This entry is a continuation of the following series: URL Monitoring Part I – The Design URL Monitoring Part II – The Classes and Discoveries URL Monitoring Part III – The Monitors After my initial posts on URL monitoring I received...

I wrote an MP last year that I thought might be useful for the community. Of course this is just an example and needs some work (error handling, testing, etc…). The purpose of the MP is to alert when a resource is not on its preferred cluster node...

  I have a customer with multiple OpsMgr management groups and they don't like to type in the name of the RMS of other management groups when they want to connect through the console. They want to use the Registered Servers option but nothing appears...

Recently some of my peers were discussing issues that their customers are encountering with manual reset monitors.  I thought the main points of the discussion were worth sharing. What is a Manual Reset Monitor? It is a type of monitor that detects...

This entry is part of the following series: URL Monitoring Part I – The Design URL Monitoring Part II – The Classes and Discoveries URL Monitoring Part III – The Monitors Creating the monitors was by far the most complex part of this solution because...

This entry is part of the following series: URL Monitoring Part I – The Design URL Monitoring Part II – The Classes and Discoveries URL Monitoring Part III – The Monitors Each of the 3 web applications has its own class. The applicable discovery queries...

The out of the box Web Application template that exists in OpsMgr 2007 SP1 and R2 is useful but there are situations where it just doesn’t fit. Consider the following scenario: The Contoso Corporation’s global IT headquarters is located in Richardson...

What if OpsMgr is in a state where it is running but not working properly? Maybe your RMS is gray or the notification and alerting systems are down. How do you detect this condition so someone can take action to resolve it? Monitoring the console all...

Here at Microsoft I have had the opportunity to work in different roles on several teams all of which contained very smart people.  I have to say though, I am currently working with some of the most talented engineers of my career.  I work with...

Over a year ago I blogged about the proper syntax required to populate an alert description with data returned from a property bag. The syntax in the blog is correct but the idea of doing this confused some. I will describe below how to accomplish this...

I have a customer who has many management groups and wants to synchronize the user roles between them. There is no easy way to do this in the UI, but it can be done via PowerShell. One of my co-workers, Jonathan Almquist, blogged about this some time...

Occasionally I run across an issue that requires immediate action be taken to resolve the problem while any root cause analysis is an afterthought. Last week I handled such an issue. My customer has a connector that was continually sending around 20...

A co-worker of mine ran into an alert flood scenario and needed to resolve a large number of alerts. He tried the following PowerShell command: Get-Alert | where {$_.ResolutionState -eq "New"} | Resolve-Alert This eventually ended up throwing an...

A customer of mine ran across a situation where they had to add a significant number of runas accounts to OpsMgr and didn't want to do it through the UI. The customer happened to have the account information handy and wanted to know how to script this...

I was doing a health check for a customer and ran across the following warning event which occurred almost daily: Event ID: 5206 Event Description: In memory container (hash table System.Health.EntityStateChangeData) had to drop data because it reached...

This is my first post in 2008 and definitely won't be my last. In April I transitioned to a new role here at Microsoft. I was previously in Escalation Engineer for most of the System Center product line. I am now a dedicated support engineer focused exclusively...

After calling UpdateAlerts() an exception is returned: "Value does not fall within the expected range". DBGView will show the following output: [4680] [E] 04680.01796, (cdasmomconnectorframework.cpp::2114) Could not decode unknown vartype 36 ! [4680...

I recently had the opportunity to learn a lot about SNMPVarBind values and populating those values in the Alert description Field from a monitor and rule. A customer was having difficulty determining the proper syntax to use for this and with the help...

The System Center Product Group has started a new blog that will contain some useful high level information about the System Center product line. The first post is by Brad Anderson who is "the man" when it comes to the System Center branded products....

If you are running a script via a rule, and that script returns a propertybag, then it is possible you'll want the data returned to show up in the alert description assuming an alert is generated. The syntax for this in OpsMgr 2007 isn't that straight...

There will be a Live Meeting on October 24 th going over the new certifications for SCCM and SCOM. I will be adding these new certs to my list of things to do. See Trika's blog on the subject and for details on the Live Meeting.

Recently a customer complained that you can't run more than one advertised program at a time on a client, but they could in SMS 2.0. Here is an example VBScript that runs all available advertised programs on a client. 'rslaten 10/10/2007 'Example...

I recently had a customer ask me why the TimeOfFirstEvent and TimeOfLastEvent fields in an alert get set to 12/30/1899 when their custom application, which uses the MOM Connector Framework (MCF), uses UpdateAlerts() to set the resolution state of an alert...

The SMS MP Guide actually tells you this: "To specify the location of the SMS installation folder the script uses a system environment variable on the SMS site server. The administrator must create the %SMS_INSTALL_DIR_PATH% environment variable as a...

I recently worked on an issue sequencing an application with the Softgrid 4.1 SP1 and 4.2 Sequencer. After selecting a location to download the virtual environment (after the install was completed) an error would appear "SystemGuard download failed (error...