | add-Member -memberType noteProperty -name ManagementPackName -Value $title
"Adding " + $title
#$record | add-Member -memberType noteProperty -name Description -Value ($HTMLPart| select-string -Pattern '<DD class=description><SPAN>(?<hid>[ 0-9a-zA-Z-:,.®]+)...'| select -expand Matches | foreach {$_.groups["hid"].value})
$record | add-Member -memberType noteProperty -name Company -Value ($HTMLPart| select-string -Pattern '<SPAN>Plug-in by: <SPAN class="fn org">(?<hid>[ 0-9a-zA-Z-:,.®]+)</SPAN>'| select -expand Matches | foreach {$_.groups["hid"].value})
$record | add-Member -memberType noteProperty -name ReleaseDate -Value ($HTMLPart| select-string -Pattern '<B>Release Date: </B>(?<hid>[ 0-9a-zA-Z-:,.®/]+) </DD>'| select -expand Matches | foreach {$_.groups["hid"].value})
$record | add-Member -memberType noteProperty -name Ver -Value ($HTMLPart| select-string -Pattern '<B>Version: </B>(?<hid>[ 0-9a-zA-Z-:,.®]+) </DD>'| select -expand Matches | foreach {$_.groups["hid"]value})
$downloadlink= $baseurl + ($HTMLPart | select-string -Pattern '="Application Details" href="(?<hid>[ 0-9a-zA-Z-:,./]+)"'| select -expand Matches | foreach {$_.groups["hid"].value})
$record | add-Member -memberType noteProperty -name DownloadLink -Value $downloadlink


# opening another IE to get the description from the link page
$oie2.navigate($downloadlink)
while ($oie2.busy) {
          sleep -milliseconds 250
}
$desc=($oie2.document.getElementsByTagName("p") | ? {$_.classname -eq "appDetailDescription"}).IHTMLElement_outerText

$record | add-Member -memberType noteProperty -name Description -Value $desc

# Adding the record to the new mp system.object
$mp+=$record
}
}


# Let's go the next page.
$count++

}

# $mp contains all the MP
# printing out the result
$mp

# exporting in HTML to get the catalog.
$head = '<style> BODY{font-family:Trebuchet; background-color:white;} H1{font-size:1.3em;} TABLE{border-width: 1px;border-style: solid;border-color: black;border-collapse: collapse;} TH{font-size:0.8em; border-width: 1px;padding: 2px;border-style: solid;border-color: black;background-color:#CEE3FF} TD{font-size:0.8em;border-width: 1px;padding: 2px;border-style: solid;border-color: black;background-color:#F7FFE8} </style>'

$mp | ConvertTo-HTML  -body "<P><H1>Here the full list of management pack in the pinpoint catalog</H1><P>" -head $head -title "pinpoint - list of managementpack"| out-file c:\mp.html

Provance IT Asset Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Service Manager 2010

For over 13 years, Provance® IT Asset Management software has been used by mid- to large-sized enterprises and government organizations to drive down IT costs, increase service management efficiency, and reduce security and compliance risks.

The new Provance IT Asset Management Pack is a Process Management Pack that runs within Microsoft® System Center Service Manager 2010. It complements the Incident, Problem and Change Management capabilities of Service Manager with powerful IT Asset Life Cycle Management and Software Asset Management. Supporting ITIL® and the Microsoft Operations Framework, Provance strengthens the IT effectiveness of companies at every level of the Microsoft Core Infrastructure Optimization model. 

A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Provance holds the Microsoft Softare Asset Management and Systems Management Competencies and is a member of the Microsoft System Center Alliance.

Company : http://www.provance.com

 

Resources

• Trial Download - Provance IT Asset Management Pack (.exe)
• White Paper - The Benefits of Combined IT Service Management and IT Asset Management(.pdf)
• Provance IT Asset Management Pack fact sheet (.pdf)
• Provance Data Management Pack benefit and feature summary (.pdf)

Management Pack for MDOP MBAM

Management Pack for MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack) MBAM (Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring ). 


This management pack monitors the critical interactions within the server-side infrastructure, such as the connections between the three web services and the two databases, the operational calls between the two web sites and their supportive web service, and finally upload requests between the desktop clients and their respective receiving web service endpoints. 


What is Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring ? Click Here 


Download the MP

Community Management Pack Catalog

SystemCenter Central has just updated their MP catalog (45 MPs). We can see some very interesting monitoring like :

• Cisco device monitoring, 
• Opalis Integration Server 6.3,
• HP Eva,
• Top Processes Identifier Management Pack (correlation between high resource utilization (CPU and memory) and running processes),
• Free VMware ESX Monitoring (via vCenter / vSphere) from Quest,
• PKI Certificate,
• Scheduled Task,
• ...

Have a look into : SystemCenter Central 

Get protocol online

Get-Protocol
You would like to know on wich tcp/ip port a service is running ? Or vice versa?