New and updated MP’s

The last weeks Microsoft released some new and updated management packs

System Center Management Pack for Windows 8 Client Operating System

Feature Summary

• Key Processor Performance Indicators
• Logical and Physical disk performance and free space
• Memory utilization
• Network health
• Health monitoring of key Windows Operating System services
• Comprehensive performance collections
• Availability and event reports

System Center Monitoring Pack for Microsoft Application Virtualization Server 5.0

Feature Summary

• Discovery of the Application Virtualization 5.0 Services: Management, Publishing, Reporting
• Alerts indicating availability/configuration/security issues that require administrative intervention
• Collection Rules defined for significant events in ETW logs of each App-V 5.0 Service
• Verification that dependent NT services are running
• Notification of security issues involving admin access attempts, admin added/deleted on App-V 5.0 Management Server

System Center Management Pack for Windows Azure Fabric – Preview

The Management Pack for Windows Azure Fabric enables you to monitor the availability and performance of Azure fabric resources that are running on Windows Azure. The management pack runs on a specified proxy agent and then uses various Windows Azure APIs to remotely discover and collect instrumentation information about a specified Windows Azure resource, such as a Cloud Service, Storage or Virtual Machine. The Management Pack for Windows Azure Fabric provides no functionality on import. For each Windows Azure subscription that contains Azure resources you want to monitor, you must configure discovery and monitoring by first using the Windows Azure wizard in the administration section of the OM Console, then the Windows Azure Monitoring template in the authoring section of the OM Console.

System Center Management Pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse Appliance

Feature Summary
The following list gives an overview of the features of this management pack for PDW Appliance. Refer to the Management Pack for SQL Server 2012 PDW Appliance guide for more details.

• Discovers SQL Server PDW Appliances, including the hardware manufacturer.
• Monitors both hardware and software components of SQL Server PDW Appliance. This includes:
  • The ability to roll up the overall health information across hardware and software components.
  • The ability to detect and monitor nodes that belong to different SQL Server PDW failover clusters.
  • Custom diagram view to visually represent the PDW appliance hierarchy comprising of hardware and software components. This includes these three views:
    • Appliance view – high level health information of the overall appliance health and their individual nodes
    • Appliance nodes – view to represent the health of each of the nodes and their roles.
    • Alerts view –view for the IT operator to look at proactive monitoring alerts and take appropriate actions.
• Custom e-mail template to provide more detailed information regarding the alerts.
• Tasks to integrate with the various PDW admin console views.
• Run-as profile to securely connect to PDW appliance for discovery and monitoring.

System Center Management Pack for Windows Server DNS

Overview

The System Center Management Pack for Windows Server DNS monitors DNS health, availability, configuration, security, and zone-transfer issues on DNS servers running the Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 operating systems.

Note This Management Pack is intended to completely replace the functionality of the previous DNS Management Pack, and as such it is not backwards compatible with them. The old and new management packs can live side-by-side, so you can uninstall the old MP’s if/when you are comfortable with the new Management Pack.

Updated management packs from Dell

Four of the Dell MP’s has been updated in the last weeks. Please download and read the guides to get started.

EqualLogic

What’s new:

• Support for PS5000, PS5500, PS4000, PS4100, PS6000, PS6010, PS6100, PS6500 and PS6510 Arrays
• Support for EqualLogic firmware upto 5.1
• Support for Storage Pool Monitoring
• Ability to turn on/off detailed monitoring for scalability

Download Dell EqualLogic Storage Management Pack Suite for SCOM, v.4.1, A00

Print

What’s new

• Support for latest Dell Printers

Dell Printer Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager, v.4.1, A00

Client

What’s new:

• Supports OpenManage Client Instrumentation (OMCI) 7.8, OMCI 8.0 and OMCI 8.0.1.
• Provides launch of remote desktop console for Dell Clients.
• Provides support to display Manufacture Ship date and Battery Part numbers of
  the Dell Client.

Download Dell Client Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, v.4.1, A00

MD Storage

What’s new

• Scalability and performance improvements over the previous releases.
  Support for the following MD Storage devices: MD3200, MD3200i, MD3220, MD3220i, MD3600i,MD3620i, MD3600f, and MD3620f.
• Revised and updated knowledge articles for recovery failures.
• Launching the Dell Discovery Utility from the SCOM console.
• Option for Scalable or Detailed Monitoring.

Dell MD Storage Array Management Pack Suite for System Center Operations Manager, v.4.1, A00

and if you want the 4.1 version for servers you can download the

Dell Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, v.4.1, A00

Exchange 2010 MP is now updated

Some of you have waited for a while, but now the wait is over. Today Microsoft released an updated version of the Exchange 2010 MP (version 14.02.0071.0) that supports Exchange 2010 SP1. The updated is pretty big and includes both fixes and new functions.

Below is from the Exchange Server 2010 Management Pack Guide

What’s New

The Exchange 2010 Management Pack includes features that weren’t included in the Exchange 2007 Management Pack. The following are some of the features that were added in the RTM version of the Exchange 2010 Management Pack:

·      Alert correlation   By maintaining the health model in memory, and processing state change events, the Exchange 2010 Management Pack determines when to raise an alert based on the state of the system.

·      Alert classification   The Exchange 2010 Management Pack uses the following alert categories to classify alerts: Key Health Indicator (KHI), Non-Service Impacting (NSI), and Forensic.

·      Mail flow statistics reporting   Hourly and daily e-mail transaction statistics are collected by using message tracking log data.

·      Service-oriented reporting   Uptime is reported based on the uptime of the application, service, and feature uptime rather than on server uptime.

·      Exchange-aware availability modeling   Client availability uptime is measured for each type of Exchange client, based on test user transactions.

Changes in This Update

The Exchange 2010 SP1 version of the Exchange 2010 Management Pack includes significant improvements beyond those included in the RTM version of the Exchange 2010 Management Pack. The following list includes some of the new features and updates:

·      Capacity planning and performance reports   New reports dig deep into the performance of individual servers and provide detailed information about how much capacity is used in each site.

·      SMTP and remote PowerShell availability report   The management pack now includes two new availability reports for SMTP client connections and management end points.

·      New Test-SMTPConnectivity synthetic transaction   In addition to the inbound mail connectivity tasks for protocols such as Outlook Web App, Outlook, IMAP, POP, and Exchange ActiveSync, the Management Pack now includes SMTP-connectivity monitoring for outbound mail from IMAP and POP clients. For information about how to enable this feature, see Optional Configurations.

·      New Test-ECPConnectivity view   Views for the Exchange Control Panel test task are now included in the monitoring tree.

·      Cross-premises mail flow monitoring and reporting   The Management Pack includes new mail flow monitoring and reporting capabilities for customers who use our hosted service.

·      Improved Content Indexing and Mailbox Disk Space monitoring   New scripts have been created to better monitor context indexing and mailbox disk space. These new scripts enable automatic repair of indexes and more accurately report of disk space issues.

·      The ability to disable Automatic Alert Resolution in environments that include OpsMgr connectors   When you disable Automatic Alert Resolution, the Correlation Engine won’t automatically resolve alerts. This lets you use your support ticketing system to manage your environment. For information about how to disable this feature, see Optional Configurations.

·      Several other updates and improvements were also added to this version of the Management Pack, including the following.

·      Suppression of alerts when the alerts only occur occasionally was added to many monitors.

·      Most of the event monitors in the Exchange 2010 Management Pack are automatically reset by the Correlation Engine. Automatic reset was added to those event monitors so that issues aren’t missed the next time they occur. For a list of the event monitors that are not reset automatically, see Understanding Alert Correlation.

·      Monitoring was added for processes that crash repeatedly.

·      Additional performance monitoring was added for Outlook Web App.

·      Monitoring of Active Directory access was improved.

·      Monitoring of anonymous calendar sharing was added.

·      Reliability of database offline alerts was improved.

·      Monitoring for the database engine (ESE) was added.

Download the Management Pack from Microsoft

Want to monitor Debian and Ubunto with Opsmgr 2007 R2?

Since the release of Opsmgr R2 we got the x-plat support but it doesn’t support all of the Linux flavors. The good new is that we now have two new community MPs for Debian and Ubunto.

Read more about it from System Center Central site

Updated version of the Dell MP is now available

I’m glad to inform that a updated version of the Dell Management pack Suite is now available for download. The new Management Pack Suite v4.1 (A00) included the following enhancements:

* Support for OpenManage events up to version 6.4
* Management of physical and teamed Network Interfaces for Broadcom and Intel NICs.
* Enriched monitoring of Network Interfaces on OpenManage Server Administrator versions greater than and equal to 6.2.0.1, along with basic monitoring on OMSA versions below 6.2.0.1.
* Performance monitoring of Network Interfaces on OpenManage Server Administrator versions greater than 6.2.0.1.
* Discovery of vflash card and monitoring of iDRAC network interfaces
* Realistic icons for the various components in Diagram View for the Dell Monolithic and Modular Systems.
* Representation of Server Modules and Chassis Slots Summary under Dell Chassis Management Controllers and Dell Modular Chassis Remote Access Controllers
* Correlation of the Server Modules under Dell Chassis Management Controllers/Dell Modular Chassis Remote Access Controllers with Dell Windows Servers on System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

Except for the above enhancements the issue where your discovered servers disappear has been fixed.

Download the Dell Server Management Pack Suite v4.1 from Dell

Windows Azure Application Monitoring Management Pack

Overview

The Windows Azure Management Pack enables you to monitor the availability and performance of applications that are running on Windows Azure.
Feature Summary
After configuration, the Windows Azure Management Pack offers the following functionality:

• Discovers Windows Azure applications.
• Provides status of each role instance.
• Collects and monitors performance information.
• Collects and monitors Windows events.
• Collects and monitors the .NET Framework trace messages from each role instance.
• Grooms performance, event, and the .NET Framework trace data from Windows Azure storage account.
• Changes the number of role instances via a task.

NOTE! The management group must be running Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cumulative Update 3

Download Windows Azure Application Monitoring Management Pack from Microsoft

Updated MP’s for SCOM R2 Cross Platform

Microsoft has updated the Cross Platform MP’s

Download version 6.1.7000.277 from Microsoft

Updated Management Pack – Windows Server Internet Information Services 7

This week a updated version of the Windows Server Internet Information Services 7 was released:

Download from Microsoft or use the Operations Manager R2 console to download/Import

Note that if you are running Operations Manager 2007 Sp1 you need to install the “Service Pack 1 Update”  K971541 before importing the MP. Since this update is not supported for SCE, I’m not sure if the MP will be supported. I will update this post when I get more information

Exchange 2007 MP 6.0.6702.0 issues

When I was at a customer, I run into two issues when configuring the Exchange 2007 MP that I thought I would share with you all:

• Problem 1
• If your Exchange has multiple OWA virtual directories, you wont get any data in the synthetic transaction performance views
• Solution
• As of now, you need to delete the “extra” virtual directory
• Problem 2
• If you are running Exchange 2007 SP2 and configured the “client synthetic transaction” you will get an alerts (see below) and the state of your CAS Synthetic Transaction State(s) will go red.
• When configured client synthetic transaction for OWA internal and/or External monitoring
• The test was unable to log on to Outlook Web Access because the SSL certificate did not validate. You can force the cmdlet to proceed by re-running it and specifying the TrustAnySSLCertificate parameter URL
• When configured client synthetic transaction for Activesync and/or Web Services monitoring
• [System.Net.WebException]:The underlying connection was closed. Could not establish a trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel.Inner error [System.Security.Authentication.AuthenticationException]:
  The remote certificate is invalid according to the validation procedure – Some of the client access server connectivity transactions failed
• Solution
• Disable the BPA on CAS servers.
  1.   Click the Authoring button in the Operations console, and then click Rules.
  2.   In the Rules pane, in the Look for box, type Exchange 2007 Test System Health, and then click Find now.
  3.   Right-click the Exchange 2007 Test System Health rule in the list, click Overrides, click Override the rule, and then click For all objects of class: Exchange 2007 Best Practice. A list of override controlled parameters is displayed.
  4.   Select to disable it

Operations Manager 2007 SP1 and R2 is now supported on Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7

Today Microsoft published a technote that state that both Operations Manager 2007 SP1 and R2 is supported on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

Note that there is some known issues if you upgrade your servers to Windows Server 2008 R2, these will be fixed in updates that will be available in the future. Doing a clean install should work fine.

Also note that System Center Essentials is still not supported on Windows Server 2008 R2.

PS! Microsoft also release an updated MP for Windows Server Operating, we can now monitor Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003, and Windows 2000 Server

Read the technote from Microsoft