Ops Mgr SP1 RC0 is here. You can download it from MS Connect, here. This version will support upgrade to the final version of SP1. The final version will be public around mid febuari 2008.

Some of the news in SP1 RC0

• Improved performance when working in the console
• Improved advanced search in the console
• Support for both SNMP v1 and SNMP v2 network devices
• Support for exporting diagrams to Visio VDX format
• Support for copy/paste from the alert details pane (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V)
• RMS encryption key backup wizard
• Support to copy views between management packs
• Both the repeatcount and override summary function are improved
• Scripts can noe be used for diagnostic tasks
• Enable to publish a report to for example sharepoint services web sites
• ACS is now supported on the Management and Gateway server roles
• ACS forwarding can be enable with command shell script

Read more about What’s New in Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1, here

If you want to discuss the service pack please join the SP1 news group at microsoft.public.opsmgr.sp1 at news.microsoft.com. I recommend JetBrains Omea Readers as news group reader, you can download it here. More information about Microsoft news groups here.

If you have tried edit Company Knowledge you have most probable recived a popup telling you “Visual Studio Tools For Office runtime is not installed“. To cure this you can download Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition Runtime here. 

After that you will recive a popup telling you “Failed to launch Microsoft Word. Please make sure Microsoft Word is installed. Here is the error message: {0}“. To cure that, install Microsoft Word. Then it should be possible for you to edit company knowledge. I needed a reboot both after Visual Studio tools setup and after Word setup.

As a template in your company knowledge articles I suggest that you follow a common structure, for example summary, configuration, cause, resolutions and additional information. Make sure you press SAVE in Word first and then switch over to the Company Knowledge box and press SAVE there too before you close Word.

In the “Windows Client Operating System Management Pack Guide for Operations Manager 2007” you can read about monitoring Business Critical Clients. But even if you import this management pack, and add your business critical workstation to the “All Business Critical Windows Critical” group you will not get an alert when the workstation are unreachable for example disconnected from the network.

If you look at the “Computer Not Reachable” monitor you will see a default override that disable it for Computer Clients. The same thing for the “Health Service Heartbeat Failure” monitor. If you then add your workstation to the for example All Business Critical Windows Client/All Business Critical Windows XP Clients” group and then create a override that enable “Generates Alert” for the two monitors for this group, you will get an alert if they are unreachable.

Today I saw a question about reponse on a logfile monitor, as there is no “Diagnostic and recovery” tab on a log file monitor. A solution to this is to use a rule instead. If you create a Alert Generating Rules/Event Based/Generic Text Log(Alert) rule, then right-click it and choose properties, you can add a response on the Configuration tab. You can for example add to run a command or a script.

Boris Yanushpolsky a member of the System Center Operations team at Microsoft has upload a new version of MPViewer to his blog. This tool can help you show the following contents of a management pack: Rules, Monitors, Views, Tasks, Console Tasks, and Reports. Download this tool here.

I couple of days ago I posted about ACS and failover. As I wrote there is no failover back to the first ACS collector. If your ACS forwarder failover to a second ACS collector your will have your ACS forwarder data in two databases, as there is a one-to-one relationship between ACS databases and ACS collectors. That will lead to a lot of extra work for you.

I have wrote a simple script to show you one way to get the ACS forwarder to return to the first ACS collector in the list. This script gets the ACS collector settings from the registry, then it test if it can ping the first ACS collector, and if it can, it will restart the ACS forwarder service. That will make the ACS forwarder return to the first ACS collector. If it cant ping the server, it will wait some time and then try again.

Even if your ACS forwarder will start send data to the second ACS collector as soon as your first ACS collector is back online your ACS forwarder will return and you will hopefully not have that much data in the second database.

You can setup a rule to trigger on event ID 4368 from Source AdtAgent in the Application log. The description should also include the name of your second ACS collector. Make the rule run the script as a response.

You can download the script here