Operations Manager Yesterday, Microsoft release a new management pack for Active Directory. This is the first release to this MP for over a year, not a lot has changed, but for non US citizens, using another locale settings, there is a change to “AD_OP_Master_Response.vbs” script which failed for German locale settings, and caused issues due to date format on other languages.
MP catalog is not updated, but you can download the latest release here
Operations Manager Recently, the OpsMgr team released a delayed Rollup 7 to Operations Manager. Some times, working with SCOM you’re forced to perform some sort of change management how strict this is depends on your company policy. After installing the latest rollup to OpsMgr you will have to patch your agents as well. I do not know how you do this in your company, but it’s either completely manual process (i hope not), through the console for remote managed agents (if your firewall allows it) or with another tool. WSUS, SCCM etc. No matter how you do it, you will wan’t to check which agent where patched or more exactly, the agent that need attention.
So the other day, i wrote a small script to provide me this information. I know, SCOM has it’s own agent version info view, but i needed to be able to work on it “offline” at that point. This is a simple script which takes input for management server, rollup info and what type of export you want, html or csv.
Lets call this a “fast publish”, so please let me know if you experience any problems.
I have attached a few screenshots to illustrate. And the script, GetSCOMPatchlist
Operations Manager After five years, Pete Zerger and Oskar Landman has released a new, and improved version of their SCOM Health Check Reports. The release was a few weeks ago, but since i did not notice it was updated, maybe you missed it as well.
Some key updates that i have found.
If you are not familiar to these reports i strongly urge you to check them out. It will give you new (and much-needed) insights on your SCOM environment.
Already using version 2? just install version 3. First time users will have to configure a new data source on your reporting server.
for all your coders, the source code is also available on GitHub
Operations Manager Just a short post, and a reminder to my self.
From time to time, you will need to clone a virtual machine, and put this clone in to production. So you Clone, you sysprep, change all it’s configuration and add it back to the domain. So what happens to the OpsMgr agent part of all this?
For the first, you will have a new agent/computer available in your console with the new name. But this agent won’t be able to download any configuration. This is shown by this alert: “Health Service unable to process new configuration” and the agent state for this computer will be shown as critical
If you experience this, you could uninstall the agent, delete it from the console and install everything again, but. What you also could do,
MMC > Certificates > Local Computer > Operations Manager – The certificate is issued to the old computer (yes of course, it is a clone). So instead of uninstall, just stop the healthservice.exe (Microsoft Monitoring Agent), delete the certificate and start the agent back up. And everything should be working as expected.
And next time, uninstall the agent on the clone 🙂
Operations Manager One of the most annoying things whit System Center Operations Manager is the lack of maintenance mode scheduling built in. (You have some options, with Orchestrator, SCCM etc). One thing I personally struggle with, is to maintenance mode every server during Windows Update since we use WSUS for patching and not SCCM. but that’s not the purpose of this post.
In this post, i will guide you through how you can schedule maintenance mode for a (SCOM) group of computers with tools you already have installed – Powershell and Task Scheduler. In our environment we have some Citrix XenApp servers which are scheduled to reboot every night. Since they boot at the exact same time they are easier to maintenance mode than all other servers that boot randomly during updates.
This post will guide you through the following.
Under Authoring in your console, create a new group. I have called mine “Citrix Servers” stored in a custom management pack. Under dynamic members you will have to create a formula to populate the group members. Her you can choose the solution that fit your needs, but I will be using OU, as our Citrix servers are stored in their own OU.
( Object is Windows Computer AND ( Organizational Unit Matches wildcard *OU=Citrix* ) AND True )
If you have some servers in the same OU, that you do not want included in this group. You can add them in the “exculded members” pane. Once your group is created, allow for the “System Center Minute” to complete, and if everything is OK, you should see your servers.
TIP: Finding a coumputers OU. Check its Properties under Windows Computers
Since were not allowed to start maintenance mode ahead in time, we have to rely on our favorite automation tool called Powershell. In the OpsMgr module there is a Cmdlet, Start-ScomMaintenanceMode, which have a time variable.
Start-MaintenanceMode on technet
param($ManagementServer, $GroupName, $Minutes, $Reason, $Comment)
Import-Module OperationsManager #Import the opsmgr module
New-SCOMManagementGroupConnection -ComputerName $ManagementServer #connect to MS
$SCOMGroup = Get-SCOMGroup | where {$_.DisplayName -like "$GroupName"} #Get the scom group to maintenance
$Time = ((Get-Date)).AddMinutes(($Minutes)) #get time and date. Add minutes. This will be how many minutes object is in maintenance mode
Start-SCOMMaintenanceMode -Instance $SCOMGroup -EndTime $Time -Reason "$Reason" -Comment $Comment-Command "z:\path\script.ps1 - ManagementServer 'ManagementServerFQDN' -GroupName 'GroupDisplayName' -Minutes 'XX' -Reason 'YourReason' -Comment 'YourCommentHere' ; exit $LASTEXITCODE"
Start by creating a new Scheduled task. Under triggers, set the time and all other configuration you will need.
Under ‘actions’ browse to system32 and add powershell as the program to run. (C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe) Under arguments, edit to fit your needs and paste in the above.
Reasons accepted
— PlannedOther
— UnplannedOther
— PlannedHardwareMaintenance
— UnplannedHardwareMaintenance
— PlannedHardwareInstallation
— UnplannedHardwareInstallation
— PlannedOperatingSystemReconfiguration
— UnplannedOperatingSystemReconfiguration
— PlannedApplicationMaintenance
— ApplicationInstallation
— ApplicationUnresponsive
— ApplicationUnstable
— SecurityIssue
— LossOfNetworkConnectivity
Event Viewer
Operations Console
Hope this get you on your way to schedule maintenance mode. When I decide to use SCCM to do our patching, or we come up with another idea, I will let you know.
As always – complete this in your test environment to confirm it’s working.
PS: Operations Manager 2016 will have scheduling built in.