System Center 2012: PowerShell Cmdlets

Microsoft has released documents containing ALL the Cmdlets available for ALL the System Center 2012 components.

Since System Center 2012 is PowerShell driven, there is a HUGE collection of cmdlets:

Changing the OperationsManagerACS Database Retention Period

Operations Manager grooms, or removes, data from its various databases at regular configurable intervals. For the Operations database, this is done in the Operations console. For the ACS database, these settings are configured during setup with a default value of 14 days. This means that every day, all database partitions (and their data) that are older than 14 days are dropped or deleted. Because of the volume of data that ACS can accumulate, 14 days is not an unreasonable setting. However, some companies might need to retain data for longer periods and they must have already planned for that when making the sizing and performance calculations for their environment. You can change the retention period for the ACS data by following this procedure.

SCOM 2012: Enable agent proxy on all agents

I kept on getting this alert on the SCOM 2012 console:
"Agent proxy not enabled"

Below is the resolution for enabling the agent proxy for all agents and setting the default value to enable agent proxy for all newly installed agents.

Turn on agent proxy for all agents where it is disabled:
get-SCOMagent | where {$_.ProxyingEnabled -match "False"} | Enable-SCOMAgentProxy

Turn on agent proxy as a default setting for all new agents to be deployed, never to have to mess with this again:
add-pssnapin "Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.Client";
new-managementGroupConnection -ConnectionString:scomserver.domain.com;
set-location "OperationsManagerMonitoring::";
Set-DefaultSetting -Name HealthService\ProxyingEnabled -Value True

Thanks to Kevin Holman for his post on this.

Hope that this post was helpful.

Windows Server 2012, SQL Server and System Center 2012

When designing a good System Center 2012 environments it’s obvious that SQL Server is key to the overall success of your design, implementation and functionality of it all.
When a bad decision is made or a good design decision is poorly executed, it has a direct negative impact on the overall experience and functionality of your System Center 2012 environment.

Microsoft System Center - Free eBooks

Microsoft Press has been releasing Microsoft System Center free ebooks this year in waves. All of these eBooks are being hosted from the Microsoft Virtual Academy website.

Download in all formats (PDF, Mobi and ePub).

Introducing Microsoft System Center 2012 R2

• Download the PDF file
• Download the EPUB file
• Download the Mobi for Kindle file

To Do List: Adding Additional SCOM Management Server To An Existing Management Group

When a SCOM Management Group (MG) is already in place for some time and an additional SCOM Management Server is added to it later on, their are quite a few steps one must do in order to get it working properly. When forgetting one of those steps it might result in a SCOM MG showing erratic behaviour.

Mind you, all these steps take place AFTER the new SCOM Management Server is installed. Also good to know, this To Do List is based on System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1.

01. Antivirus exclusions
Please make sure the new SCOM Management Server uses the same AV policy as the other SCOM Management Server. So the correct folders and processes are excluded from AV scans. Check KB975931 for more information.

SCOM Reports Not Updated & Not Working

Issue
Bumped into an issue where the latest MPs contained Reports which weren’t uploaded at all to SCOM Reporting. Took me a while to crack it but finally I found KB2771934 which was the starting point of the solution to this issue.

Causes & Fixes
As it turned out there were multiple causes which joint forces in order to frustrate the SCOM Reporting process in many kind of ways.

1. The object Data Warehouse Synchronization Server was a goner. KB2771934 helped me in fixing that.
2. The SCOM Data Warehouse Read account was lacking proper permissions. TechNet has some good articles about it, like Account Information for Operations Manager and the Online Deployment Guide. Based on that information I set the permissions as required.
3. There were also multiple time outs where the Management Servers couldn’t write their information to the Data Warehouse database or read from it (important for SCOM in order to know what Reports to upload to the SSRS instance). After some tweaking and tuning the SQL server got a bit more space to operate which reduced these errors enormously.

Afterwards the Reports were updated again: the old outdated Reports removed since their related MPs weren’t present anymore and the newest Reports, based on the MPs which were imported lately, showed up in SCOM Reporting.

Hope that this post was helpful.

Register ASP.net 4.0 With IIS Windows Server 2012

Issue
Bumped into an issue where ASP.net 4.0 wasn’t registered with IIS running on Windows Server 2012. Before that Server OS the solution was an easy one: simply follow this posting of mine and all is fine again.
HOWEVER, Windows Server 2012 and later don’t support that anymore and the ONLY fix is removing IIS and reinstalling it with ASP.net 4.0. But that’s way too much and takes too much time, effort and resources.

Quick Fix
Thanks to Google I found two articles about how to fix this WITHOUT removing and reinstalling IIS:

1. Open IIS Manager and select the webserver and select Modules (found under header IIS).
2. Double click on it, so you open Modules, and remove the module ServiceModel.
3. Go back to IIS Manager, select the webserver again in IIS, and select Handler Mappings (found under header IIS).
4. Remove the handler svc-Integrated.
5. Restart IIS by using an elevated cmd prompt and issue this command: IISRESET <enter>.
6. When IIS is running again add WCF by going to "Turn Windows Features On and Off" and enable .NET Framework 4.5 Features > WCF Services > HTTP Activation.
7. Restart IIS by using an elevated cmd prompt and issue this command: IISRESET <enter>.

Now the SCOM 2012 Web Console will be fully functional WITHOUT reinstalling IIS.

A big word of thanks to the authors of these two articles I used for this solution:

1. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15278027/cant-register-net-4-0-in-iis-on-windows-8
2. http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/613812/Solve-IIS-8-Error-Could-not-load-type-System-Servi

Hope that this post was helpful.

Fixing the SCOM 2012 SP1 UR#3 Web Console. Error: Debugging resource strings are unavailable.

Issue
This one is a bit strange. Before UR#3 for SCOM 2012 SP1 the Web Console worked just fine. I applied UR#3 for SCOM 2012 SP1 Web Console, ran through all the required procedures but the Web Console was broken.

And:

New FREE MP Authoring Tool For IT Pros

For a day now a new FREE MP Authoring tool for IT Pros is available for download. This will be the tool recommended by Microsoft since they partnered with Silect in order to build this new tool.
Basically it means it will replace VAT (Visio Authoring Tool) which won’t be recommended any more nor supported. I don’t regret it since VAT wasn't a good tool at all. It forced me to use other MP authoring tooling, so I am happy about the demise of it.

The new tool looks very promising and resembles the previous SCOM 2007 MP Authoring tool somewhat. You can download the tool from here (after some registration). Again, the tool is FREE so don’t let this screen fool you after you have filled out the form:

Simply click on No Thanks. This will bring you back to the main screen where you started. But now you've received an e-mail message containing the download link for the tool.

Download it, install it and use it. Already Stefan Stranger and Kevin Holman blogged about these in more detail so no need to repeat myself:

Stefan Stranger:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_stranger/archive/2014/01/13/new-tool-for-mp-authoring.aspx
Kevin Holman:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2014/01/13/new-mp-authoring-tool-released-mp-author.aspx

Hope that this post was helpful.

System Center 2012: Turn On Microsoft Update Or Not?

With System Center 2012 a new functionality came to be. That is, a functionality which already exists for a long time for other Windows/Microsoft based technologies, the Microsoft Update functionality.

During installation one is asked whether or not to let Microsoft Update cover the related System Center 2012 component as well. For myself I always set this option to OFF.

Retrieving Data from the SCOM Database - (OperationsManagerDW)

Centralised monitoring tools are very useful for collecting data from a large server estate; however when you have got the data it’s nice to be able to do something with it. Often these tools have an interface which is both slow and convoluted – it takes a long time to work out how to get a raw data export, as long again to run it and when you finally get it out it’s not in the format you wanted it. And if you want to automate analysis a csv export isn’t what you want anyway – you want access to the raw data in a database.

A lot of tools (particularly open source tools) seem to use an rrdtool database which isn’t designed for anything except graphing. You can get the data out but SCOM (or Microsoft System Centre) is one tool that is better in this sense in that it has a fairly nice SQL server database underneath it. We looked into the database structure for connecting our OCM analysis pack to it (see Intelligent Automated Alerting in Practice).  I thought I’d share a few tips on how the performance data is stored and how to retrieve it.