The high level themes of the System Center Operations Manger 2007 Service Pack 1 are:

• Address critical customer initiated issues including roll-up of all hotfixes
• Make the product easier to support
• Make the product easier to use
• Make the product easier to deploy

In the beginning of November there will be a public Release Candidate  (RC). This release (RC) is fully upgradable to the final RTM version of the Service Pack. The reasons the product team is making the RC of the Service Pack generally available are:

• To give customers evaluating OpsMgr 2007 advance access to the SP to aid in their evaluation and proof of concept deployments
• To give current OpsMgr 2007 customers that may have hotfixes in their environment an opportunity to test the Service Pack and provide feedback on it
• Ultimately to make sure that the final RTM release of the Service Pack is of the highest possible quality.

The final RTM version of the Service Pack is targeted for mid-February 2008. This version of the Service Pack will be able to be applied to upgrade the originally released RTM version of Operations Manager 2007 and it will also upgrade Operations Manager 2007 running the Release Candidate of SP1

 

 

SC Ops Mgr 2007 Resource Kit – Operations Manager Inventory

A command-line utility that captures the configuration of your Operations Manager 2007 Management Servers and stores it in a .cab file that can be sent to Microsoft support to assist in problem analysis.

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A command-line utility that enables you to remove any or all of the components of Operations Manager from a local computer in cases where the normal method of uninstallation has failed.

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A command line utility that will allow you to perform end-to-end validation of Agent-less Exception Monitoring to verify that AEM is properly configured and operational.

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A sample script that enables you to extract a list of computer names from your custom SQL Server database and add them to an Active Directory security group. The security group can then be referenced in the Agent Assignment and Failover Wizard to automate agent assignments to Management Servers.

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A Management Pack that enables you to identify generic errors sent by Windows Error Reporting (WER) clients to Management Servers that are AEM-enabled. Without this mapping function these errors appear in Operations Manager as “unknown application” and “unknown version”.

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A tool that displays the set of rules and monitors that are running on a computer, distributed application, or any other managed entity after any configured overrides have been applied.

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A PowerShell script that allows you to set the action account on groups of computers.

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A Vista Gadget that enables you to view the active alerts and health states for a specified set of objects from a computer running Windows Vista.

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This weekend I have been thinker with Exchange 2007 and Ops Mgr 2007. I am running Exchange 2007 on a Windows 2003 ENT X64 machine. I converted the Exchange 2007 MP for MOM 2005 and imported into Ops Mgr 2007, no problems so far. I followed this post about the converting MP. 

After reading about the management pack at this page,  I ran the following scripts

1. new-testCasConnectivityUser.ps1 (create the test mailbox and setup user for tests)
2. set-owaVirtualDirectory (modify the properties of Outlook Web Access virtual directories )
3. After this I still received a lot of URL check errors, so I re-run new-testCasConnectivityUser.ps1 and also verified that the account was unlocked in Active Directory. This the result was different and the error stopped.

If you receive alerts that the agent cant check exchange URLs, for example the OWA site, make sure you can connect to the site with Internet Explorer. I had some problems because the IIS was in the wrong “mode”. I did reconfigure that with this KB. 

There were some other alert telling me to configure external owa URL and so on. The alert description and knowledgebase includes information how to fix them.

My plan was first to run the Exchange Management Pack Configuration Wizard to setup test mailboxes and so on, as we did with MOM 2005 and Exchange 2003. I downloaded the wizard and started it, and I got this:

“The CDOEXM library is not installed on this computer. The application depends on this library to run. To install CDOEXM you need to install the Exchange System Manager. Setup cancelled.”

Unfortunately Exchange 2003 does not support X64 OS, so it is not possible to install the Exchange 2003 System Manager on this Exchange 2007 machine. My next plan was to install the MP wizard and the Exchange 2003 tools on my XP X86 machine. The installation was no problem, but when I started the MP wizard, no exchange servers was found. I found a interesting KB about create all the settings manually, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924152 

This weekend I also tried setup notification with the new Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. No real problem was found, I configurated everything with default values. It was even easier then deploying Live Communicator Server 2005.

Summary: You can convert the Exchange 2007 MP for MOM 2005 and make it work in your Ops Mgr 2007 environment. But you will lose some functions, for example there will be no Exchange reports. If you have a urgent need for the Exchange 2007 MP you can convert the MOM 2005 version, else I recommend you to wait. The Exchange 2007 MP for Ops Mgr 2007 is planned to Q3 2007.  

You can use the Database Configuration Wizard (dbcreatewizard.exe) to install multiple Operations Manager databases on a single instance of SQL Server. But before you can start it you need three files from a Ops Mgr installation.

• C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\ Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.UI.ConsoleFramework.dll
• C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\ Microsoft.MOM.UI.Common.dll
• C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\ Microsoft.MOM.UI.Wrappers.dll

As many have question, how can I have the files if I not even have installed the database? You can copy these files from a machine that has Operations Manger 2007 Console installed, so install only the console on a machine that you will use as a management workstation later.

If you have a rule or monitor that are incorrect configure you can end up with a event like the one below.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Health Service Modules
Event Category: None
Event ID: 10102
Description:
In PerfDataSource, could not resolve counter incorrectObject, incorrectCount, incorrectInstance. Module will be unloaded.
One or more workflows were affected by this.
Workflow name: MomUIGeneratedRulebe73b15420934af6ac89a227094c0ffb
Instance name: DC01
Instance ID: {0367F246-11C3-0AA4-583B-6819AB40434E}
Management group: Contoso


With only the information in the local event it can be difficult for you to troubleshoot it. To get more information about, in this case about a rule, you can first run a SQL quert in your OperationsManager database

SELECT * FROM Rules WHERE RuleName = ‘MomUIGeneratedRulebe73b15420934af6ac89a227094c0ffb’

You will then get a lot of information about the rule, copy the string in the RuleID field, and then start Command Shell. In Command Shell run the Get-Rule command, for example Get-Rule -Id FA5958CE-1EC8-A723-541A-5A1B2D48B67D

This command will return all information about this rule, for example DisplayName. You can then easy find the rule in the Operations Console and modify it.

I saw a question about generating a report every hour for “the hour before”, that you can´t do out of the box. But I have a idea, why dont generate a report every half hour, for the entire day? That would give you a updated report every half hour, including the hour before, or as far as the data warehouse has processed data.

In this example I will use a generic performance report

1. Open the Ops Mgr 2007 Console
2. Go to Reporting (Ctrl+3)
3. Expand Reporting and click Microsoft Generic Report Library
4. Click Performance and then choose Schedule from the action menu
5. The Subscribe to a Report wizard starts, at the Delivery page, input a description and choose a delivery method. In this example I will choose Windows File Share as delivery method. That will store my report to a file share on the network.
   – File name, for example CPU Graph Today.pdf
   – Path, for example \\servername\share
   – Render Format, choose output format, PDF is nice
   – Write mode, choose Overwrite
   – User name and Password, inpute information about a account to use to write the report, then click Next
6. At the Subscription Schedule page, choose how often the report should be generated. I will choose Hourly and every 0 hours and 30 minutes. Choose when the subscription should start and then click Next
7. At the Report Parameters page, choose
   – Data Aggregation: Hourly
   – From: Today 00:00
   – To: 23:59
   – Histogram: Daily by hours
   – 3D Chart: True
8. At the Report Parameters page, click Change…
9. In the Settings box, click New Chart
10. In the Settings box. input chart title, for example CPU Graph Today
11. In the Settings box, click New Series
12. In the Settings box, click Add Objects, in the Add Object box, choose a item of the Windows Operating System type, click Add and then OK
13. In the Settings box, click Browse
14. In the Select Rule box, search for “processor” and choose “Processor % Processor Time Total” from available items, click OK
15. In the Settings box, click OK
16. At the Report Parameters page, click Finish
17. Back in the console reporting part, click Scheduled Reports to see your new subscription.

As you can see in the report, the report are about one hour behind. If you generate the report at 23:30 the report will include data to 22:30. If you need for example performance data quicker than that, you can create a new performance view.

In this post I will show how to create a monitor that check for one event and if there is not another event within a specified timeframe minute from the first event, the monitor will generate an alert. I will reset the monitor with time, 3 minutes, but you can choose to reset the monitor with for example a third log event.

1. Start the console
2. Go to Authoring, expand management pack objects and click Monitors
3. Click Scope and select Windows Computer, click OK
4. Expand Windows Computers, expand Entity Health, right-click Availability and choose to create a new unit monitor
5. Create a unit monitor – Monitor Type: Choose Windows Events/Correlated Missing Event Detection/Timer Reset, click Next
6. Create a unit monitor – General: Input a name and a description, click Next
7. Create a unit monitor – Missing Event Log Name A: Input the event log name of the first event, click Next
8. Create a unit monitor – Build Missing Event Log Expression for A: Input event ID and event source, in my example it will be event id 1000 and event source EventCreate. Click Next
9. Create a unit monitor - Missing Event Log Name B: Input the event log name of the second event, click Next
10. Create a unit monitor – Build Missing Event Log Expression for B: Input event ID and event source, in my example it will be event id 2000 and event source EventCreate. Click Next
11. Create a unit monitor – Configure Correlation:
Correlation interval: 1 Minutes
Correlation Details: The last occurrence of A with the configured occurrence of B in chronological order
Click Next
12. Create a unit monitor – Auto Reset Timer: In my example I will specify 3 minutes, click Next
13. Create a unit monitor – Configure Health: Click Next
14. Create a unit monitor – Configure Alerts: Check “Generate alerts for this monitor” and then click Create

If I only get a event ID 2000 and no event ID 1000 there will be a alert. If I get event ID 2000 and event ID 1000 within 1 minute there will be no alert. You can change the correlation configuration in any way you want, for example in which order the events must be generated.