Simple Custom Management Packs for SCOM

The past few days I have had to create a few lightweight custom management packs for our ops teams.  They gave me the requirements (pretty light) and I set out to build the management packs for them.  One MP is for OCS that will discovery OCS installation, then defines two roles (Communicator Web Access and Front End role).  I have a few state views and the health roles up to the application level.  Initial discovery is a bit lame, as it is only looking for RTC key and Version (which any place OCS is installed will get detected – I plan on fixing this). 

We use FaceTime Vantage for IM auditing (this was called ImAuditor).  The ops teams want to monitor the dedicated IMAuditor servers as well as the Front End Process Controller service on select OCS front ends.  So I have created my FaceTime Vantage management pack.  Again, lightweight, but you can extend or modify it as you see fit.

Finally we needed to monitor OCS Group Chat.  The requirements for this was just to monitor the two services on Group Chat.  We did get a document from MSFT about counters to evaluate, but I haven’t included those in the MP yet. 

All discoveries are set to run once a day.  Health rolls up from the lowest application component classes (for service monitoring only) to the application level.  I put the sealed versions in one zip file and the unsealed in another.

If you use these, then great, if you don’t then I can’t blame ya!    Remember if you do decide to use these management packs, make sure you test them before putting any of them into production.  The primary reason for releasing these was just to give some first time authors a sense of how you might go about creating a basic application management pack.  You can download them from my sky drive here.

Enjoy and happy authoring!

Views for each of the management packs if imported:

SNMP Traps and MobileMonitor for BlackBerry

So I documented about this in the past, but had to revisit it and noticed I might have made a few mistakes <g>.  I will document this again and post it shortly.

HP StorageWorks MP 2.3 for MOM 2005

In the past a lot of people wondered about this management pack.  How good it was for monitoring their HP EVA storage solution.

We have been dealing with this MP since it initially came out.  HP released the 2.3 version of this MP several months ago and it has fixed a lot of the issues we were seeing.

One issue we discovered with an older version of the MP is that a patch to WEBES on our EVA management servers broke feeds to our MOM servers with the WEBES Listener service.  I believe this is a known issue and well documented.

Now we are running the right version of WEBES on our EVA servers and the feeds are working as expected.  In the past you would have to add the "ghost" machines to a computer group, but that is no longer the case, as HP has enabled the MP to now display the server the alert was forwarded from.  In the past you would see the alert on your Management server and the details would show you which EVA system was broken, but now the host and domain appear in the console (remember the management server is raising these alerts via the XML feed similar to SNMP Traps that might be fed in to MOM).

So now when you import this MP you just have to add the management servers that have the webes listener service in to the WEBES listener computer group.  If you are not using SNMP to get alerts from the various hardware components on the EVA’s, then I suggest you disable this RG as it might cause noise.

Outside of the default rules we have added a few performance collection and threshold rules.  I have also added a rule that looks for the DESTA service crashing, if it does crash, then it raises an alert and tries to restart.  Ensure this rule is running against the management server hosting the listener service.

There are a few other customizations I have done per the request of our EVA engineers and the MP has been doing very well.  The next step is testing it with a new version of WEBES that will be rolled out to our EVA boxes as well as testing this MP in SCOM.  From what I can tell this maybe a converted MP, so don’t expect many changes in SCOM.  I will document all of this in more detail as I work through the deployment.

If you are having issues with the EVA MP, then let me know and I will do my best to assist you.  From what I have seen over the past year or so, you shouldn’t be having any new issues.  The only issue you might have is if your WEBES service on your EVA’s is not compatible with the listener service on your management server.

Security: Not just for networks

I found out on December 19 that security is not just for networks, but for homes too.  On December 19 my truck was broken into and the crooks used the garage door opener to get into my house.  They stole my work laptop, personal laptop, and other small electronic devices from my house.  They took my wallet and car keys and then left, leaving my garage door open.

 

I was home at the time, but didn’t hear them come in.  My daughter woke me up and asked me why I left the garage door open.  So after all of this I called a few alarm companies and did some research on home security.  I also discovered that my garage door opener (Chamberlin) had a feature for disabling remotes!!!  ARRRG!  I wish I had known this before.  I probably wasn’t paying attention when the installer put it in. 

 

So now the house is more secure and the police were able to recover my truck, but none of my items.  They arrested three people who had warrents.  They were in a house in Fairfield CA.  The police went to the house to serve the warrents and saw my truck outside.

 

None of my items (besides the truck) have been recovered.  I will have to testify against the men for the theft of my truck.  I can’t wait to do that.

 

So if you park outside and have a garage door opener in your car, then you may want to figure out how you can secure your house incase someone breaks in to your car and has access to your garage door opener.

 

Lesson learned here, but the hard way.

 

Happy holidays!