I have put together some questions and answers that have been discuss in System Center Operations Manager 2007 forums

Q: Which versions of SNMP are supported by Operations Manager 2007?
A: Today only version 2c are supported.

Q: What can I use to scale ACS?
A: there is a Operations Manager 2007 Performance and Scalability White Paper at MS Connect that you can download, it includes a chapter about ACS. The System Center Capacity Planner 2007 can also help you size your environment. Supported Machines Per Audit Collection Collector are 100 Domain controllers, 1000 Member Server or 10000 Workstations.

Q: How can I change the refresh time in the console?
A: There is no supported way to change it today.

Q: Is SQL 2005 SP2 supported by Operations Manager 2007?
A: Yes it is, another comments is that if you run X64 OS also SQL has to be X64

Q: Is SQL db mirroirng supported by Operations Manager 2007?
A: No it is not

Q: How do I create a task that are visable on all alerts?
A: If you create the task under for example Agent the task will be shown for all agent managed computers

Q: What does error id 0x80070005 mean?
A: That is the “access denied” error ID, verify that you are running with a suitable account

Q: When I install the reporting component the setup fail with “check log for value 3”, what does this mean?
A: This is a known issue. It would happen if your reporting servers is in a disjointed namespace or if your Active Directory query timeout. There will be a fix for this soon.

Q: Is there a way to see which MPs are assigned to a given computer object?
A: Take a look at this link

In this guide I will show how-to connect two management groups. A reason to run multiple management groups could be geography dividing or dividing based on your organization. In this example I have one management group in the Contoso domain and another in the Fabrikam domain. Contoso.local and Fabrikam.local is not in the same forest, but there is a two-way trust between them. 

A management group connector is a one-way connection. Operators in the top level management group, in this example Contoso, can access alerts and run response task in Fabrikam management groups in a single view. They dont need to run multiple consoles to see alerts from both management groups. Follow these steps to setup a connector where Contoso will be the management group to recive alerts from Fabrikam:

1. At the Contoso Ops Mgr Server – From the Start Menu, select the Operations System Center Operations Console
2. In the Navigation pane (left), Click Administration
3. In the Administration pane, right-click Connected Management Groups and choose Add Management Group
4. In the Add Management Group window, input the name of the other management group and the FQDN of the other root management server. Also choose a account to use, this account need permissions to connect to the other root management server and also permissions to update info in the other operations database. Then Click Add
5. In the Navigation pane (left), Click Monitoring
6. In the Monitoring pane, click Show Connected Alerts. You will have to input credentials once every console session, you could also grant you account permissions to the other management group. Please note that if you not click Show Connected Alerts, you will not see alerts from connected management groups.
7. In this view you can now see alerts both from the local management group and the connected management group

I have seen some questions about synchronize two management groups, so you can see all alerts from both management groups in both management groups console. If you want to do that, you will have to create a additional connector in the other management server.

 

This is a short step by step guide how to make a dynamic group based on computers in a OU (Organizational Unit). 

1. From the Start Menu, select the Operations System Center Operations Console
2. In the Navigation pane (left), Click Authoring
3. In the Authoring pane, right-click Groups and choose New Group
4. In the Create Group Wizard – General Properties window, input a suitable name and choose a management pack, you should have one explicit management packs for all your overrides. Click Next
5. In the Create Group Wizard – Explicit Members window, choose any machines that will always be a member of this group even if they don’t fulfill the dynamic member formula. Click Next
6. In the Create Group Wizard – Dynamic Members window, click Create/Edit rules…
7. In the Create Group Wizard – Query Builder, choose Windows Computer from the drop-down menu and then click Add. Choose Organizational Unit in the property menu, equals in the operator menu and input a OU name in the Value field, for example OU=London,OU=Contoso,DC=contoso,DC=Local . Click OK
8. In the Create Group Wizard – Dynamic Members window, the formula will now look like this 
   ( Object is Windows Computer AND  ( Organizational Unit Equals OU=London,OU=Contoso,DC=Contoso,DC=Local ) )
9. In the Create Group Wizard – Dynamic Members window, click Next
10. In the Create Group Wizard – Subgroups window, choose subgroups to add to this group. Click Next
11. In the Create Group Wizard – Excluded Members, choose any machines that will not be a member of this group even if they don’t fulfill the dynamic member formula. Click Create

Please note that this will only include machines in the OU specified, it you want to include computers from another OU you can simple add a “OR” expression.

The Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 Management Pack provides proactive monitoring of your Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 environment. It includes detection and monitoring of all SMS 2003 servers and dependent services, alert driven state, topology diagram, performance and backlog monitoring and configuration, performance and availability reports.

File Name: Microsoft System Management Server 2003 System Center Operations Manager 2007 MP.msi
Version: 2007
Date Published: 5/9/2007
Language: English

Download here

Two new knowledge base articles:

• The Run As Account that you create in System Center Operations Manager 2007 or in System Center Essentials 2007 does not run a task successfully, here
• The Operations Manager Audit Collection Service does not start and Event ID 4668 is logged after you install Audit Collection Server from a read-only source, here

Also, note that you can subscribe to new KB articles at this webpage.

I have been in the sandbox today, playing with failover. In this scenario I had four machine,

• COOM01, root management server with SQL
• COOM02, management server
• CODC01, domain controller and DNS, also agent managed from operations manager
• COXP01, XP workstation for operations manager administrators 

I deployed a agent to the domain controller (CODC01) from COOM01 and assign CODC01 that management server. During the agent deployment you can setup failover for a agent. If you use Active Directory integrated settings for your agents you can specify failover settings there. With default settings the agent will automatically failover to any other management server in the management group.

When a Operations Manager administrator started the console at his workstation, COXP01, he connect to COOM01 as it is the root management server (RMS). 

I then turned off the root management server. On the agent, CODC01, I first got an event ID 21006 that told me that the agent could not connect to CODC01, and that I should check the network. Two minutes later I got an event ID 21015 that told me that the agent will resume communication when COOM01 are back online. I also got, two minutes after the first event, an event telling me that the agent had successfully failed over to COOM02.

 

 

I then turned the root management server back on and after a couple of minutes the agent generated a event ID 21019

 

Everything was back to normal. When I opened the console I saw no alerts at all, at least no new ones. This was most likely because the root management server was down and could not update the database. Then I shut down the root management server again, this time with the console open at COXP01. I got the event at CODC01 telling me that the management server COOM01 was not available and that the agent had failed over to COOM02. I did not got any error messages in the console at COXP01, but if I tried to change the view in the console I did get a error.  If I try to open the console at COOM02 I get this

 

 

After that the root management server went down the administrator at the workstation could not see anything in his console. The SDK service is responsible for authentication to the database, the SDK service are running on the root management server. This mean that if there is no root management server running the SDK service nothing can access the database. 

If you look in the management pack catalog you will now find management packs for Operations Manager 2007 too. You will find the catalog here. Most of the management packs are unfortunately still only available through evaluation software package and the volume licensing webpage.

Pete Zerger (MOM MVP) and I collaborated on a guide about Active Directory integration in System Center Operations Manager 2007.

Operations Manager 2007 integration with Active Directory is designed to minimize cost and effort in Ops Mgr  agent administration, by allowing an administrator to publish agent configuration details in the Active Directory domain partition related to desired Operations Manager 2007 Management Group membership, as well as desired primary and failover management server settings.

Read the guide here