A lot of people who are monitoring their Windows Servers with OpsMgr has probably read in the blog of Kevin Holman, that in the latest version of the Windows Server OS MP changes are made to the Logical Disk free space monitors both for Windows Server 2003 and 2008 disks. The changes that are made is that in the alert description of the Logical Disk Free space monitors no values are shown of percentage free space and MB free space anymore.

As Kevin describes in his blog a lot of customers would like to have these values back in the alert description. Kevin also describes another approach on how to fix this issue with the help of the blog of Daniele Grandini. Personally I prefer the fix of Daniele by adding diagnostics to the existing sealed Logical Disk Free space monitors, which will add the actual disk free space in MB and % to the Health explorer.

Unfortunate by testing the sample MP of Daniele Grandini, I ran into a problem. In the Health Explorer the output of the diagnostic task was displaying a WMI error: "Unable to open WMI Namespace 'winmgmts:\\\root\cimv2'. Check to see if the WMI service is enabled and running, and ensure this WMI namespace exists.."

I found out that in the sample MP of Daniele a visual basic script was added to collect the values of percentage free space and MB free space. In this visual basic script there are two lines that are not correct. To fix this you have to do the following or download the New Sample MP.

1. Open the XML file "QND.Windows.Server.2008.LDisk.xml" in notepad.
2. Search for the line: " TargetComputer = oArgs(0)"
3. Replace the line with: "TargetComputer = WScript.Arguments.Item(0)"
4. Search for the line: "P_DiskLabel = oArgs(1)"
5. Replace the line with: "P_DiskLabel  = WScript.Arguments.Item(1)"
6. Save the XML file
7. Import the new Sample MP in Operations Manager. (Note: if you already imported the original Sample MP, you have to increase the version of the MP to 6.0.6278.6)

If you test it again the diagnostic task will run correctly with the correct values of percentage free space and MB free space as shown in the screenshot.

Thanks to Kevin and Daniele for their research.
Best Regards
Tom

Working at a customer this week I had to implement a service map within SCSM based on a Distibuted Application created with SCOM 2007. This did not work at first! For some reason the objects would not sync. I checked the allow list in SCSM and added all the DA classes that are not in the list by default. Still no succes, the Service map remained empty after sync.

So after some time trying to figure out what was going wrong I discovered that when you configure the connector you first need to deselect all management packs and press OK. So you actually configure it back to not synchronize anytime. Then go back into the connector, hit the refresh button and now select all management packs and press OK again. For some reason, after this procedure the connector started syncing, This step has to be done everytime you add new managment packs to the connector!

Synchronizing started working for me now and my service map was filled with the correct objects. I tested this behaviour in my demo environment and the problem was the same. I checked this with SCSM 2010 SP1 and CU 3 installed. I cannot tell if this problem also exists in other versions of the product.

Today I had my first expierence with the updated Windows Server OS Management Pack which can be downloaded at the following location: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=9296

Of course I read the manual before importing it into a test Operations Manager Management Group. But I have to admit I oversaw one important comment in the guide.

So I imported all the .MP files and as normal practice I monitored the errors in the console and in the eventlog soon after the import finished. The error that appeared in the eventlog after a couple of minutes was the following:

Log Name:      Operations Manager

Source:        Health Service

Modules Date:          24-11-2011 10:23:46

Event ID:      31565

Task Category: Data Warehouse

Level:         Error

Keywords:      Classic

User:          N/A

Computer:      <RMS FQDN>

Description: Failed to deploy Data Warehouse component. The operation will be retried. Exception 'DeploymentException': Failed to perform Data Warehouse component deployment operation: Install; Component: Script, Id: '3a49a530-26a2-c525-35fe-69df5898f150', Management Pack Version-dependent Id: 'dbf18271-9643-32ff-4849-00d79d9e2a9d'; Target: Database, Server name: '<DB ServerName>', Database name: 'OperationsManagerDW'. Batch ordinal: 1; Exception: Incorrect syntax near the keyword 'with'. If this statement is a common table expression or an xmlnamespaces clause, the previous statement must be terminated with a semicolon. Incorrect syntax near ','. Incorrect syntax near ','. Incorrect syntax near ','. Incorrect syntax near ','. Incorrect syntax near the keyword 'ELSE'.

One or more workflows were affected by this. 

Workflow name: Microsoft.SystemCenter.DataWarehouse.Deployment.Component Instance name: <RMS FQDN> Instance ID: {E5EEDF23-3C06-B007-D7F1-E6D2BA8659DF} Management group: <SCOM Management Group Name> Event Xml: <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">   <System>     <Provider Name="Health Service Modules" />     <EventID Qualifiers="49152">31565</EventID>     <Level>2</Level>     <Task>3</Task>     <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>     <TimeCreated SystemTime="2011-11-24T09:23:46.000000000Z" />     <EventRecordID>18630414</EventRecordID>     <Channel>Operations Manager</Channel>     <Computer><SCOM RMS FQDN></Computer>     <Security />   </System>   <EventData>     <Data><Management Group Name></Data>     <Data>Microsoft.SystemCenter.DataWarehouse.Deployment.Component</Data>     <Data><SCOM RMS FQDN></Data>     <Data>{E5EEDF23-3C06-B007-D7F1-E6D2BA8659DF}</Data>     <Data>DeploymentException</Data>     <Data>Failed to perform Data Warehouse component deployment operation: Install; Component: Script, Id: '3a49a530-26a2-c525-35fe-69df5898f150', Management Pack Version-dependent Id: 'dbf18271-9643-32ff-4849-00d79d9e2a9d'; Target: Database, Server name: 'SCOM DB Server Name', Database name: 'OperationsManagerDW'. Batch ordinal: 1; Exception: Incorrect syntax near the keyword 'with'. If this statement is a common table expression or an xmlnamespaces clause, the previous statement must be terminated with a semicolon. Incorrect syntax near ','. Incorrect syntax near ','. Incorrect syntax near ','. Incorrect syntax near ','. Incorrect syntax near the keyword 'ELSE'.</Data>   </EventData> </Event>

After 10 minutes the same error appeared in the Operations Manager EventLog and this keeps repeating every ten minutes. So I decided to pick up the guide again and once again it became clear why this step cannot be forgotten! The new management pack contains a new .MP called Microsoft.Windows.Server.Reports.mp

In the MP guide it is clearly stated that this MP is not compatible with SQL 2005 and only with SQL 2008. This means the new reports are not available if you are running the OpsMgr Databases on SQL 2005. The solution is of course simple, just delete te reports MP or move your databases to a SQL 2008 installation.

After deleting the MP the error events in the Operations Manager log are not reoccuring and the correlated Alert in the OpsMgr Console closed itself.

You can download and give it a try here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=27841

Adwait Joshi wrote a good blog about the new features compared with beta 2: http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2011/10/27/system-center-2012-configuration-manager-release-candidate-is-here.aspx

and off course Wally Mead will talk about it tomorrow at the SCUG Meeting at Amstelveen!

One of the features I personally liked in SCCM 2007 was the DCM (Desired Configuration Management) feature. This gave you as an admin the ability to build all kinds of configuration items which were evaluated against the systems of choice. So you could check for example how many machines were compliant with respect to specific software versions. So it was very easy to report on application version management. You could also write your own scripts, and use those scripts to check all kinds of stuff on your machines and report on their compliancy. So pretty powerful!

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