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
Or you could also title this “How to talk your company into buying you a high end gaming rig for your desktop”
So I’ve been playing with this web service I’m writing for OpsMgr. I was doing a bunch of practical things with it, that you’d normally want to do with it – but then I thought screw that, let’s do something fun with it.
I like to play Team Fortress 2. I like to monitor things. Why not put them together?
Well friends, once you’ve made a web service that talks to the system, it’s fairly trivial to write something to take that information and put it somewhere else.
Let me demonstrate (And yes, you probably do want to click and view the larger version of this)
Stay Tuned…. Video coming soon.
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’.
So a couple of weeks ago on the MVP mailing list someone asked the question on how to best integrate SiteScope with OpsMgr. Ever the SDK/Powershell lover I immediately replied that “Hey, there’s some code in the SDK about making a webservice, we’ll just do that and then you can write a script to talk to opsmgr”.
Well, lo and behold I was wrong. It wasn’t actually sample code for a web service, but the code to talk to one you wrote.
So I started writing one.
Since I’ve started working again I haven’t had a whole lot of time to work on code – so I’ve been messing with this for about 30 mins or so a day. Right now it doesn’t really work very well, creating an XML web service is all new to me. But if you read my last post, you know that once this is finished you’ll have a system that you’ll be able to manipulate from any system that can talk to it, which is almost anything – Linux, Unix, Mac, etc.
So I’m going to keep at this, and hopefully have something to release to you guys eventually. I’ll start small, just a few functions, then slowly add to it over time.
So while it doesn’t even really work yet, I just couldn’t help but show you guys. I’m pretty exited about this!
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.
Now here’s an awesome bit of good news! Just announced the OpsMgr R2 Authoring Resource Kit! It’s available at this URL.
I am REALLY excited about this! Why? Well let’s check out all the cool stuff we’re getting:
- Management Pack Best Practices Analyzer
MPBPA scans management packs for best practice compliance and provides automated resolution for numerous issues. This tool integrates with the Authoring Console.
- Management Pack Spell Checker
MP Spell Checker checks spelling in management packs to eliminate errors in display strings.
- Management Pack Visio Generator
MP Visio Generator allows you to generate a class inheritance and class relationship diagram using Microsoft Office Visio.
- Management Pack Diff
MP Diff shows the differences between two management packs.
- Management Pack Cookdown Analyzer
MP Cookdown Analyzer identifies workflows which may break cookdown. Suggestions are provided for how to fix the performance problems.
- All Reference Add-in
All References Add-in helps find all management pack elements that reference the specific element chosen. For example, the ability to right click a class and find all rules, monitors, overrides, as well as anything else that targets that class is provided. This tool works on most management pack elements.
- Workflow Analyzer
The Workflow Analyzer provides the ability to statically analyze all types of workflows. It also allows users to trace workflows running on any Health Service.
- Workflow Simulator
The Workflow Simulator provides the ability to test certain types of workflows such as discoveries, rules, and monitors without a Management Server and Management Group. Key functionality includes the ability to test workflows as well as view and validate output prior to signing and importing the MP into a Management Group for additional testing.
- Management Packs
Three management packs which are frequently used as dependencies are provided as part of the tools installation. These MPs are necessary to allow the Authoring Console to open most MPs available online in the System Center Operations Manager MP Catalog.
This is great news! Finally we’ve all been given the power to generate powerful, extensive management packs. You will be able to build it, diagram it, and most importantly – test it for quality assurance. No longer will we be left guessing if a certain change is better or worse – we’ll be able to find out ourselves!
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 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…
The new Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide for OpsMgr 2007 R2 has been released.
If you’ve never checked it out, I strongly encourage you to – especially if you have a new install coming up. The IPD guide walks you through all aspects of the planning and design of an OpsMgr network. After you’ve gone through it you’ll know how to:
- Define the scope of the project
- Identify necessary management packs and product connectors
- Determine how monitoring will be implemented
- Determine the number of management groups and agent security strategy
- Design and place the OpsMgr server roles and databases
- Design the notification system
- And much much more!
These guides are pretty invaluable, especially if you’re not an expert in the technology.
So what are you waiting for? Download it now – and when you’re done, check out the rest of the design guides, too!
Note: The version number is still 1.0 and the published date remains June 2008 – I sent a note off to ask them to increment that.
Operations Manager has always been a fairly powerful tool. Even in it’s MOM2000 and MOM2005 variations it has a lot to offer. Sadly, in all the organizations I’ve been to, it’s never been utilized to it’s fullest.
I want to help change that.
Do you have a ‘batch’ server at your organization? You should. A batch server is a general all purpose scripting machine. It’s one you use to automate a lot of tasks that you don’t want to have a dedicated machine for, but are more important then you’d want to trust to run on your regular workstation. It doesn’t need to be anything particularly powerful – my batch server is a small Dell pizza box with now outdated hardware: Pentium 4 3.4Ghz CPU, maxed out at 2GB of ram, with an 80GB hard drive. Up until recently it ran Windows 2000 – it now runs Server 2008 standard.
A lot of the stuff I’ll be writing about will have a batch server in mind. I run these scripts there, and use OpsMgr to interact with the data. You’d be amazed at how much more you can accomplish and automate things with a simple ‘throw away’ desktop.
To start out, let’s get OpsMgr to record some stock prices. This will be a powershell script, that I’ll be running on our batch server. Read on to see how I do it.
Read more…
Go out and download the evaluation version. Learn about what’s new and improved! Try it out in the virtual lab. Or watch a quick video by Sacha Dawes, Senior Program Manager for Operations Manager, on a tour of all the new features in R2.
It’s not on MSDN downloads quite yet, but it should be there soon.
