SCOM uses Management Packs for everything it does.

Management Packs (MP) contain predefined monitoring settings that enable agents to monitor a specific service or application in Operations Manager 2007. These predefined settings include discovery information that allows management servers to automatically detect and begin monitoring objects, a knowledge base that contains error and troubleshooting information, alerts, and reports.

In short MP's are a collections of rules and alerts for a specific object. Many MP's are provided from Microsoft for monitoring things like Windows 2008 Server OS, or SQl. Some third party vendors provide management packs as well. For example we have a lot of Dell Servers in our environment, so we installed the dell server MP. This MP monitors physical system health and alerts us when a failure has occurred.

When you First install SCOM it will install around 40 different default MPs. These MP's are a core part of SCOM. You then have the option to install additional MPs. These will be application specific, Windows, SQL, Exchange, ect. It is a best practice that you only install MPs that you need, and install them in a controlled manner, so they can be configured, and overridden in a controlled manner.

In my environment we have 140 MP's installed, with very minimal overrides configured. We have anything with a critical status to generate an email to the System Admins. This creates a large amount of garbage emails to be generated.

The Second big issue we have is Overrides. It is best practice to never place an override in the default management pack (by default it will automatically select to go there.) Instead each management pack should have its own custom build override pack. For example if the MP is "Active Directory Server 2008 (Monitoring)" you would create a custom override MP "Active Directory Server 2008 (Monitoring) - Override." Like most items in your environment, naming conventions are key here. If you dont come up with something that you follow for naming custom MP's you will end up with a mess.

In my environment the overrides we do have defined are all over the place, some are in "Default Management Pack" some "Test" or "Test MP" and very little follow any naming scheme.

Unfortunately before i can fix the email flooding issue, I needed to fix the Poor Location and Naming Scheme for our custom MP's.

This post was originally found on: Just One More Project www.ProjectHamel.com

SCOM 2007: The Problems

System Center Operations Manager is a cross-platform data center management system for operating systems and hypervisors. It uses a single interface that shows state, health and performance information of computer systems. It also provides alerts generated according to some availability, performance, configuration or security situation being identified. It works with Microsoft Windows Server and Unix-based hosts.

In short its a health management tool. It sends out email alerts based on what you define, to notify you of issues, or pending issues within your environment. It will allow you to migrate from a reactionary department to a proactive department.

This tool when configured right and make your job much easier, but when not configured right... well you end up with what i have.

Currently i receive between 200 and 500 email's a day on "critical" issues within my environment.
"Critical" Issues Like:
Alert: Computer Browser Service Stopped Resolution state: New
Alert: Miscellaneous SAM Errors Resolution state: New
Alert: DC is both a Global Catalog and the Infrastructure Update master Resolution

Now don't get me wrong, i do get emails about actual critical issues within my environment, but when i get emails on issues like the above, it makes it near impossible for me to react within a timely manner.

So. Im going to start posting tips and tricks i have found for managing scom on here. Hopefully some of this stuff will help someone down the line, or even myself when I need to come back and reference something.

Hope you enjoy the Adventure.

This post was originally found on: Just One More Project www.ProjectHamel.com

SCOM 2007: The Adventure

My web Host is 1and1.com, and inorder for your site to use php5 instead of php4 you must add a custom line in the .htaccess file in the root of your website.  Simply add the below code to your .htaccess file, and you are good to go.

Code:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Here is my full .htaccess file, so you can see what it looks like.

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Thanks to OutofControl.ca for his post on this issue.

This post was originally found on: Just One More Project www.ProjectHamel.com

Fix Broken Auto Updates In WordPress.

How to Manual Update:

The manual update process is quite simple. The wordpress website has full details on their website as to how to do this update. (http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress)  I will just go over the basics really fast.

Backup, Backup, Backup!

Any time you make a version change in WordPress you should backup your database.  For that matter you should backup any thing you think is too important to loose any time you do something to wordpress.  I dont know about you, but the idea of having to retype all my articles does not leave me with a warm fuzzy.

The Simplest way to perform this backup is through the wordpress export tool.  This can be found under tools in your Administrative dashboard.   Simply select to backup all users, and it will present you with an XML file containing all your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags.  This is in no way a complete wordpress backup, but it should give you a backup of the important stuff.   If you want a full backup you need to go into your database manager and backup your full database.

Also i suggest backing up your whole wordpress directory on your website.  This is by all means not necessary, but i like to have backups of everything just in case.

Plugins!

Now its time to start the upgrade first you must make sure all your plugins are upgraded.  This will help minimize the the chance of compatibility issues.  Next Disable all your plugins.  Just in case one of your plugins is not comparable with the upgrade, you don't want your site to be completely useless.   If you forget to disable your plugins and have an issue after the upgrade you will need to manually disable them by either moving or deleting them from the plugins folder.

Upgrade!

Download and extract, the latest update (http://wordpress.org/download/) locally to your computer.  Open up your favorite FTP client (I Like FileZilla http://filezilla-project.org/) and connect to your web host.  Delete or Rename the wp-includes and wp-admin folders in the root of your wordpress install.  Then upload, replacing all the files, the new version on top of the old version.  Dont worry you should not lose and of your config or data  (if your worried make sure you backed it up.)

Completion!

Once you have uploaded the files your all done.  Now you can go to your website, and start testing functionality.  Slowly turn on each plugin, and test that plugins features, to make sure its working, and not breaking something else.

Dont forget to test your website on both IE and FireFox.

This post was originally found on: Just One More Project www.ProjectHamel.com

Upgrading WordPress to 2.9.2

This is actually a really simple fix.  Just FTP into your web space and delete this file, and your blog should be back to normal, Provided the incomplete upgrade did not damage your blog in any way.

Why Does this happen?

During a wordpress update, WordPress creates this "dummy" file in the root, to block access to the website while the update is in progress.  This is done so that if someone attempts to view your website while the upgrade is in progress, they may get ill desired results.  If you are having problems using the auto update feature i suggest updating it manually, and researching why its not working.  There can be many causes.

Hope this Helps!

This post was originally found on: Just One More Project www.ProjectHamel.com

WordPress “Briefly Unavailable for Scheduled Maintenance” Message Removal

This post was originally found on: Just One More Project www.ProjectHamel.com

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