You´re in control Event in Stockholm

Microsoft Sweden has an "You´re in control" event Thursday 3 may. I will do a live demo of our Operations Manager 2007 installation during the Ops Mgr session. The scope for my demo is third party plug-ins from AVIcode, Citrix, HP and SecureVantge and the tweaks we have done ourselves to take care of some products and information. The event focus is on System Center and Forefront products.

Citrix Presentation Server MP for Ops Mgr 2007 is available

Citrix Management Pack for Presentation Server for Ops Mgr 2007 is available for download from mycitrix.com. We will put it in our Ops Mgr this week. Some words from the Citrix web: "The Management Pack enables all the new functionality introduced in Operations Manager 2007 such as service-oriented state monitoring, automatic topology discovery, and real-time event and performance data collection."

Health Service Handle Count Threshold monitor causes the RMS health state to be Critical

We were experiencing that Health Service Handle Count Threshold monitor caused the RMS health state to be Critical. There was a solution for this behaivior. The default threshold value for this monitor is supposed to have an override for the Management Server Computer Group, but the override was not included in the RTM code.

To resolve this problem, use the following steps to manually configure the override:

1. In the Ops Mgr 2007 Operations Console, open Authoring.
2. Click the Scope button on the toolbar. If a scope was previously enabled, click the Scope button twice to clear the previous scope.
3. In the "Look for" box, type "health service" (without quotes).
4. Check the box for the Health Service target and click OK.
5. In Monitors, expand Health Service, Entity Health, Performance, and then Health Service Performance.
6. Under Health Service Performance, right-click Health Service Handle Count Threshold, point to Overrides, point to "Override the Monitor", and then click "For a group".
7. In the Select Object box, click Management Server Computer Group and click OK.
8. In the Override Properties box, check the "Agent Performance Monitor Type - Threshold" parameter, change the Override Setting for this parameter from 2000 to 10000, and then click OK.
9. Under Health Service Performance, right-click Health Service Private Bytes Threshold, point to Overrides, point to "Override the Monitor", and then click "For a group".
10. In the Override Properties box, check the "Agent Performance Monitor Type - Threshold" parameter, change the Override Setting for this parameter from 104857600 to 1610612736, and then click OK.

You may create a "Operations Manager Overrides MP" to store your overrides in and not store them in the default management pack.

Operations Manager 2007 doesn’t support SNMP v1.

Currently there is a limitation in Operations Manager 2007. The SNMP support is only for version 2c and not for version 1. There will probably be a QFE to address this issue but no date is set for the update. So if you have problem discovering some of your SNMP devices, check if they’re supporting SNMP v2c.

Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 documentation

There is some documentation on Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 released at Microsoft Download.

Overview
This download contains the following documentation for System Center Operations Manager 2007:
• Operations Manager 2007 Deployment Guide:
This guide steps you through the deployment process for System Center Operations Manager 2007.
• Active Directory Management Pack Guide for Operations Manager 2007:
This document includes a Management Pack overview, deployment procedures, and monitoring scenarios for the two Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) Management Packs
• Exchange Management Pack Guide for Operations Manager 2007:
This guide includes a Management Pack overview, deployment procedures, and monitoring scenarios for the Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007.
• SQL Management Pack Guide for Operations Manager 2007:
The SQL Server Management Pack provides both proactive and reactive monitoring of SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 for an enterprise environment.
• Windows Server Operating System Management Pack Guide for Operations Manager 2007:
The Microsoft Windows Server Management Packs monitor the performance, health, and availability of Microsoft Windows 2000 Server and Microsoft Windows Server 2003.
• Windows Client Operating System Management Pack Guide:
The Windows client operating system Management Packs are intended for use in gathering data on client computers or individually monitoring designated mission-critical client computers. • This guide includes an overview of the Management Pack, deployment procedures, and monitoring scenarios for the Terminal Services Management Pack.

Archive ACS data into compressed log files.

Now we have the Audit Collection Archiver from SecureVantage up and running. Every night a job runs and archives ACS database data into compressed text files. This way the ACS database don’t grow out of hands. We have the last 14 days in the ACS database and daily we store the security log data with the Archiver. This way we have 8-12x Compression Ratio on the stored data and the long time storage is more space effective. With the Archiver comes a loader function to make it possible to search in the archived data and have On Demand historical access to security logs. The Archiver is packaged with some reporting extension to expand the Ops Mgr 2007 ACS reporting. If you are thinking of using the ACS (Audit Collection Services) that comes with Operations Manager 2007 you should take a look at this product.

Secure Vantage Archiver

To have some archiving functionality to your ACS installation you have to get a third party solution or make some SQL stuff yourself. The ACS in the box does not provided the archiving functionality. I am in the process of setting up the Secure Vantage Archiver to solve our archiving needs. As soon as everything is up and running i will deliver some more information on this.

The Operations Manager 2007 RTM project.

Here is some update from our Ops Mgr 2007 project. We have a distributed Ops Mgr installation with ACS and Reporting. So far we have 50 server plus the Ops Mgr servers in production. We also have some SNMP monitoring going o mail firewalls. We are currently running Ops Mgr 2007 and MOM 2005 agents on the servers. We are adding agents to new servers everyday. We have had some minor issues on the reporting server but no major errors. On the MP side we are running SQL, IIS, Base OS, and the Ops Mgr "core" MPs. When you install the Ops Mgr 2007 you get a rather big number of Mps or Mp libraries installed.

How to install ACS reports in Ops Mgr 2007

To install ACS reports in Ops Mgr 2007 you have to got to the installation CD and locate the ReportModels\acs folder. Copy that folder and subfolders to for example c:\acs. Locate the SupportTools folder on the CD and copy ReportingConfig.exe to c:\acs. Then start a command prompt. Change folder to c:\acs. Run "UploadAuditReports [ACSDBServer] http://[opsMgrReportingserver]/ReportServer C:\acs"
Now the reports are uploaded to the reporting server.
To limit the rights to run these reports create a ACS readers group.
Add a SQL logon on ACS Db server and assign db_datareader permissions to that group on the OperationsManagerAC database. Configure the Audit DB Data source on the reporting server to connect using "Credentials supplied by the user running the report" and select "Use as Windows Credentials when running connecting to the data source". This way you can have the same reporting server for Data Warehouse and ACS. I have the reporting server on the DW database server.
If you have installed a distributed configuration (Report Server separate from Management Server) you have to run the adsutil tool to enable NTLM auth on the IIS Server.
o http://support.microsoft.com/kb/215383 this describes what to do.
o Typically the statement is cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/1/root/NTAuthenticationProviders "NTLM"

Secure Storage Backup Tool

When you finished the installation of the RMS server you should backup the RMS key with the SecureStorageBackup.exe tool. You will find it in the SupportTools folder on the Ops Mgr 2007 RTM CD. Copy the file to your SCOM 2007 folder under Program Files. Then run it with following syntax:

SecureStorageBackup.exe Backup [backupfile]

If you try running from CD you are going to get an error:
"Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Mom.Common, Version=6.0.4900.0,......."

Don´t be miss led by the "old" version number, you have to copy the file to the folder under program files to make it work.

Reinstalling Reporting in Ops Mgr 2007

If you want to reinstall the reporting part of Ops Mgr 2007 you have follow this.
1. Uninstall Ops Mgr reporting.
2. On the Ops Mgr CD in the SupportTools folder there is a tool ResetSRS.EXE
Syntax: ResetSRS.exe
Note
If you have a default instance installed, the command you use is ResetSRS.exe MSSQLSERVER. If you installed Operations Manager using "Instance1", the command would be ResetSRS.exe Instance1.
3. Use the SQL Reporting Services Configuration tool to reconfigure Reporting services
4. Install Ops Mgr Reporting.

This can be helpful if you have an RC2 and don’t want to reinstall SQL server when reinstalling Ops Mgr 2007 to RTM.

Author MP - a site for MP creators

There is a site focused on MP creating in Ops Mgr 2007.
AuthorMPs is created and owned by Steve Wilson. He is program manager on the System Center Operations Manager team and responsible for a lot of the monitoring engine of OpsMgr and the MP infrastructure layer of the product.

http://www.authormps.com/dnn

Back home from the MMS in San Diego

I have been traveling the last 2 weeks to San Diego and Microsoft Management Summit. There was lots of new information and sessions regarding the just released Ops Mgr 2007. We have started our upgrade from RC2 and finally there is some helpful documentation on the Microsoft Download site. There is deployment documentation as well as SQL, AD and Exchange MP Documentations to download. So now back home there is a lot to read. During the next weeks I will leave some progress reporting on our upgrade project.