Are you looking for in-depth technical training on Operations Manager 2007, check out www.systemcentertraining.com. We've just lauched the site with the goal of providing in-depth technical training on System Center technologies to the management community. If you haven't been happy with the quality of training available on MOM 2005 or Ops Mgr 2007, take a look at the course syllabi we have posted, I think that you will be pleasantly surprised.

 

We work with the technologies that we provide training on every day, and we love what we do which makes us very passionate about the subject. If you are attending MMS 2007 this week in San Diego, check out my session on SO32 'Monitoring AD Security with Ops Mgr 2007' on Friday at 10am in room 20b.

 

Have fun, learn Ops Mgr!!

Well, it's officially started and I have attended my first session delivered by Steven Rachui who did an excellent job!!

 

The session SO20 'State based alerts in MOM 2005 - deep dive and troubleshooting' was filled with VERY valuable information for anyone working with MOM 2005. What would have made this session even better was having it delivered at MMS 2005 or 2006.

 

Some of the key points covered in this session included:

1) Alerts are required to generate state. This seems basic but has confused many. The key here is that state is enabled on the alert tab in the properties of an event rule, hence the correlation.

2) State can be generated by both Event and Performance rules.

3) SQL Profiler (a SQL utility) can be used to capture communication from the Data Access Server (DAS) on the MOM 2005 Mgmt server to the SQL database hosting the OnePoint DB. This will allow you to see the insertion statements by searching for sp_ProcessAlert. (Remember that searches in SQL Profiler are case sensitive. Syntax and spelling will get you every time.)

3.1) When looking at your collected data in SQL Profiler, you will notice the command exec dbo.ProcessAlert 'Alert GUID'....3,0 where the second to last value (3 in this example) means that the alert is in an active state. A value of 1 would indicate that it's inactive.

4) The LogViewer tool included in the MOM 2005 Resource kit can be used to view event processing logic but in order to collect the level of detail required, the trace level must be set to level 6 or 9 to be verbose enough to allow you to see the event processing logic. DON'T leave this set to 9 for long, only during short testing and troubleshooting intervals as it will put a heavy load on your MOM server. Performance will degrade significantly.

5) Active state based alerts will never be auto resolved regardless of your Alert resolution settings defined in your Global Settings. This is by design and is a good thing.

6) In order to allow state to reset, you must have duplicate alert suppression enabled in your event rule. You set this on the alert suppression tab.

7) Corrupted queues on the server can prevent state properties from being reset. One cause of this can be on-demand anti-virus monitoring of log files. Define an exception that prevents your antivirus from scanning your queue files. One way to resolve corrupt queues is to delete the queue files and restart the MOM service.

 

One question that came up in the question period was in regard to escalation scripts to allow you to alert on alerts in an active state for a specific period of time. For example, my information store service is in a service unavailable state for more than 15 minutes, I want another alert generated so that another notification is kicked off. This functionality isn't native to MOM 2005 but Brian Wren (MCS in LA) has posted some escalation scripts to allow you to accomplish this. Look for this type of functionality in Ops Mgr 2007.

 

Have fun, learn Ops Mgr!!! Check our our training offerings which cover these in-depth concepts and more at www.systemcentertraining.com or www.infrontconsulting.com/events.htm.

One of the questions that comes up time and time again, is 'how do I learn more about how to create management packs?'. Well, this past week I was told of a new blog by a member of the Ops Mgr team that is dedicated to this very topic. Check out http://www.authormps.com.

 

Learn more about Operations Manager 2007 at the Ops Mgr Bootcamp.... www.infrontconsulting.com/events.htm

Changing the frequency at which a monitor runs

 

Here are the steps to change the time frequency at which the SQL Service Pack Compliance monitor runs in Operations Manager 2007.

1. In the Operations Console, select the Authoring node
2. Expand Management Pack Objects and select Monitors
3. Click the Change Scope link in the top right hand corner.
4. Select clear all.
5. Type sql in the 'Look For' text box.
6. Click Select All and click OK.
7. Expand SQL 2005 DB Engine and expand Entity Health and expand Configuration.
8. Right click on Service Pack Compliance and select Overrides, Override a Monitor, For all objects of type: SQL 2005 DB
9. In the Override Properties place a check box in the override column for the frequency row and change the Override setting to 300 from 43200 and click OK.
10. Now restart the health service on your SQL 2005 servers to force the rule change configuration.

 

Have fun, learn Operations Manager 2007. Check out the Operations Manager Bootcamp at www.infrontconsulting.com/events.htm

Well, I made the move to Office 2007 and for the most part, I like some of the new features and I am much more efficient after finally finding all of the features that I am used to working with. Like most Office users I only probaby use about 10-20% of the features that are they anyway. The one product that I am still quite disappointed with is Outlook and it's also the application that I use most often.

 

I live on email. It's the live-blood of communication for business today and I really wish the Outlook team had incorporated some of the new functionality that I could benefit from. Let me explain what I am looking for...

 

I am a mail junky that keeps everything, primarily because it's client and project related but I also keep notes from when my wife and I first started dating and other personal stuff. However, I don't regularly read this nor do I need instant access to it so what I would really like is the ability to right click a folder and select archive. The folder should become greyed out and the content archive and removed from my pst file. When I do want to access it, I should be able to right click on the greyed out folder and select 'open' or 'restore' and minutes later, it should be available. Hopefully this would also improve performance because right now my experience has been poorer performance with Outlook 2007 than with Outlook 2003. That's disappointing in my opinion. I have also looked for optimization tips for Outlook and haven't found any that have made a difference.

 

I currently have to have two contacts for myself as my primary contact includes notes, birthday's, personal information, etc and when I create a v-card with that contact, all of that is included - that's crazy IMHO!! Creating a v-card should prompt you to select what information you want to be included - this would be as simple as a list with check boxes at the side that allow you to select what you want to include.

 

Integration with Word!! When I write a letter or want to address an envelope, I want to be able to open an outlook contact, or right click on a contact and select send to a Word Envelope as the destination address! Where's the real 'user required' integration? Outlook already defaults to using Word as it's editor but let's leverage this and provide some true integration.

 

Multiple Exchange Accounts!! I really need to be able to have one profile open and access mail hosted on Exchange at my own office, client one's mail server, client 2's mail server. This is a must folks!!! That's a feature that would get me to upgrade. Changing the document format to xml, I have yet to find any personal benefits to that from a day to day usage perspective.

 

I really hope that the next version of Office provides some of this functionality!!