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Expect great things

 News, Pavleck.NET  No Responses »
Jan 072011
 

professor-farnsworth Good News, Everyone!

 

It’s been quite some time since I’ve really gotten to roll up my sleeves and get dirty with SCOM. And that’s about to change. I’ve recently accepted a position at Certified Security Solutions as a Senior Consultant. My role? To do the same Operations Manager stuff I haven’t been able to do for the past couple of years. 2011 is starting to look good!

I start this Monday, the 10th, where I’ll be flying out to Cleveland for a week to do the usual meet & greets as well as get a big picture on what they’re looking to do.

So, with any luck, you’ll see a new flurry of activity here on my humble blog as I return to my usual self; finding new and innovative ways to use, and abuse, OpsMgr and now the whole System Center family!

I can’t wait!

Is it done yet, is it done yet, is it done yet?

 Community, Guides, Pavleck.NET, SCOM, Web Service  No Responses »
Nov 122010
 

So, I’ve received a few (Read: a metric ton) of comments regarding if my eBook and Webservice is done yet.

In short: No.

In long: Yes, but no, well sort of.

So I had a lot of bad things that went down in my personal life. I was laid off, the wife and I separated, etc etc. So mentally I was able to devote as much time as I had hoped to this endeavor – though I do have a decent ground work laid for it.

But there’s another problem  now.

Being unemployed for as long as I was, I had to sacrifice some things to get by. I had to sell the servers I used for my virtual SCOM infrastructure. So now I don’t really have a machine capable of running OpsMgr + all the additional VMs I need to setup all of the various environments to testing and deployments to.

Did you want to help? I’d love it if you could!

What I need right now to finish all of this:

A proper server. If anyone has one for sale, or to loan to me for awhile (1 year or so), I can get this whole thing back up and running.

I’m looking for something like a Dell Poweredge T610 – a dual processor capable machine with plenty of ram and disk. It doesn’t have to have the extra proc (Though that would be awesome) or be fully populated with ram and drives – but it would be helpful.

If you have one for sale or loan, and would like to be my very best friend, please send me an email to jpavleck.servers@gmail.com – I’ll get back to you ASAP and be sure to credit you with saving these 2 projects. And, as a special gift, when I release the “pro” version of the Web Service Connector, you and your company will receive a free license to it – as well as support – for free! This will easily be a $5,000 value!

So lets see if the community out there can rally around and help me get this done!

Oh, and likewise, if you’d rather send me $2,500 so I can just buy the server, well I can do that too. Send an email to the same place.

I’m fairly certain nothing will come from this post, but I’m putting it out there just in case there’s some kind soul who can help me out.

Thanks,

Jeremy

Some slight re-organizations

 Community, Pavleck.NET, SCOM  No Responses »
Jan 282010
 

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

Do you use Google Wave?

 Community, Pavleck.NET  1 Response »
Oct 132009
 

 

googlewavebig

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.

Things I need, for you!

 Pavleck.NET  3 Responses »
Oct 072009
 

Unemployment, it has it’s good and bad points.

The good points? In between job interviews and calls from recruiters for jobs I’m not even close to being qualified for (Senior Solaris Architect.. What?) I have more then enough time to work on neat things with OpsMgr. Showing you all the awesome things you can do with it, as long as you don’t mind getting your hands dirty.

The bad points? Well, mainly the lack of funds to buy some of the stuff I need to make the cool stuff to show you – but you can help me there!

One of the neat things I’ve been working with OpsMgr is integrating it into the physical world. Creating a connector to read from, and interact with, things outside of the server room. So one of the biggest things you could gift me (Consider it a late 33rd birthday present if you like) is a gift certificate to SparkFun Electronics.

What will I do with that? Well, depending on just how much I get I plan to get the following devices (In order of importance)

And a few other things as well. In total, it’s several hundred dollars worth of parts – but I don’t expect that from anyone, just a little will do.

I’m also always looking for things to expand my network to better bring you a more in-depth OpsMgr experience. So I’m also looking for complete servers ((Either quad core workstations or ‘real’ servers such as Proliant 380s, fairly modern)) as well as peripherals such as external tape drives and hard drives. If you have something to donate, please feel free to email me and let me know. If you’d rather donate with your bank account, I’ve added a donate button below – every donation of at least $5 will also come with a Pavleck.NET lanyard – I have a bunch of them left and would love to get rid of some of them.

Thanks, and now I’m back to the console!


Back in the saddle again

 Pavleck.NET  2 Responses »
Sep 282009
 

Sorry for my lengthily  hiatus folks. I honestly never meant to leave you stranded! There was a lot going on, and most of it wasn’t OpsMgr related, so I neglected you, fair reader. But my 33rd birthday was on the 26th and with it I vowed to not do it to you all again, so I am back!

Hopefully in a day or 2 I’ll have a new post for you – How to get other information into OpsMgr.

What do I mean by other information? Well, in my test scenario, that will be the current stock price for a symbol – we’re going to use MSFT.
There are many many ways to get information directly into SCOM. I’m going to use what *I* think is the easiest method – and that’s a PowerShell script that queries for the given symbols last price and then writes that into a custom performance counter.

To prepare for it, make sure you’re running the most current version of PowerShell 2.0 (Which is CTP3, if you’re on Windows 7 though, you’re fine). If you have UAC enabled, you’ll also need to run this script in an elevated prompt.

I was hoping to have the post out for you today – but an extended power outage at home ended that dream.

So in short: I’m back.

OpsMgr for… fun?

 Management Packs, Pavleck.NET, SCOM  2 Responses »
May 062009
 

Yes, it’s true. You can have fun with Operations Manager. Right now I’m currently on the bench, and then probably unemployment soon since jobs are scarce, but it won’t be slowing me down ((If you need someone in the Twin Cities area, please shoot me an email – it’s my first name@my last name.net.)) In fact, I’ll be able to work on a lot of the wacky creative uses for OpsMgr – things like:

  • Tracking your Dominoes pizza
  • Recording and reporting on things other then performance data – like stock prices, the weather, etc
  • Get emailed when your friend’s flight is about to land
  • Interacting with the physical environment using the Arduino microcontroller (Think: Turning on a fan when the heat gets too high)
  • And much much more!

So I’m rebuilding my current SP1 environment and turning it into an R2 RC one. Then I’ll start adding wacky monitors. And I’ll create a full management pack to do it, and you’ll learn step-by-step. It’ll be a fun time! So stay tuned, and you stay classy, San DIego!

The newest OpsMgr MS MVP, workload, SDK, and miscellany.

 Pavleck.NET, SCOM, SDK  2 Responses »
Jan 052009
 

Although I technically received the congratulations email several days ago, I debated about whether or not I should post it. But I might as well. Well, what is it already?

I am the newest MS MVP for OpsMgr! I am absolutely thrilled to be the 29th member of the OpsMgr MVP family, and really looking forward to seeing all the new found knowledge I’ll have access too, and can pass it on to you!

microsoft_mvp_logo

As for my workload, well I’m quite busy at the moment, so posts may be a tad sparse. There’s an MS engineer on site at this client, essentially to backup that yes, these are really the only ways to do this. I’m trying to bang out this SDK connector service, which essentially is the culmination of other posts I’ve written regarding the fine tuning of alerts via alert name. Some of what I’m going to be accomplishing is in R2, but it’s not RTM yet and as such I need to act just like it doesn’t exist.

It has a new name now, the OpsMgr Alert Wrangler. It’s much like some of the code I’ve written here, except for it uses an XML config file instead of having everything hardcoded, and it hopes to be a little bit smarter about how it accomplishes things. This is really my first real foray into programming anything serious, so once it’s at a stable enough place I’ll be throwing it on CodePlex so you can all make fun of me and tear it apart.  :)

There is an additional method to narrow alerts, and it seems like it would really work well – and that is the Alert Category; right now it has things like availability, DSIntegration, performance, custom, etc etc. I can’t find a way to properly add a new category – yet. By all accounts, the SDK documentation says I can’t – the categories are static coded members of the EnerpriseManagement.Configuration namespace, but that’s not to say there isn’t something undocumented. I’ll keep tapping away at it.

I need to bang together a new contest, and this time give away something really good, like some copies of Sapien Primalscript and such – which will come soon when I finish my ‘I <3 Primalscript’ post fairly soon.

I also to work more on the Wiki, work on my video Q&A, and about 2 dozen other things – there’s really a free moment!

PowerShell v2 CTP3 released, works fine with OpsMgr

 Pavleck.NET, Powershell, SCOM  1 Response »
Dec 232008
 

I would have posted this yesterday, but I wanted to do some testing first. Twelve hours ago the PowerShell team announced the release of V2 CTP3. It adds a lot of great things into the mix. I wanted to verify that it plays well with OpsMgr and as suspected it does.

Just a note – you’ll need to install PowerShell v1 for a new OpsMgr install. But you can then remove it and install a newer version. I typically run the newest v2 CTP release on my laptop, though I remain at v1 on the production servers.

Happy holidays all!

OpsMgr Video Experiment: Ask About OpsMgr

 Pavleck.NET, SCOM  6 Responses »
Dec 182008
 

I’ve been reading and hearing all over the place how complicated and difficule Operations Manager is. You’re half-right. It’s immensely complicated when compared to previous editions, and when it’s your first exposure to it. I’m aiming to change all that, and I’m trying it in a new medium – video! So watch the video below (Or if your firewall rules don’t prohibit it, go directly to the YouTube link) and post a video response asking me your question. Any question.

I’ll do my best to answer it with the help of the OpsMgr Army and screencast it all!

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