OK, I know a few post ago I wrote about our initial installation of OpsMgr. Well since then things have ramped up and we are almost ready to fully cut over to OpsMgr from MOM. Almost!

There are 2 hurdles I am yet to overcome and they are (to a certain extent) show stoppers.

Hurdle 1:

We (sadly) use a product called CA UniCenter ServiceDesk (or USD) as our help desk application. Now, I’ve used a fair few SD apps in my time and this is by far the clumsiest of them all. In fairness to CA however, we are a few releases behind and aren’t planning an upgrade any time soon, and this is part of my issue.

Unfortunately we have no means by which to have alerts generated by OpsMgr inserted into USD. Why, I hear you ask? Well it’s like this…

At present, MOM alerts are emailed to a central mailbox where (through almost magic) the emails are processed by a USD tool and entered into USD. Alerts are assigned against the name of a corresponding CI item (e.g. SERVER1). This works well as MOM uses the NetBIOS name of the server. This doesn’t work with OpsMgr because there is no way of passing the NetBIOS name in an alert, just the FQDN (e.g. SERVER1.DOMAIN.COM.AU). When USD cross references the email with the CMDB, it doesn’t find an entry for the FQDN, just the hostname.

An advisory call to Microsoft just confirmed what I pretty much already knew. No available variables, no X-Path, no access to the NetBIOS name at all.

I am working on a few solutions to this issue and should have it resolved within the next day or 2.

Hurdle 2:

Like most companies, we have a DMZ and therefor servers in said DMZ. Both MOM and OpsMgr use mutual authentication to communicate with servers and ensure the integrity of the traffic. This could be disabled within MOM (assuming you are willing to wear the risks [minimal though they may be]). Microsoft (if their grand wisdom) have enforced mutual authentication within OpsMgr, making it difficult to setup DMZ (let alone cross domain/forest) monitoring. Documentation is sketchy at best, though I was able to find a guide at www.systemcenterforum.org but it is clearly not comprehensive enough (it glosses over some important information around certificates and assumes a certain setup).

On the whole however, OpsMgr is a big improvement over MOM. It’s object oriented monitoring means more control and greater granularity on alerts.