With Short Message Service (SMS) you can easy send messages (max 160 characters) to mobile phones. Messages can be textual (alphanumeric) or binary. These are the four steps you setup notification with SMS:

1. Configure a GSM modem 
2. Configure SMS notification channel
3. Configure notification recipients
4. Configure notification subscription

A GSM modem can be any normal mobile phone, as long as your RMS server founds it as a modem in the Operating Systems. I tried this with a ordinary Sony Ericsson mobile phone, connected to the RMS through a USB cable. Simple connect the phone and install suitable drivers. When planning this, make sure there are drivers for your platform, for example I couldn’t found any X64 drivers for my phone. All notification are sent from the RMS. Of course you could build a script that RMS triggers with command notification that send SMS from another machine. A tool that might be useful then is Microsoft SMS Sender. 

To configure a SMS notification channel you simple click “Enable short message services notifications”, under Administration/Settings/Notification and the Short Message Service tab, in the console.

Create a notification recipient under Administration/Notifications/Recipients. Add a notification device that use the short message service channel.

Create a notification subscription and add your new notification recipient to it. One thing that you might want to modify is the SMS format. Check the “Use custom SMS format” on the Formats page, and then modify the subject line, in the subscription properties wizard. 

Plan your SMS notification careful so you don’t send out hundreds of SMS to all mobile phones. When configure your notification recipients with SMS device you can configure schedule, one idea can be that the SMS device is only available during non-office hours. During office hours you can most probable receive notification with e-mail.

Happy SMSing!

There is a couple of different theories posted in forums about alert aging and notification subscriptions. I will try to explain how alert aging works.

During configuration of a new subcriptions you can configure alert aging notification option. You will then get a notification if an alert that meets all other subscription criteria remains in any alert resolution state checked on the alert criteria page for longer than X minutes. For example, if you select NEW under alert criteria and input 10 minutes on the alert aging page you will get a notification if an alert remains in criteria NEW for 10 minutes.

Please note that there will be ONE notification sent to you, not two or three or once every X minute, only one notification, after X minutes.

For example if you have a team of operators watching the console and you want to make sure them don´t miss an alert, so you configure a subscription for second line engineers with alert aging. If your operators dont do anything (for example change resolution state) on the alert for X minutes, you want to send it direct to second line. These second line engineers will get only one notification, it is there for very important that you plan your alert flow. For example don´t send notification e-mails to a personal mailbox, send it to a function or role, which is always supervised.

If you want to escalate your alerts to multiple levels you will have to create multiple notification subscriptions. For example first one after 10 minutes and then a second subscription that will send notification to 3rd line if no one does anything with an alert within 30 minutes.

 

 

Pete and I updated our guide on configuration of notification in Ops Mgr 2007. The updated version includes steps for configuration of self-service notification as review of enhancements in the notification engine. You can download the new version here

A short post about one of the AD MP Reports:

According to the detaljs for the AD role holders report in the Active Directory management pack you should choose the “Active Directory Domain Controller Computer Role” as object type. Unfortunately this object dont work. Instead you should click “Add Group” and add the “Active Directory Forest” object type.

Yesterday I needed a Biztalk 2004 management pack for Ops Mgr 2007. The only Biztalk managamange pack available in the System Center Operations Manager 2007 catalog is for Biztalk 2006. I converted the MOM 2005 Biztalk 2004 MP to Ops Mgr 2007 format, according to Petes guide. But, when I tried to import the management pack into Ops Mgr 2007 I recived a error saying “XSD verification failed for management pack”. I then downloaded XML Notepad 2007 and took a look at the XML file. The NAME field included a lot of spaces, I removed them and wrote Biztalk2004 in the NAME field instead. After that there was no problem importing the Biztalk 2004 management pack into Ops Mgr 2007.

After you have implement Audit Collection Services in your environment you must start monitor the collector. There is a number of performance counters that can help you with this:

• Connected Clients
• Database Queue % Full
• Database Queue Backoff Threshold in %
• Database Queue Disconnect Threshold in %
• Database Queue Length
• DB Loader Event Inserts/sec
• DB Loader Principal Inserts/sec
• DB Loader String Inserts/sec
• DB Principal Cache Hit %
• DB Request Queue Length
• DB String Cache Hit %
• Event time in collector in milliseconds
• Incoming Events/sec
• Interface Audit Insertions/sec
• Interface Queue Length
• Registered Queries

If you want to collect this performance data and review it for analyse and plannig, you can first create a collection rule and then a performance view.

1. Start the console, click Authoring
2. Right-click Rules and choose to create a new rule
3. Rule Type: Choose to create a Collection Rules/Performance Based/Windows Performance. Click Next
4. General: Input a rule name, description and choose “Microsoft Audit Collection Services Collector” as rule target, then click next.
5. Performance Counter: input “ACS Collector” as object. If you want to collect for example number of events inserted in the database per second, select “DB Loader Event Inserts/sec” as counter. Select “Include all instances for the selected counter”. Configure the interval and then click Next
6. Optimized Collection: Choose to use optimization or not, click Create

If you want to view the collected data you can create a performance view, and configure it to show data related to “Microsoft Audit Collection Services Collector”.