There was another policy checking the service and restared it if needed, of course we could merge them into one policy. The “Notify by popup” is a “Run program” object with the following settings

• Program execution
• Computer: IP of target machine where to run the program
• Program path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\msg.exe
• Parameters: * /SERVER:NYSRV10 /TIME:120 {Name from “Get All New Alerts”}
• Working folder: C:\

The message on the target machine

…and the updated alert in Operations Manager, by the second policy.

That means that you need to install the Operations Manager Console first, as Opalis use files from that to connect to Operations Manager. You also need to reboot your Opalis machine before you can successfully connect.

get-agent | select Displayname,InstallTime,InstalledBy,Version | export-csv -notype c:\agents.csv

That will give you a CSV file, C:\agents.csv. Open the file with Excel, select all the data, click the “text to columns” button and choose comma delimeter. That will convert your data into nice columns.

…and there you have your list in Excel with nice columns

I will deliver two sessions at Best of MMS 2010 in Stockholm/Sweden. My first session “Operations Manager 2007 R2 tips and trix” is a level 400 session with a lot of good tips from the field. I will show a number of custom solutions and solutions to problems I often see at customers. I guess there will also be some Opalis demos in this session too… 

My second session is toghether with Microsoft Sweden, “Reduce support costs and improve business alignment with System Center Service Manager”, it´s a level 200 session, in which you will learn how Service Manager lowers the cost of incident and problem resolution and provides a streamlined approach to change management by providing integrated knowledge of configuration items and the ability to easily assess the current health state of IT services by seamlessly integrating the activities between Service Manager, System Center Operations Manager and System Center Configuration manager.

There will be a number of System Center experts speaking at the event, for example my Operations Manager MVP colleagues Björn Axell, Gordon McKenna and Simon Skinner so bring all your Operations Manager questions!

 See you in Stockholm! More info about the event here

Patrik have created a form templates for the Authoring Tool that contains already implemented controls like the “Related Items” control and “History” controls. You can download his template here. In this example I will add the history tab to the form created earlier in this post.

1. Download the package and extract all files
2. Copy CustomFormTemplates.dll to a suitable folder, in my case C:\MPs
3. Open the Authoring tool and your MP where you want to create a form . In my case I will use the MP and form created in the earlier post. I will replace the form with a new form
4. In the Management Pack Explorer, right-click Forms and select Add Custom
5. In the base class window, select Contoso.Projector as base class, click OK
6. In the Add custom form window, input
   1. Internal name: contoso.projector.formB
   2. Assembly: CustomFormTemplates.dll
   3. Type: HistoryOnlyTemplate
   4. Click Create
7. Add date pickers, labels and text fields as in the earlier post
8. When done, delete your old form, in my case contoso.projector.form
9. Seal your management pack according to my earlier post
10. Save your management pack and close the Authoring Tool
11. Start power shell as administrator, goto your MP folder
12. Make sure you have the selaed MP (.mp) and the CustomFormTemplates.dll in the same folder
13. We need to create a MP bundle as we have a custom dll (Patrik form templates) that needs to be inserted into Service Manager.
    Run, new-mpbundle.ps1 Contoso.Projector.Library.mp Contoso.Projector.Library (new-mpbundle.ps1 is included in the package from Patrik)
14. Verify that you now have a new .mpb file in your folder
15. Import the new MPB file into Service Manager
16. Change something on a project and then open the CI again and look at the history tab