OpsMgr++

One of the things I have heard on several occasions is that people want to disable or enable a number of rules/monitors/discoveries at once. Currently its only possible to enable or disable one at a time. This can be an issue when you are trying to disable...

Thanks Stefan for reporting that MPViewer export to HTML functionality didn’t work with the latest version of the E12 MP. This was caused by a bug in MPViewer. The new version is attached to this blog post. I also some more minor features such as frequency...

One of the new things in OpsMgr is the ability to easily setup URL monitoring from multiple watcher nodes. What what if you want to monitor 500 different URLs? Setting this up manually could be pretty time consuming. Here is a script I put together that...

Putting a computer into maintenance mode is what users do when they know a particular computer will be offline for a while (security update, known network issues, hardware installation, other things). This is done so that OpsMgr does not generate any...

The purpose of override explorer is to simplify understanding what overrides exist in a management group. It provides two views: Type Based - This view shows types for that have rules/monitors/discoveries for which overrides were created. Computer...

I have heard the question about creating rules that execute only during a certain set of hours many times in the last while. While its not straight forward, it is still possible. Attached to the this blog post is a MHTML file which I wrote that describes...

One of the things that I have been wanting to cover in this blog is advanced MP authoring. Lately I have been spending a fair bit of time doing MP related work so I am going to start blogging on this subject. My main focus will be to provide samples as...

Several weeks ago we released an update to Windows 2003 Cluster MP to address several customer initiated issues. I am very interested to hear what you think about the cluster MP and what has been your experience in deploying and using it, or things that...

Sometimes you may not wish to put the whole computer into maintenance mode. Instead you may wish to put just a number of databases or websites into maintenance mode. The steps are very simple: 1 - Get the monitoring class that represents the type...

Added another several small features in this version: 1 - The target of a rule/monitor 2 - The type of a monitor 3 - The priority of the alert generated by a monitor 4 - Whether a rule generates an alert as well as the severity and priority...

Ever wanted to dig into a management pack but could not because it is sealed? One workaround is to import the management pack into a management group and then export it. There is a much quicker way to do this using PowerShell and the SDK. Attached...

Here is a sample script that demonstrates how to specify which RunAs account to use for a particular RunAs profile on a particular agent. The main reason I am blogging about this is that the code that needs to be written to do this is not straight forward...

Attached is a script that takes a group and puts all the computers in the group (as well as the health service and the healthservice watcher) into maintenance mode. Here is how you can run the script from the command line to start or stop maintenance...

This updated version of MPViewer will allow you to export data to Excel in addition to the HTML format which was available before. Now that you are able to export to excel, I hope it will make it easier to understand MP contents. This update also includes...

A really useful feature of Health Explorer in Operations Manager is the ability to force the agent recalculate health of a particular monitor. One the most common uses for this is when you want to confirm that the action that you took actually fixed the...

Groups are one of the most used areas of functionality in Operations Manager. When you are creating overrides, setting up role based security, scoping views, or running reports you are most likely using groups. Generically speaking, groups allow you to...

When creating a Event Log unit monitor, you might want to include in the alert description the event information. Here are the expression that you can use in order to include the event information in the alert description: Publisher Name - $Data...

Given that groups are used for role based security, overrides, reports, and some other features, it might be pretty interesting to know what groups is a particular computer member of. Attached is a sample script that dumps the list of groups that a particular...

I wrote a blog post several weeks ago about putting a computer into maintenance mode using PowerShell. For some reason after posting the script there was a white space infront of one of the parameters which resulted in the health service watcher object...

Performance monitors will look at at performance counter value and change state when a particular condition is detected. However if you want to collect performance counters for viewing in the console or reporting, you need to create a performance collection...

I have seen a number of questions on this in the past so I am happy to announce that we just released the Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster MP. You can now download it on: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AC7F42F5-33E9-453D...

Are you interested in participating in a private beta program for the Windows 2008 Cluster management pack? If so, please send me an email ( borisyan@microsoft.com ). Please note that I am only able to provide access to the beta bits to 10 customers so...

A while I wrote a blog entry about how you can automate the creation of URL monitoring logic in OpsMgr using PowerShell. One of the questions I have received is "how do you do the same thing for port monitoring ?". Attached is a script that demonstrates...

Sometimes after installing an agent or importing a management pack you may see event number 33333 logged by the Data Access layer. In many situations this error is caused by the fact that proxying is not enabled for a particular agent. In OpsMgr SP1,...

I recently saw an interesting mail thread about how does one figure out which MPs will work for agentless monitoring and which MPs will not. The interesting part is that at the MP level there is no way to declare whether it is designed for agentless monitoring...