Creating seed discovery with Silect MP Author

FYI: This is now a built in feature in MPAuthor SP4

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As a System Center Operations Manager Engineer (or what ever your title is) you are probably some what familiar with developing your own management packs, and if not, you most likely will end up in a situation where a colleague or a client want you to monitor his or hers custom developed application, or your environment requires you to do some MP development. There are many solutions out there to do the dirty work for you, and they are all good in their own ways. You can use the Authoring functions in your OpsMgr console (basic stuff available), Developers can use Visual Studio etc. My personal favorite is MP Author from Silect. This software is GUI oriented and will help you create management packs for any SW you want. Although, it has it limitations, it is also possible to edit the XML created through it’s wizard.

One of the things that is not possible to do in MP Author’s GUI is to create a seed class/discovery. If you’re not familiar with this concept there are many good articles available on the internet, but in short terms you create a class and discovery to find the smallest bit of your application (ie. registry key) and then target your other discoveries to the seed class.

In my case i had to develop a management pack that was print server related. I created a new target and discovery in MPAutor which would run against Windows Computer class. This discovery runs a WMI query for Print and Document services.

SELECT Name FROM Win32_ServerFeature WHERE ID=261

261 is the ID for Print and Document Services role installed (in this case) on all servers we would like to monitor.

Now, our seed discovery is created, and it is time to create discovery for your application it self.

I create a new registry target to find the “rest” of my application, base class now is Windows Local Application

 

 

You could think our full discovery is finished now, but as you can see, our second discovery is targeted Windows Computer class.

I wan’t this to target all computers that are running this application, “AdatumDemoApp.Seed” time for some .XML editing. Click “Edit XML” for your full discovery, and change this line:

Target="Windows!Microsoft.Windows.Computer

to

Target="AdatumDemoApp.Seed"

Wich is the name of the target you created (not the discovery name)
Look your discovery is now targeted your seed class. Time to import in your demo environment and see what’s not working 🙂