musc@> $daniele.work.ToString()

Lonely blog for almost a year, and see you at MMS 2013 next week

2013-04-06T17:16:25Z

Wow, I haven’t written here in a while. My last post on this blog is from over a year ago, and referred to the BETA of System Center 2012 Service Pack !

Since then, the final version of that Service Pack 1 has shipped and Global Service Monitor has been made general available too - http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2013/01/15/system-center-2012-sp1-operations-manager-is-generally-available.aspx

I have not really been completely silent, tho – just on this blog. With regards to SP1, I have recorded a short presentation for Microsoft Virtual Academy about what is new in SP1 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/video/JJ873818 – if you are coming at MMS 2013 next week, you will hear a lot more about these enhancements.

I also blogged a few technical posts on the momteam blog, a few of those posts here in case you missed them:

APM Configured Endpoint report
http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2012/08/22/apm-configured-endpoint-report.aspx

Event-to-Alert ratio, reviewing problems and understanding trends for APM data in OpsMgr 2012
http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2012/06/18/event-to-alert-ratio-reviewing-problems-and-understanding-trends-for-apm-data-in-opsmgr-2012.aspx

APM Agent Throttling settings and other APM Overrides in SC2012 Operations Manager
http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2012/12/19/apm-throttling-settings-and-other-apm-overrides-in-sc2012-operations-manager.aspx

I also kept updating and fixing bugs in MPViewer and OverrideExplorer – for which I keep updating always the same post here http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dmuscett/archive/2012/02/19/boris-s-tools-updated.aspx

I have also been busy with a couple of personal projects, such as restoring a mis-treated guitar I got in a thrift store ( http://www.muscetta.com/2013/01/21/restoring-an-electric-guitar/ ) an building one (almost) from scratch ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/dani3l3/sets/72157632658946681/ ).

I will be at MMS 2013 next week, and you can catch me at a couple of different sessions:

IM-B202 System Center 2012 SP1 Operations Manager Overview - Tuesday, April 9 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM South Seas B

IM-B318 Panel Discussion: System Center Operations Manager - Tuesday, April 9 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM Mandalay Bay Ballroom L

AM-B302 Developers and Operations Engineers: System Center and Visual Studio - Wednesday, April 10 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM South Seas F

AM-B306 DevOps: Azure Monitoring & Authoring Updates for Operations Manager 2012 SP1 - Thursday, April 11 2:45 PM - 4:00 PM Jasmine E

Operations Manager 2012 SP1 BETA is out, and some cool things you might not (yet) know about it

2012-09-17T02:33:46Z

It has been a couple of months since we released the CTP2 release (I had blogged about that here http://www.muscetta.com/2012/06/16/operations-manager-2012-sp1-ctp2-is-out-and-my-teched-na-talk-mgt302/ ) and we have now reached the Beta milestone!

Albeit you might have already seen a number of posts about this last week (i.e. http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2012/09/10/system-center-2012-sp1-beta-available-evaluate-with-windows-server-2012.aspx or http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2012/09/11/system-center-2012-service-pack-1-beta-now-available-for-download.aspx), I see the information on the blogs so far didn’t quite explain all the various new features that went into it, and I want to give a better summary specifically about the component that I work on: Operations Manager.

Keep in mind the below is just my personal summary – the official one is here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj656650.aspx – and it actually does explain these things… but since some OpsMgr community reads a lot of blogs, I wanted to highlight some points of this release.

Platform Support

Support for installing the product on Windows Server 2012 for all components: agent, server, databases, etc.
Support for using SQL Server 2012 to host the databases

Cloud Services

Global Service Monitor - This is actually something that Beta version enables, but the required MPs don’t currently ship with the Beta download directly - you will be able to sign up for the Beta of GSM here. Once you have registered and imported the new MPs, you will be able to use our cloud based capability to monitor the health of your web applications from geo-distributed perspective that Microsoft manages and runs on Windows Azure, just like you would from your own agent/watcher nodes. Think of it as an extension of your network, or “watcher nodes in the cloud”

APM-Related improvements

this is my area and what myself and the team I am in specifically works on – so I personally had the privilege to drive some of this work (not all - some other PMs drove some of this too!)

Support for IIS8 with APM (.NET application performance monitoring) – this enables APM to monitor applications running on Windows Server 2012, not just 2008 anymore. The new Windows Server 2012 and IIS8 Management packs are required for this to work. Please note that, if you have imported the previous, “Beta” Windows 8 Management packs, they will need to be removed prior to installing the official Windows Server 2012 Management Packs. About Windows Server 2012 support and MPs, read more here http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2012/09/05/windows-server-2012-system-center-operations-manager-support.aspx
Monitoring of WCF, ASP.NET MVC and .NET NT services – we made changes to the agent so that we better understand and present data related to calls to WCF Services, we support monitoring of ASP.NET MVC applications, and we enabled monitoring of Windows Services that are built on the .NET framework – the APM documentation here is updated in regards to these changes and refers to both 2012 RTM and SP1 (pointing out the differences, when needed) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh457578.aspx
Introduction of Azure SDK support – this means you can monitor applications that make use of Azure Storage with APM, and the agent is now aware of Azure tables, blobs, queues as SQL Azure calls. It essentially means that APM events will tell you things like “your app was slow when copying that azure blob” or “you got an access denied when writing to that table”
360 .NET Application Monitoring Dashboards – this brings together different perspectives of application health in one place: it displays information from Global Service Monitor, .NET Application Performance Monitoring, and Web Application Availability Monitoring to provide a summary of health and key metrics for 3-tier applications in a single view. Documentation here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj614613.aspx
Monitoring of SharePoint 2010 with APM (.NET application performance monitoring) - this was a very common ask from the customers and field, and some folks were trying to come up with manual configurations to enable it (i.e. http://blogs.technet.com/b/shawngibbs/archive/2012/03/01/system-center-2012-operation-manager-apm.aspx ) but now this comes out of the box and it is, in fact, better than what you could configure: we had to change some of the agent code, not just configuration, to deal with some intricacies of Sharepoint…
Integration with Team Foundation Server 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2012 - functionality has also been enhanced in comparison to the previous TFS Synchronization management pack (which was shipped out of band, now it is part of Operations Manager). It allows Operations teams to forward APM alerts ( http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2012/01/23/custom-apm-rules-for-granular-alerting.aspx ) to Developers in the form of TFS Work Items, for things that operations teams might not be able to address (i.e. exceptions or performance events that could require fixes/code changes)
Conversion of Application Performance Monitoring events to IntelliTrace format – this enables developers to get information about exceptions from their applications in a format that can be natively used in Visual Studio. Documentation for this feature is not yet available, and it will likely appear as we approach the final release of the Service Pack 1. This is another great integration point between Operations and Development teams and tools, contributing to our DevOps story (my personal take on which was the subject of an earlier post of mine: http://www.muscetta.com/2012/02/05/apm-in-opsmgr-2012-for-dev-and-for-ops/)

Unix/Linux Improvements

Support for monitoring of CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu Linux – this is really one of my favorites: you might remember that I have been pioneering the CentOS and Debian/Ubuntu monitoring from OpsMgr a few years ago, albeit in totally unsupported fashions – here http://www.muscetta.com/2008/11/23/centos-discovery-in-opsmgr2007-r2-beta/ and here http://www.muscetta.com/2009/05/30/installing-the-opsmgr-2007-r2-scx-agent-on-ubuntu/ . Similarly, Robert (who now works on System Center Orchestrator) had blogged some clearer step-by-step (in three parts http://blogs.msdn.com/b/scxplat/archive/2010/01/18/building-a-centos-management-pack-part-3.aspx ) on how to build such a management pack… and finally, official support is coming: read more about it from Kristopher (who is the PM driving this) here http://operatingquadrant.com/2012/09/14/sc2012-sp1-beta-operations-manager-adds-support-for-additional-linux-distros/ . Did I already say this is awesome?
Improved Heartbeat monitoring for Unix/Linux - Heartbeat monitors for Operations Manager UNIX and Linux agents now support configurable “MissedHeartbeats” – allowing for a defined number of failed heartbeats to occur before generating an alert.

Audit Collection Services

Support for Dynamic Access Control in Windows Server 2012 - When was the last time that an update to ACS was made? Seems like a long time ago to me…. Windows Server 2012 enhances the existing Windows ACL model to support Dynamic Access Control. System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1) contributes to the fulfilling these scenarios by providing enterprise-wide visibility into the use of the Dynamic Access Control.

Network Monitoring

Additional network devices models supported – new models have been tested and added to the supported list
Visibility into virtual network switches in vicinity dashboard – this requires integration with Virtual Machine Manager to discover the network switches exposed by the hypervisor

Reminders:

Production use is NOT supported for customers who are not part of the TAP program
Upgrade from CTP2 to Beta is NOT Supported
Upgrade from 2012 RTM to SP1 Beta will ONLY be supported for customers participating in the TAP Program
Procedures not covered in the documentation might not work

Download http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34607

Operations Manager 2012 SP1 CTP2 is out, and my TechED NA talk (MGT302)

2012-06-16T16:02:44Z

As you might have already heard, this has been an amazing week at TechEd North America: System Center 2012 has been voted as the Best Microsoft Product at TechEd, and we have released the Community Technology Preview (CTP2) of all System Center 2012 SP1 components.

I wrote a (quick) list of the changes in Operations Manager CTP2 in this other blog post and many of those are related to APM (formerly AVIcode technology). I have also demoed some of these changes in my session on thursday – you can watch the recording here. I think one of the most-awaited change is support for monitoring Windows Services written in .NET – but there is more than that!

In the talk I also covered a bit of Java monitoring (which is the same as in 2012, no changes in SP1) and my colleague Åke Pettersson talked about Synthetic Transactions, and how to bring all together (synthetic and APM) in a single new dashboard (also shipping in SP1 CTP2) that gives you a 360 degrees view of your applications. The CTP2 documentation covers both the changes to APM as well as how to light up this new dashboard.

When it comes to synthetics – I know you have been using them from your own agents/watcher nodes – but to have a complete picture from the outside in (or last mile), we have now also announced the Beta of Global Service Monitoring (it was even featured in the Keynote!) – where essentially we extend your OpsMgr infrastructure to the cloud, and allow you to upload your tests to our Azure-based service and we will run those tests against your Internet-facing applications from our watcher nodes in various datacenters around the globe and feed back the data to your OpsMgr infrastructure, so that you can see how your application is available and responding from those locations. You can sign up for the consumer preview of GSM from the connect site.

Enjoy your beta testing! (Isn’t that what weekends are for, geeks?)

Boris’s OpsMgr Tools – Updated

2012-02-19T17:17:00Z

Over the years, Boris has released a set of phenomenal tools, that saved lives of OpsMgr administrators quite some time in performing common OpsMgr tasks in OpsMgr 2007 and 2007 R2..

The sad news is that Boris has moved to another team within Microsoft. He has made a tremendous contribution over the years to the OpsMgr product, and I am sure he will rock on into his new role and team. At the same time he will be missed.

In order to not let those tools go to waste, since I know many people use them, I have asked him to give me the code of his tools and allow me to update and maintain those tools going forward. And so I did: I updated a couple of his tools to work with OpsMgr 2012:

Tool	Description
MPViewer 2.3	The previous version 1.7 (that works with OpsMgr 2007 and 2007 R2) was released here. Version 2.3 has been updated to work with OpsMgr 2012, and now includes support for MPB files (MP Bundles), shows embedded resources in bundles (such as images or scripts), loads MPs asynchronously, and has the ability to Unseal and Unpack MP Bundles.
OverrideExplorer 3.6	The previous version 3.3 (that works with OpsMgr 2007 and 2007 R2) was released here. Version 3.6 has been updated to work with OpsMgr2012 and includes some minor fixes, as well as the capability to Export all overrides to an Excel spreadsheet.
Proxy Settings 1.2	The previous version 1.1 (that works with OpsMgr 2007 and 2007 R2) was released here. Version 1.2 is functionally identical to the previous version but has been just recompiled to work with OpsMgr 2012 SDK.
OverrideCreator 1.5	The previous version (that works with OpsMgr 2007 and 2007 R2) was released here. Version 1.5 is functionally identical to the previous version but has been just recompiled to work with OpsMgr 2012 SDK.

All the above tools require the Operations Manager Console being installed on the machine where you run them, as well as the .NET framework 4.0.

According to my information, the above three tools were the most used/useful. Feel free to comment if need any other one being updated and/or have bug reports or feature requests – albeit I don’t promise I will be able to fix or update everything

Disclaimer

Just like their predecessors, it is necessary to make clear that this posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Use of included utilities are subject to the terms specified at http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm

Changelog / Updates

[Updated on March 8th 2012 with MPViewer 1.9.1 that contains a fix for the Excel export of some MPs]

[Updated on March 15th 2012 with MPViewer 2.0 that now allows you to Unseal/Unpack MPs and MPBundles]

[Updated on March 21st 2012 with OverrideExplorer 3.5 which now allows to export Overrides to Excel]

[Updated on July 19th 2012 with MPViewer 2.1 that now shows the PublicKeyToken for referernces/dependencies]

[Updated on August 29th 2012 with MPViewer 2.1.2 that contains fixes to show Perf Objects, Counters and Frequency for some more modules]

[Updated on September 29th 2012 with MPViewer 2.2 that contains cosmetic as well as reliability/responsiveness fixes]

[Updated on October 3rd 2012 with MPViewer 2.2.1 that contains a fix for a crash when opening Unsealed MPs]

[Updated on November 20th 2012 with OverrideExplorer 3.6 that contains a fix for the “change target” operation that was creating broken overrides when changing target from a group to another group]

[Updated on April 26th 2013 with MPViewer 2.2.2 that contains a fix for some rules in the IIS MP that were incorrectly being reported as not generating alerts, and another fix for the "unseal/unbundle" menu item that sometimes was not being enabled]

[Updated on May 9th 2013 with MPViewer 2.3 that now can also handle MP Bundles that contain multiple ManagementPacks in a single bundle]

[Updated on May 14th 2013 with OverrideCreator 1.5 – first working version for OpsMgr 2012]

A couple of OpsMgr / APM Posts

2012-01-24T21:27:17Z

Just some shameless personal plug here, pointing out that I recently wrote two technical posts on the momteam blog about the APM feature in Operations Manager 2012 – maybe you want to check them out:

APM object model – describes the object model that gets created by the APM Template/Wizard when you configure .NET application monitoring
Custom APM Rules for Granular Alerting – explains how you can leverage management pack authoring techniques to create alerting rules with super-granular criteria’s (building beyond what the GUI would let you do)

Hope you find them useful – if you are one of my “OpsMgr readers”

Operations Manager 2012 Release Candidate is out of the bag!

2011-11-10T17:22:38Z

Go read the announcement at http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2011/11/10/system-center-operations-manager-2012-release-candidate-from-the-datacenter-to-the-cloud.aspx

This is the first public release since I am part of the team (I started in this role the day after the team had shipped Beta) and this is the first release that contains some direct output of my work. It feels so good!

Documentation has also been refreshed – it starts here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh205987.aspx

The part specifically about the APM feature is here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh457578.aspx

Enjoy!

Repost: Useful SetSPN tips

2011-10-19T15:59:00Z

I just saw that my former colleague (PFE) Tristan has posted an interesting note about the use of SetSPN “–A” vs SetSPN “–S”. I normally don’t repost other people’s content, but I thought this would be useful as there are a few SPN used in OpsMgr and it is not always easy to get them all right… and you can find a few tricks I was not aware of, by reading his post.

Check out the original post at http://blogs.technet.com/b/tristank/archive/2011/10/10/psa-you-really-need-to-update-your-kerberos-setup-documentation.aspx

A month in a new life

2011-08-19T06:55:00Z

Hey, I have just realized that I have been in my new PM role for a month already – time flies!

If you are one of my OpsMgr readers, in case you haven’t noticed, I have been silent here but I have published a post on the momteam blog – check it out: http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2011/08/12/application-performance-monitoring-in-opsmgr-2012-beta.aspx

If you are one of those few readers interested in following what I do, instead – I can tell you that I am loving the new job. Lot to do, of course, and that also applies to the private sphere – did you know that relocating to another continent takes some energy and effort? - but we are settling in nicely and things are going very smooth overall.

I have been chosen; Farewell my friends...

2011-07-07T05:52:58Z

I have been in Premier Field Engineering for nearly 7 years (it was not even called PFE when I joined - it was just "another type of support"...) and I have to admit that it has been a fun, fun ride: I worked with awesome people and managed to make a difference with our products and services for many customers - directly working with some of those customers, as well as indirectly thru the OpsMgr Health Check program - the service I led for the last 3+ years, which nowadays gets delivered hundreds of times a year around the globe by my other fellow PFEs.

But it is time to move on: I have decided to go thru a big life change for me and my family, and I won't be working as a Premier Field Engineer anymore as of next week.

But don't panic - I am staying at Microsoft!

I have actually never been closer to Microsoft than now: we are packing and moving to Seattle the coming weekend, and on July 18th I will start working as a Program Manager in the Operations Manager product team, in Redmond. I am hoping this will enable me to make a difference with even more customers.

Exciting times ahead - wish me luck!

That said – PFE is hiring! If you are interested in working for Microsoft – we have open positions (including my vacant position in Italy) for almost all the Microsoft technologies. Simply visit http://careers.microsoft.com and search on “PFE”.

As for the OpsMgr Health Check, don't you worry: it will continue being improved - I left it in the hands of some capable colleagues: Bruno Gabrielli, Stefan Stranger and Tim McFadden - and they have a plan and commitment to update it to OpsMgr 2012.

Improved ACS Partitions Query

2011-05-04T07:14:35Z

This has been sitting on my hard drive for a long time. Long story short, the report I posted at Permanent Link to Audit Collection Services Database Partitions Size Report had a couple of bugs:

it did not consider the size of the dtString_XXX tables but only the size of dtEvent_XXX tables – this would still give you an idea of the trends, but it could lead to quite different SIZE calculations
the query was failing on some instances that have been installed with the wrong (unsupported) Collation settings.

I fixed both bugs, but I don’t have a machine with SQL 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 anymore… so I can’t rebuild my report – but I don’t want to distribute one that only works on SQL 2008 because I know that SQL2005 is still out there. This is partially the reason that held this post back.

Without waiting so much longer, therefore, I decided I’ll just give you the fixed query. Enjoy

--Query to get the Partition Table
--for each partition we launch the sp_spaceused stored procedure to determine the size and other info

--partition list
select PartitionId,Status,PartitionStartTime,PartitionCloseTime 
into #t1
from dbo.dtPartition with (nolock)
order by PartitionStartTime Desc 


--sp_spaceused holder table for dtEvent
create table #t2 (
    PartitionId nvarchar(MAX) Collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS,
    rows nvarchar(MAX) Collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS,
    reserved nvarchar(MAX) Collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS,
    data nvarchar(MAX) Collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS,
    index_size nvarchar(MAX) Collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS,
    unused nvarchar(MAX) Collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS    
)

--sp_spaceused holder table for dtString
create table #t3 (
    PartitionId nvarchar(MAX) Collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS,
    rows nvarchar(MAX) Collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS,
    reserved nvarchar(MAX) Collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS,
    data nvarchar(MAX) Collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS,
    index_size nvarchar(MAX) Collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS,
    unused nvarchar(MAX) Collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS    
)


set nocount on

--vars used for building Partition GUID and main table name
declare @partGUID nvarchar(MAX)
declare @tblName nvarchar(MAX)
declare @tblNameComplete nvarchar(MAX)
declare @schema nvarchar(MAX)
DECLARE @vQuery NVARCHAR(MAX)

--cursor
declare c cursor for 
    select PartitionID from #t1
open c
fetch next from c into @partGUID

--start cursor usage
while @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
begin

--tblName - first usage for dtEvent
set @tblName = 'dtEvent_' + @partGUID

--retrieve the schema name
SET @vQuery = 'SELECT @dbschema = TABLE_SCHEMA from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.tables where TABLE_NAME = ''' + @tblName + ''''
EXEC sp_executesql @vQuery,N'@dbschema nvarchar(max) out, @dbtblName nvarchar(max)',@schema out, @tblname

--tblNameComplete
set @tblNameComplete = @schema + '.' + @tblName

INSERT #t2 
    EXEC sp_spaceused @tblNameComplete


    
    
    
--tblName - second usage for dtString
set @tblName = 'dtString_' + @partGUID

--retrieve the schema name
SET @vQuery = 'SELECT @dbschema = TABLE_SCHEMA from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.tables where TABLE_NAME = ''' + @tblName + ''''
EXEC sp_executesql @vQuery,N'@dbschema nvarchar(max) out, @dbtblName nvarchar(max)',@schema out, @tblname

--tblNameComplete
set @tblNameComplete = @schema + '.' + @tblName

INSERT #t3 
    EXEC sp_spaceused @tblNameComplete

    
    
    
fetch next from c into @partGUID
end
close c
deallocate c


--select * from #t2
--select * from #t3


--results
select #t1.PartitionId, 
    #t1.Status, 
    #t1.PartitionStartTime, 
    #t1.PartitionCloseTime, 
    #t2.rows,
    (CAST(LEFT(#t2.reserved,LEN(#t2.reserved)-3) AS NUMERIC(18,0)) + CAST(LEFT(#t2.reserved,LEN(#t2.reserved)-3) AS NUMERIC(18,0))) as 'reservedKB', 
    (CAST(LEFT(#t2.data,LEN(#t2.data)-3) AS NUMERIC(18,0)) + CAST(LEFT(#t3.data,LEN(#t3.data)-3) AS NUMERIC(18,0)))as 'dataKB', 
    (CAST(LEFT(#t2.index_size,LEN(#t2.index_size)-3) AS NUMERIC(18,0)) + CAST(LEFT(#t3.index_size,LEN(#t3.index_size)-3) AS NUMERIC(18,0))) as 'indexKB', 
    (CAST(LEFT(#t2.unused,LEN(#t2.unused)-3) AS NUMERIC(18,0)) + CAST(LEFT(#t3.unused,LEN(#t3.unused)-3) AS NUMERIC(18,0))) as 'unusedKB'
from #t1
join #t2
on #t2.PartitionId = ('dtEvent_' + #t1.PartitionId)
join #t3
on #t3.PartitionId = ('dtString_' + #t1.PartitionId)
order by PartitionStartTime desc



--cleanup
drop table #t1
drop table #t2
drop table #t3