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Microsoft is busy catching up with some documentation after the release of Operations Manager 2007 R2:
Microsoft has released supported for running Operations Manager 2007 SP1 and Operations Manager 2007 R2 on Win7 and W2008 R2. This also includes an operating system management pack for Windows Server 2008 R2.
There are a few workarounds to note on the page, e.g. for when servers are upgraded from Windows 2003 x64 or when push installations fail due to COM issues.
I’m stressing the word _helper_ on this because there are no guarantees. Sizing is completely site dependent. What’s right in one site might be totally wrong in another similarly sized site. It all depends on activity, failures, configuration, etc.
“The OpsMgr 2007 R2 Sizing Helper is an interactive document designed to assist you with planning & sizing deployments of Operations Manager 2007 R2. It helps you plan the correct amount of infrastructure needed for a new OpsMgr R2 deployment, removing the uncertainties in making IT hardware purchases and optimizes cost. A typical recommendation will include minimum hardware specification for each server role, topology diagram and storage requirement”.
The best advice I can give is to build an OpsMgr 2007 R2 test lab and get it right. Then do a limited and planned pilot on production systems based on documents and guides you’ve developed on the test lab. Then try to use the heuristic data you’ve gathered to size your production systems in addition to using the above.
I’ve seen this one myself a few times. An x64 Operations Manager 2007 agent can consume 100% of the CPU on machine running MSXML 6.0. Install 968967 on the agent machine to resolve the issue.
I had a problem this week when I was trying to run some reports in OpsMgr 2007 R2. Some reports were failing … either issues to do with “LT_Report”, missing parameters or internal failures. If I played with the time settings for the report criteria then sometimes I’d get a result but not the one I was chasing. The SQL Reporting database is running on SQL 2005. I upgraded it to SP3 and that fixed the issue – I’m a bit hesitant about installing SQL service packs.
I really like the reporting feature of SCOM. The reports in MOM 2005 always struck be as a bolt on. Information and reports are an integral component of OpsMgr 2007 and 2007 R2. You can navigate to just about any item in the monitoring view of the Operations Console and get a context sensitive link to the report console in the Tasks pane.
Reports can have hyperlinks to view further material. For example, this week I’ve run availability reports on Hyper-V virtual machines, physical hosts, operating system installations and web sites. A client asked about the uptime of a website on a server. Bang: out came a report showing 100% up time.
You can build on this with Distribute Application modelling and the SLA (Service Level Agreement) module. This allows you to get the ITIL view of your services (not windows services but services provided to users/customers). You can then run reports on the SLA compliance. How sweet is that?
OpsMgr 2007 R2 has the ability to integrate with other systems management products, i.e. forward alerts and continue to synchronise data related to the alert while the alert remains in the system.
This release of the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Connectors includes the following Connectors:
Twice last week at our user group event on OCS 2007 R2, I was asked about monitoring the network using Operations Manager 2007. Well, you can.
Check out the Jalasoft offering. I had a demo of it last year at TechEd and it looked very nice. They do something similar to the HP blade management pack. You install an application either on your management server or on a dedicate machine depending on the load. This communicates with your routers, switches and firewalls. The app then feeds all the data into OpsMgr so you can monitor your network infrastructure health and performance using OpsMgr.
There’s another trick you can do on _small_ networks. System Center Essentials includes a basic SNMP based management pack for network monitoring. It assumes there’s only a small number of network devices so it’s not efficient CPU-wise when that number grows. You can pull out that MP and install it on OpsMgr. That’s totally unsupported by MS.
Then you can do what I’m doing with OpsMgr 2007 R2 (cross platform extensions). Our network guys set up a SLES VM on our Hyper-V cluster. They’re used to the traditional tools like SYSLOG and Cactii. That’s fine with me; I’m not a network guy (I just request changes and want to know things are OK at a high level) so I want them to work efficiently. We’re doing a few things to extend this with OpsMgr 2007 R2:
I’ve bundled all of those and the SLES box into a group. The network guys are delegated rights to that group and are getting notifications for alerts from entities in the group. That gives us network monitoring via OpsMgr 2007 R2 with minimum spend.
The source code for Microsoft’s System Center Operations Manager Cross Platform Extensions providers has been published. The agents weren’t. This will probably allow open source developers to extend the work that Microsoft has done. Already there are licensed products available to extend the X-Plat agents.
There is a “guide” on management pack authoring in the OpsMgr 2007 R2 documentation. Unfortunately it is more of the same regurgitated theoretical stuff that we’ve been seeing on this subject since 2007 was released. It’s the polar opposite of what is sorely needed to complete the release of Operations Manager 2007. Without a practical real world (the many lab environment blog posts are far from real world) examples then people cannot figure out the complexity of writing a customised management pack for bespoke applications on their networks.
We don’t want object oriented theory lessons. Give us practical examples of how to go from A (discovery) to G (monitoring things like event logs, text logs, SNMP traps, WMI queries, etc) to Z (raising/closing alerts and sending notifications). Without practical real world examples we have nothing to go on. Please give us a step-by-step for using that Authoring Console. Instead of measuring it’s success based on downloads, why not measure its success based on ongoing usage?
I deployed my first Operations Manager 2007 R2 agent on to a SUSE Enterprise virtual machine running on Hyper-V today. It took a little work because the documentation downloads from MS don’t include this and the online documentation appears to be quite outdated – the dialogs are nothing like what they describe. I guess the guides are from the beta release.
I did a mass import of the latest management packs and included the Linux ones I’ll need in the future.
I set up an account to manage the server. This was a admin account. If your Linux boxes are grouped to share usernames and passwords then you can use this approach for this account:
The account was then assigned to the Action and Privileged RunAs Profiles. You could use two accounts if you wanted. I didn’t.
Next up was the Linux box. Ensure that its firewall allows the follow TCP ports in:
TCP 5723 will be used for the agent to talk to the OpsMgr server. WinRM is used as a part of this so you need to configure it on the OpsMgr 2007 R2 managment server:
winrm set winrm/config/client/auth @{Basic="true"}
Finally you need to ensure that the DNS records for the Linux box are set up:
The agent deployment would not work without the latter for me. I found no documentation of this. However, I did do a Linux discovery based on IP address. I need to test doing manual installations and a name based discovery. I’ve a funny feeling the PTR was only required to get the name of the machine for the trust generation in the absence of a name in the discovery process.
I kicked off the discovery via SSH. That took a wee while and eventually I saw the process … discovery, installation, cross certification via SSH. Finally I linked the computer object (you could use a group) to the 2 RunAs profiles. The agent was now monitoring correctly.
I went into Authoring and set up a log monitor. That was easy. Look for a string in the log you want to search for and another to test for (they might be the same). Enter the name of the computer to scan, the log file (and location) to scan and the alert string to check for. You can also enter a test string that is already in file. You can test the monitor whenever you want with this. I saved it and allowed time for it to download to the agent. To test I logged into the Linux machine via SSH (putty) and typed:
echo this is a failure >> test.log
I did this at /. Test.log was appended with “this is a failure”. My search string was “fail”. Moments later an alert was raised and notifications were sent. Perfect.
I quickly followed this up with a monitor to check the health of the MySQL daemon. I can’t test that because it’s in production but it was easy. The template wizard scanned the designated Linux box for “services” and allowed me to pick the mysqld process.
First impressions? This looks good. It’s pretty well integrated and seems scalable in administration compared to the pre-OpsMgr 2007 R2 attempt at cross platform extensions. The only downside is that “Computers” is different to “Linux Servers”. Computers has all the Windows servers and only the Windows servers. I’ll need to remember to check on both views for a health check.