Please take some time to have a look around the new site and feel free to let me know what you think. I plan on making regular updates and hope to provide some useful info.

Here’s where you can get the podcast:

Stream live from 1E.com

Download Episode 4 from iTunes

Subscribe the the 1E Podcast Network on iTunes

We at 1E are dedicated to bringing you real world scenarios to help solve some of the most challenging problems faced by IT professionals. If you are wrestling with an issue, would like some advice or have a topic you would like to see covered, please feel free to send me an email outlining your issue or idea. If selected for inclusion in the 1E Podcast, we’ll make sure to get you invloved and have you contribute to the podcast.

You can get the podcast from 1e.com here or on iTunes here

We at 1E are dedicated to bringing you real world scenarios to help solve some of the most challenging problems faced by IT professionals. If you are wrestling with an issue, would like some advice or have a topic you would like to see covered, please feel free to send me an email outlining your issue or idea. If selected for inclusion in the 1E Podcast, we’ll make sure to get you involved and have you contribute to the podcast.

In this episode, Andy Dominey (OpsMgr Practice Lead and MVP) and I chat with Kevin Muldoon and Barry Shilmover from the OpsMgr Product team about 2 key new features of OpsMgr R2. Kevin discusses the new Interop Connector, how it works and the software it supports (Tivoli, OVO etc.). Whilst Barry gives us a background on the new Cross Platform capabilities within OpsMgr R2 and how you can now extend your monitoring into the Linux/Unix world.

You can download the podcast here (under Systems Management at the bottom of the page), or alternatively, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes by clicking here.

We at 1E are dedicated to bringing you real world scenarios to help solve some of the most challenging problems faced by IT professionals. If you are wrestling with an issue or would like some advice, please feel free to send me an email outlining you issue or idea. If selected for inclusion in the 1E Podcast, we’ll make sure to get you invloved and have you contribute to the podcast.

The strength of any great monitoring solution is not just in its ability to report issues and the current state of servers and applications (there are a plethora of good monitoring tools that can do this), but in its ability to resolve problems automatically when they arise. Through the creation of automated tasks, administrators can simplify day to day management of servers and applications to allow support teams to concentrate on only the most critical of issues. This is what distinguishes a GREAT monitoring solution from a good one.

Here at 1E, we love the System Center suite of products. You only need whisper the words ‘Config Manager’ or ‘VMM’ in the ear of a 1E consultant to get their pupils dilated and their heart racing. Be careful with ‘Ops Manager’ though, as this can send one particular 1E consultant into a lather.

Why? I hear you ask… Simply put, Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 (or OpsMgr for short) is the premiere enterprise class monitoring solution, and it just got better with the release of OpsMgr R2. But does OpsMgr meet my criteria for a ‘great’ monitoring solution? You bet!

The true power behind OpsMgr lies within the workflow engine that underpins everything. Each Discovery, Rule and Monitor is a workflow comprised of individual modules that are executed sequentially in order to identify the current status, overall health or relationships between objects. It is this workflow engine that empowers administrators to configure automated tasks. In OpsMgr, these are Diagnostic and Recovery Tasks and they are available for all Monitor workflows.

To better understand the difference between a Rule and a Monitor consider the following:

A rule collects data from various sources (PerfMon, Event Logs, SNMP etc) and stores that data in the Operations Database and the DataWarehouse database. This data is then made available for reporting purposes. Rules (generally speaking) do not generate alerts.

Similarly, a Monitor also collects data but for a different purpose. A monitor uses its captured data to determine the health state of an object. The monitor will change the state of an object (Healthy, Warning or Critical) in response to the information being gathered and the configuration of the monitor (i.e. CPU utilisation threshold), and may in turn generate an alert or run diagnostic and recovery tasks.

For more information, please see this TechNet article (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977440.aspx)

With this in mind, let’s take a look at an example of what you can do with Diagnostic and Recovery Tasks.

In this example, we will look at the Health Service Heartbeat Failure monitor.

Open the Operations Console and navigate to the Authoring window, expand Management Pack Objects and select Monitors. Change the Scope to Health Service Watcher (Agent) and then expand Entity Health and Availability.

Click to enlarge

Now select Health Service Heartbeat Failure, right click and select Properties and then navigate to the Diagnostic and Recovery tab.

Click to enlarge

What we can see here are the Diagnostic Tasks (top) and the Recovery Tasks (bottom). From an execution perspective, if the monitor triggers a state change it will automatically launch all Diagnostic tasks that are configured for the specific Health State. It will then launch any recovery tasks, again based on the Health State, passing any parameters from the completed Diagnostic task.

Within the confines of our example;

1. The agent managed server does not reply to the heartbeat, causing the Health Service Heartbeat Failure monitor to trigger a state change from Healthy to Critical, indicating that either;

a. the OpsMgr Health Service service is in a stopped state or

b. the agent managed server is uncontactable

2. The Health Service Heartbeat Failure monitor executes the Ping Computer on Heartbeat Failure and Check If Health Service Is Running Diagnostic tasks.

3. Once complete, the next step will be to execute any Recovery tasks that are configured to run automatically for the specified health state. In our example there a 2 which relate to the state of the object, however as you can see there are additional Recovery tasks that can be enabled and configured to run. These include restarting the Health Service, enabling and restarting the Health Service and reinstalling the Health Service.

This has been a brief, high level overview of the Diagnostic and Recovery tasks capabilities of OpsMgr. In future blog posts I will cover this topic in greater detail, first examining the underlying xml code and configuration of Recovery and Diagnostic tasks, and then how to create Diagnostic and Recovery tasks to automate system management.

This program gives influencers – user group leads, MVPs, popular bloggers and others recognised as influential in the community around System Center – the technical training content, people connections, and general guidance they need to enhance their credibility and impact in the community.

The content as it stands at the moment seems a little disjointed as there doesn’t seem to be a central repository (there’s a downloads section along with a SharePoint section). However, this program promises to be a very useful tool for those in the SC community who are looking to extend their capabilities and personal networks.

To join, sing in to connect and select it from the Connection Directory. Alternatively, send an email to scnetsup@microsoft.com.

1E helps businesses to reduce the cost of owning Windows computers. Our expertise in providing leading-edge automation solutions which significantly reduce complexity, management costs and power consumption, has earned us the trust and confidence of over 12 million users across 1,000 businesses in 42 countries worldwide

www.1e.com

Tao states on his blog…

In SCOM console, when you put a computer into maintenance mode, it does not put associated objects into maintenance mode. So for example, if you want to take a computer offline and put it in maintenance mode in SCOM console, it does not put associated Agent Heartbeat watcher object into maintenance mode, therefore a SCOM alert is still going to be generated.

Tao also points out that…

In order to run this GUI form, you must firstly:

* Install Powershell and set execution policy to unrestricted

* Install SCOM command console

* Place this powershell script and ini file to a same folder.

* the ID you are running it under need to have approriate rights in SCOM

This is a handy tool and one that should be added to any OpsMgr Admin’s arsenal. Visit Tao’s Blog for more details and to download the tool.

From MS:

Windows® SideShow™ for Windows Mobile® is an application for Windows Mobile 5 and Windows Mobile 6 Pocket PCs and Smartphones that allows you to use your Windows Mobile device as a Bluetooth SideShow-compatible device. This enables you to use your phone as an extra window into your PC. You can both access your computer’s information from your Pocket PC or Smartphone, and control the computer through a gadget interface. While the phone is out of range, or when your computer is off, you can continue to view content sent to the phone previously. This makes it easy to send information to the phone that you’ll need later on.

Here is a YouTube video that shows some of the features etc.

Download the Developer Preview here…

The Fixes and Enhancements section of the Dell website states the following:

Version A00 changes:
- Dell Server and Printer Management Pack (Dell.Connections.001.mp) code was modified with fixes for discovery of Storage Controllers with Server Administrator version 5.5, and a known defect with health of Virtual Disks, where in some scenarios health of Virtual Disks were not shown correctly.
- The executable ‘DellBMCLog.exe’ was modified to include improved error handling.
- The Storage Array Management Pack (Dell.Connections.StorageArray.mp) and the executable ‘dellabb.exe’ was modified to add support for MD Storage Arrays (MD3000/MD3000i), both generation 1 with firmware version 06.xx.xx.xx as well as generation 2 with firmware version 07.xx.xx.xx

Click here to download it.