Cumulative Update 5 for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (KB 2495674)

The CU5 SE team is very happy to announce the release of Cumulative Update 5 for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (KB link will be active shortly). CU5 is a continuation of our commitment to service our in-market products in timely, high-quality manner.

Cumulative Update 5 for Operations Manager 2007 R2 resolves the following issues:

• Restart of non-Operations Manager services when the agent is updated.
• Updated ACS reports.
• TCP Port Probe incorrectly reports negative ping latency.
• MissingEvent Manual Reset Monitor does not work as expected.
• Drill-through fails due to rsParameterTypeMismatch in the EnterpriseManagementChartControl.
• ACS – Event log message is truncated or corrupted in SCDW.
• UI hang caused by SDK locking.
• ACS Filter fails for certain wildcard queries.
• Edit Schedule button is disabled with SQL Server 2008 R2.
• Web console is timing out while opening the left navigation tree.
• Scheduled Reports view for Windows Server 2003 and SQL SRS 2005 SP3 CU9 – returns System.IndexOutOfRangeException: Index was outside the bounds of the array.
• Signed MPs cannot be imported when new attributes are added to existing classes.

 

Cross Platform Cumulative Update 5 for Operations Manager 2007 R2 resolves the following issues:

• Performance data for LVM managed partitions is not available
• Process monitor does not retain name if run via symbolic link
• AIX with large number of processes crashes with bad alloc

 

Cross Platform Cumulative Update 5 for Operations Manager 2007 R2 adds the following features:

• Support for Red Hat 6

For additional information about this release, please see the CU5 KB article

Free tool for Monitoring of Hyper-V

Looking for a better Hyper-V monitoring solution other than Task Manager?

After a little searching I found a tool developed by Tim Mangan called HyperV_Mon

The HyperV_Mon tool helps you to understand Performance characteristics in a Hyper-V world.

HyperV_Mon monitors physical, logical, and virtual performance information that is available when running virtual machines under Microsoft Hyper-V. The graphical display is organized to help easily understand the CPU performaces being experienced. Detailed text displays also help highlight other performance issues such as memory, paging, and I/O. Additional information is provided about virtualization “overhead” that is detected within the VMs.

You can download the install and supporting documentation here.

Updated Dell MP for OpsMgr v4.1, A00

 

<—- click to download

 

Besides a fix for the Discovery issue (doah!) it contains these improvements:

• Support for OpenManage events up to version 6.4
• Management of physical and teamed Network Interfaces for Broadcom and Intel NICs
• Enriched monitoring of Network Interfaces on OpenManage Server Administrator versions greater than and equal to 6.2.0.1, along with basic monitoring on OMSA versions below 6.2.0.1
• Performance monitoring of Network Interfaces on OpenManage Server Administrator versions greater than 6.2.0.1
• Discovery of vflash card and monitoring of iDRAC network interfaces
• Realistic icons for the various components in Diagram View for the Dell Monolithic and Modular Systems
• Representation of Server Modules and Chassis Slots Summary under Dell Chassis Management Controllers and Dell Modular Chassis Remote Access Controllers
• Correlation of the Server Modules under Dell Chassis Management Controllers/Dell Modular Chassis Remote Access Controllers with Dell Windows Servers on System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2

Thanks for the update Dell – I know some folks that have been waiting for this!

Download: Dell Server Management Pack Suite

Service Manager 2010 SP1 Product Documentation

Looking for product documentation around Service Manager 2010 SP1? The links below will provide all the product documentation you should need…

Administrators Guide
Authoring Guide
Deployment Guide
Disaster Recovery Guide
Job Aids
Operations Guide
Planning Guide
Upgrade to SP1

System Center Service Manager 2010 SP1 provides an integrated platform for automating and adapting your organization’s IT service management best practices, such as those found in Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). It provides built-in processes for incident and problem resolution, change control, and asset lifecycle management.

System Center Service Manager 2010 Product Documentation Archive contains archived versions of the documentation for the original release of System Center Service Manager 2010. For the latest documentation, supporting the latest release, go here.

OpsMgr 2007 Tools and Utilities

SCOM MP Catalog

Active Directory Integration Script: Enables you to extract a list of computer names from your custom SQL Server database, based on a specified query parameter, and add them to an Active Directory security group. You can assign the members of the security group to a specific Management Server.
Understanding how Active Directory integration feature works in OpsMgr 2007

Operations Manager Cleanup Tool: A command-line utility that enables you to remove all of the components of Operations Manager from a local computer in cases where the typical method through the Add/Remove Programs application in the Control Panel has failed.

A few other useful tools and utilities:
Action Account Tool: A Windows PowerShell script that allows you to set the action account on multiple computers.
Effective Configuration Viewer: A tool that displays the set of rules and monitors that are running on a computer, distributed application, or any other managed entity after any configured overrides have been applied.
AEM Validation: A command line utility that will allow you to perform end-to-end validation of Agent-less Exception Monitoring to verify that AEM is properly configured and operational.

System Center Operations Manager

Plethora of Windows Server 2008 Posters

Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Component Poster

Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Components Poster

Windows Server 2008 R2: Hyper-V Component Architecture Poster

Remote Desktop Services Component Architecture Poster

Operations Manager 2007 R2 Management Pack

Feature Summary
The Operations Manager 2007 R2 Management Packs includes the following features:

• Local and Remote Monitoring of an Agent’s Health
  • Operations Manager agents monitor themselves for events and performance indicators that signal an issue with the agent’s health.
  • Management servers also maintain an external perspective of an agent’s health via the Health Service Watcher.
  • The ‘Agent Health State’ view provides a side-by-side dashboard of both perspectives on the agent.
• Optional, Automatic Agent Remediation Capabilities
  • If the Health Service Watcher determines that an agent is unhealthy, a series of diagnostics and recoveries can be enabled to further diagnose the problem and event take actions to attempt to fix the problem (e.g. Ping the server to see if it is completely offline, start a stopped agent, trigger a reinstall, etc.). Refer to the management pack guide for more details.
  • Agents are monitoring their own process to ensure that memory utilization is not sustained at unacceptable levels. If this condition is detected then the agent will automatically restart itself to force the freeing up of memory.
• Detection of Problems and Misconfigurations with Run As Accounts and Profiles
  • Checks are run on a regular basis to detect if any of the management group’s “Windows” type Run As Accounts have credentials which are about to expire. Alerts will be raised, and where possible this will be done in advance of the credentials expiring to avoid outages.
  • Alerts will be raised if any errors are encountered during the distribution of Run As Accounts.
• Monitoring of problems with Running Workflows in Management Packs
  • Numerous rules are provided to detect if workflows within management packs are failing. Examples of workflows include discoveries, rules, monitors, etc. Failures can range from bad configurations on the workflows themselves, script failures, permissions problems, etc.
• Reports for identify drivers of data volumes in your environment
  • Introduced with the 6.1.7599.0 release of the management pack, these reports provide insight into the overall data volumes being processed by your environments. These reports can be used for gaining an understanding of current usage levels in order to establish a baseline and for identifying opportunities for tuning.
• Operational Data Reporting
  • Introduced in the 6.1.7599.0 release of the management pack, these reports gather information and sends reports to Microsoft on a weekly basis (if you select to send reports). Microsoft uses these reports to improve the quality of its management packs and Operations Manager 2007. Participation in the program is strictly voluntary. For more information, see the Management Pack Guide

Download: Operations Manager 2007 R2 Management Pack

Kevin Holman’s review of the install.