Try PowerShell and the SCOM cmdLet reference. (And a surprise)

If you’re still hesitant to dive into powershell, you’re not alone. To someone who is a light scripter or has limited or no development background it can seem like a daunting task. A lot of the examples you’ll find are easy and simple, but Write-Host –Fore Green “Hello World! I’m using PowerShell” won’t help you with automating all of those tasks out there.

There are a few places to go, and a few books to read, to help you get up to speed with it.
One of the most promising looking resources would have to be Doug Finke’s “Try PowerShell”.

Try PowerShell  is an interactive PowerShell tutorial created with PowerShell using WPF (( Wikipedia: Windows Presentation Foundation )) and PowerBoots.
With it you can easily try out PowerShell commands just by clicking on them, no typing needed. You can search for particular commands, run them, and even edit them to see what happens if you change something. This is an awesome tool I don’t think enough people know about.

As for blogs, I can’t recommend Joel Bennett’s any more then I already to – HuddledMasses.org. He’s one of the most knowledgeable people in the subject (And a recent PowerShell MVP, too) and knows how to do a lot of the deep level .net-ish stuff that only a software developer knows. He has to be, without a doubt, one of my most relied upon resource. It also doesn’t hurt that he hangs around (With a lot of awesome fellow powershellers, a couple others also being MVPs) on the #PowerShell channel on FreeNode. In fact, you can click here to join us right now and ask your questions.

Another great resource, especially when it comes to Operations Manager, is Marco Shaw. His Get-PowerShell blog features a lot of general PowerShell information, as well as some Operations Manager specific. He also replies to people on our next resource which is:

The Extensibility sub-forum of the Operations Manager TechNet forum. There’s a lot of ‘getting started’ information written by me, Marco, and others. It’s a good place to learn, or ask questions if you get stuck. And not to mention, the entire OpsMgr forum is loaded with a lot of helpful bits from many many intelligent people. (And sometimes I go there, too)

Which leads to the final PowerShell resource, which is more of a shotgun of code to your face. Jaykul has created a Yahoo pipe of 50 powershell resources.

It shows up 2 weeks of chronologically merged posts from a selection of PowerShell bloggers. You can learn a lot by only glancing over it every day or so. You can even subscribe to it via RSS so you don’t even have to go there.

And lastly, forever ago Microsoft published a pretty slick document called “Windows PowerShell Virtual Machine Manager CmdLet Reference”. Now, it isn’t much more then a nicely formatted Word document of a PowerShell command like “Get-Help -full | Where-Object {$.Module –eq “VMM Module name”}”, but it is a pretty slick little document to send around if people have questions about a CmdLet inside of VMM, yet don’t have enough of the basics to use Get-Help.(( Now don’t get me started. True, they probably shouldn’t be using Posh anyway then, but I digress )) It can even be used as a nifty “selling tool” for why people should get into PowerShell – “Look at how easy it is to do X, Y and Z when you’ve been manually doing it from the console!”.  So I’m making one for OpsMgr. Well, actually, I made one about a year ago for OpsMgr, I just forgot about it until today and now I need to finish formatting.

And also, here’s a special treat for those of you kind enough to not only click on “Read More”, but have also read all the way down here:

Coming eventually – I’m not entirely sure when it will be done – “How to monitor EVERYTHING with System Center Operations Manager”. It’s an eBook I’ve been working on for the past several months. It’s not your typical ‘hand holding’ book. It assumes you have Operations Manager installed. It’s working fine. Now you want to do more with it.

Things like:

Integrate OpsMgr into other monitoring systems

• Nagios
• Cacti
• OpenManage
• Network Node Manager
• Servers Alive!
• And more!

Learn all about authoring in the ‘real world’:

• Real World vs. ‘Technically Correct’ uses of Monitors and Rules
• How to create extensive management packs – includes examples of BlackBerry Enterprise Server and ‘My Company’s Generic Web App’
• Why, when and how to use roll-up monitors, with examples
• How to get anything into OpsMgr – if it exists on a computer, you can get it into OpsMgr (And even sometimes when it doesn’t exist)
• Things to watch out for, best practices, and other helpful hints!

This should be simple, but it isn’t! Complete guides on how to:

• Setup basic rules and monitors
• Setup and use gateway servers (And wtf is a gateway server, anyway?)
• Talk to machines that aren’t in the domain OpsMgr is
• Talk to machines that aren’t in ANY domain
• Troubleshoot typical agent problems – what to look for first

Learn to hack OpsMgr! Make it do what YOU want it to:

• Branding the web and reporting consoles
• Make OpsMgr send reminder emails, automate alerts, run tasks
• Interact with the physical world!
• Switch out complete sub-systems! (Includes example of getting rid of Windows SNMP and using Net-SNMP!)

Also, being an eBook, many sections will feature interactive content. Which means errata can be corrected, and the next time you open the book, you too now have the updated information. No more trying code samples, then wondering why it didn’t work and spending 3 hours on some publishers website!

What isn’t in the book:

• “What is OpsMgr” (You probably already know, right?)
• Supported Configurations (You have it installed. And your company probably had MS out to help, so this is pointless)
• How to install it (Ditto)
• Painfully detailed explanations of what a Root Management Server, Management Server, Audit Collection Service, Agent, etc (You know the basics, you don’t need to see the damn code they used)
• Pretend environments, with non-typical ‘easy’ to work with applications. (You live in the real world, as does your company. You all have faults. Lets deal with them, not ignore them

And the best part? Unlike other OpsMgr books that use cryptic copyright information, forbidding you from using their code (And honestly, that’s what you want, right? I mean, it’s cool to learn things, but you need this done NOW because you have 2 dozen other things to work on) “How to monitor EVERYTHING with SCOM” uses a very simple license. One that’s easy for even management to understand.

While the book itself is, of course, copywritten by be Jeremy D. Pavleck of Pavleck.Net and Red Deuce Systems, Inc – all of the code inside, which you can download at my site – including management packs which would retail for thousands of dollars, will be under the GNU General Public License!
That means you have:

1. The freedom to run the program for any purpose (Commercial or not!)
2. The freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs.
3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
4. The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

So, you’ll technically have something in you hands worth a lot of money. So how much will it be?

$25.00. Twenty-Five USD. That’s it. For the eBook anyway.
There may be a for-print version, but I’m not entirely sure yet. I don’t believe in paying $50 for a book that will be outdated within weeks or months.

Furthermore, if you are one of those souls that believes in living on the edge, you can go ahead and pre-order the book for half that price, $12.50. Though I’m really not sure when it will be done – though if I get enough people it may help motivate me.

Also, everyone who pre-orders will be in close contact with me, as I continue to ask for more real world applications to monitor and other questions people have.

So it’s up to you. You feelin’ lucky? Well then, if so, go ahead and pre-order it then.