Pavleck.NET

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

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.

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)

• RFID USB Reader and RFID Tags
• Magnetic Card Reader/Writer and blank cards
• Thermocouples (Temperature Sensors)
• Infrared Emitter & Detector
• Proximity Sensors
• Force and various other sensors

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 servers¹ 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!

1. Either quad core workstations or ‘real’ servers such as Proliant 380s, fairly modern [↩]

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.

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 down¹ 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!

1. If you need someone in the Twin Cities area, please shoot me an email – it’s my first name@my last name.net. [↩]

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!

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!

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!

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!

Congratulations are in order to Jim and Zolon, they won an autographed Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed and a Sapien Schwag pack – who will win next? Maybe it’s you! The prizes are getting better and better!

Thanks guys, I’ll be sending them out asap!

Please forgive the delay in posts, but trust me, I’ve been busy.

Shortly after this post I’m going to make a valiant attempt to get the new site up. Though I’ve learned that to import a Wordpress blog into Drupal, I need to install Drupal 5, run an import, then upgrade to 6. So yeah, we’ll see how that goes.

For the past several days I’ve been in an MS workshop entitled ‘Vital Signs’. It’s essentially a performance tuning course which focused on the counters and thresholds to watch out for. To commemorate the occassion, I’m working on a Windows Diagnostics Management Pack – which is mostly a group of tasks to run against a remote machine – collecting a variety of counters and analyzing it via SPA.

You’ve got about 5 hours to enter the contest, and then it’s all done. I’ve lined up additional items for upcoming contests, such as the top notch screen capture program Snagit by TechSmith. Thanks to them for that!

And I’ve been doing a lot of non-OpsMgr powershell work. Since I did intend for Pavleck.NET to include ‘general’ IT topics, I think I should start posting them – been working on a bunch of Amazon web services stuff.

Anyway, off to work on this upgrade!