Pavleck.NET

So my current contract has ended and while I have some spare time I’m going to be focusing fiercely (Well, fiercely for me anyway) on “Project KONOP”, the OpsMgr Web Service. I’ve even been so bold as to take the liberty in registering SCOMWS.com to host it.

And a new project, still unfinished – SystemCenterSearch.com. Hoping to make it a very basic ‘portal’ for all things system center – but mainly centered on the most recent issues, most common problems and solutions, and a simple search that looks through all of the system center websites for your query.

And for you Redditors out there I’ve made two new sub-reddits. /r/SystemCenter – dedicated to all things System Center related and /r/SCOM – dedicated to just OpsMgr stuff (Of which we know I’m kind of partial to).

So just a quick note to let you know what I’m working on. Now, I’m back to working on website front-ends and building a web service using a 5 year old book from MS Press heh.

You may notice the site will be in an erratic state for awhile. Just be patient. I need to re-organize and update a majority of the content as well as aggregate a lot of the fragments sitting out there.

This site will no longer be solely dedicated to Operations Manager. Instead, it will be focusing on automation & process improvement items – things to make our lives easier.

I’ll no longer be writing as the ‘elitist’ Senior OpsMgr Consultant which was my role for so many years – I’m now Joe SysAdmin. And as such, I’ll be tackling problems in that manner.

So except fewer Opsmgr posts, and more about dealing with opsmgr in the way most companies do; they pick Random System Admin guy, point a magic wand and say “You’re the OpsMgr Guy now”.

And this is how we’ll be solving problems from here on out.

Real, every day problems. A lot of them will clearly be hacks, but some of them will be quite wonderful.

On that note – if you’re a C# developer and would like to collaborate with me to get the OpsMgr Web Service to a state I feel is acceptable to distribute, please email me and lets start a dialog about all this.

Jeremy

Alas, with the ending of my 12th month as a Microsoft Most Valued Professional, ends it, period. I didn’t get renewed.

Just as well though.

I could go on a slight diatribe about it all, but I’ll just keep it bottled in.

Until then, let me tell you, writing a web service is a lot harder than I thought – I might be eliciting the help of the community at some point. And yes, I am still slowly trudging along with it. It’s mainly been redesign redesign redesign. Though I’m hoping to have something ‘soon’.

Yesterday, posted quietly as KB article 968929, Microsoft officially released PowerShell 2.0

Why is that cool? Because now you can get PoSh 2 officially deployed to all your servers. And you get to “officially” use the coolest CmdLet in the bunch: New-WebServiceProxy

Now, if you were to just read the help about it, it doesn’t really seem all that interesting:

Creates a Web service proxy object that lets you use and manage the Web service in Windows PowerShell.

But I’m going to give you an awesome secret. There’s a webservice out there unlike any other. If you want to sell PoSh to your coworkers, this is the way to do it.

What is it?

WebServiceX.Net provides On Demand XML Web Services for Financial,Distribution, Retail, Health Care, Manufacturing, Telecom, Government and Educational Industry.

So, what’s the mean to us?

Well using our shiny new cmdLet and a few lines of code we can instantly access data for over 70 different services. So really it comes down to “What do you want to do?”

Get the weather? No problem.

BAM. Done.

Oh, you don’t live in the US? No worries either.

Lets see how the weather of a certain favorite MS employee is.

Wow, Stefan better grab a coat, it’s chilly there.

Ok, those were interesting in an ‘yeah, I’ve seen that before’ way – but what else?

A simple-as-pie domain whois? You know it’s there.

BAM!

Next?

How about searching Lloyd’s for the risk code for a given item. Sure, we got it.

BAM!

Apparently it’s risk code is 6T. No idea what that all means.

I could go on all day – there is so much information out there. From Acceleration Unit Converters, Sunset and Sunrise times, RSS Readers, Translation services, Barcode generation, Text to Braille – hell, it’ll even let you send Free SMS messages and Faxes to anyone!

As you can tell, it’s a pretty expansive list, with many options and a whole ton of data. Not always what you want when you’re trying to do a little Posh-Fu. So that’s why I’m working on a little script for you to dot source, one that “PoShifies” these various services and gives you a lot more options on the command line – look for that soon!

Oh, and before I forget – be sure to check out the PowerScripting Podcast tomorrow night because you’re in for a treat! Me, Marco Shaw, Marcus Oh and Scott Moss will be giving a little panel discussion about PowerShell in OpsMgr – the Command Shell as we’ve come to call it. So come listen in, ask some questions, and maybe win some sweet sweet schwag!

Alas, it seems those Danes are just as goofy as I am. And I’m happy to hear it!

Jakob Svendsen over at CoreTech released a management pack today. That management pack will alert you when the coffee in your coffee pot gets low. I’ll go ahead and embed the video below, but you’ll have to go to their site to download it.

Now, I return to my dank and dark office, where I shall create a SUPERIOR coffee pot monitor!
I’m actually waiting on an order from SparkFun and Jameco to get here as we speak.

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 WPF¹ 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.

Read more…

1. Wikipedia: Windows Presentation Foundation [↩]

Is anyone else in the OpsMgr community using Google Wave yet? If you’re not yet ‘in the know’, Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration.

I recently received my invite to it, and have setup a System Center Operations Manager wave to test it out. If you’re a member too, please add jpavleck@gmail.com to your contact list, and I’ll add you to it.

If you’re not a member yet, but would like to be, they’re still handing out invites – just go to the Wave Signup form and fill in your information. If you’re still not sure what it actually is, check out Google’s own “About Google Wave”, read about it on its Wikipedia page, or have a look at the preview video released in May.

Be sure to add them to your list of places to check for all things Operations manager related http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/systemcenteroperationsmanager

As usual, Anders is the first post over there!

I’ve added a suggestion on Connect, #436472, that I think would really assist with the creation of custom reports. In HP’s System Insight Manager, when you generate a report for something, like number of CPUs per server, at the very bottom of the report is a link that says “Show SQL query used to generate this report”.

A feature like that added to OpsMgr reporting would go a long long way to allowing us to generate custom reports.
Why?
Well, the SQL schema for OpsMgr is not, and never will be, given out. It’s like that because once they’ve shared a schema, then they are more or less stuck with it and it makes adding, removing, or making more efficient sql much more difficult. So they just don’t share it. They didn’t in MOM2005 either, but it was significantly easier to figure things out there, since we had the one MOM database, and all of the warehousing data was pulled from that one via DTS packages, so the whole thing functioned easier. With OpsMgr 2007, data is written to the OpsMgr database and the reporting database concurrently, and they are more less independent of each other. Because of that a lot of the tables and such are a lot more confusing and a lot more happens behind the scene. So adding something simple like “Show me the SQL used to generate this query” would open up a whole new world to us.

Let’s face it. For the vast majority of us, we’re either System Administrators that handle day to day duties as well as the OpsMgr infrastructure, or we’re full time OpsMgr Admins. We’re IT renaissance men, Jacks (and Jills) of all trades. We know a little bit about all of the applications, operating systems, hardware, etc of our company, but we’re not an expert in one thing. Since OpsMgr uses SQL Reporting Services to issue up reports, that means we need either:

• High level knowledge of SQL Reporting Services
• Full access to someone that is an expert of SRS
  or
• An easier, more guided method of generating reports

What I normally run across is:

1. I know SQL, I can bang together most of the things I need with the help of the SQL Books and Google. But SRS? No idea!
2. Every SQL DBA I know is either swamped with work, or they themselves don’t use SRS and have no idea how to help me
3. To say reporting is not very intuitive would be an under-statement

But, if we had a way of looking at the SQL queries a particular report uses to pull up it’s information, we’d be able to bang something together. Jonathon Hambrook showed us how to create the report model and get started. Kevin Holman shows us a different way, and also shows us a real world query to use.

While those are great starting points, I want more information. I want to create a report through the reporting tab – let’s say we want to look at the CPU usage over a 4 week period for all of the exchange servers. I then want to see exactly what SQL voodoo was run, and then re-create the report myself in the SQL BI suite, that way I can prepare something for a presentation, and make sure this report adheres to my companies style and branding guides. Just that one simple change would be the bridge that lets us go from “No idea” to “Hey, I have a great idea!”.

Hopefully I’ve got you fired up enough to rate my suggestion – if we get it high enough there’s a good chance it’ll be included! So open up suggestion #436472, and rate it! If you’ve never been to MS Connect before, login to the site and subscribe to the OpsMgr connection, #446. Then you’ll be able to click on the suggestion above to go directly to it. In the mean time, I’m trying to figure out how to pull up this info via ‘other means’.

Until next time!

Scott Moss shot me an IM a little bit ago to remind me about the System Center Virtual User Group that’s happening today (November 21st, 2008) at 1:00 PM Central time. Here’s the ClickToAttend.Com Link to the event – feel free to add this to your Google Calendar.

Speaking of Google!

Google is slowly rolling out new features for a select group of users. It’s a wiki-fied version of search with promote/demote buttons and a comment area. This will help you pick the more authorative links among a list – unless someone has hired an army to promote a malware site, which I wouldn’t put past the modern web.

Anyway, here’s a screen shot of what the new interface looks like, and a short video afterwords.

The new wiki-like features of Google search

And a screencast!