SCOM » Pavleck.NET

I’ve returned! SQL Query guide updates

Jan 272012

Hello friends! Yes, I know, it’s been awhile. I’ve been busy working. Now, not so busy, not so much working. So if you’re hiring, well let me know.

One of the reasons I reduced the amount of posting I did was I had already done all of the cool stuff you could do with SCOM. The regular day-to-day BS maintenance stuff is not fun for me. Nor is reposting every single press release Microsoft releases like a lot of my brethren. So I didn’t post much, just did my own thing.

But now with the upcoming release of Operations Manager 2012 there will be so many new, cool things to do with it! Not to mention I’ve extended my System Center fun to the other members of the family, and we should see some cool stuff happening.

To kick things off I’ve cleaned up and added to my Useful SCOM SQL Queries list. I’ve also uploaded it as both a PDF and as a .SQL file. So you can play with that for the time being while I finish up a few other things I’m working on.

SCOM 2007 R2 VHD Test Drive & 2012 thoughts

R2, SCOM, SCOM 2012 4 Responses »

Feb 122011

Just in case you were interested in test driving Operations Manager 2007 R2, Microsoft published a VHD several days ago, you can download it here.

I’m curious as to why it’s only available as a 13 part RAR file, and doesn’t use the typical MS File Transfer Manager like we get on MSDN to download it one big bundle – or at least the option to get it that way. It’s a little odd.

Also, I’ve been messing around with a VM of Operations Manager 2012, now at CTP3. My initial thoughts? It looks a lot like 2007, which isn’t bad.

The best part? It actually tells you when it’s “thinking”. No more does it just lock up with the old green revolving bar at some random point while it’s collecting it’s thoughts – it actually tells you what it is doing!

More thoughts as I play with it!

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

Visio and Sharepoint 2010 Extensions for OpsMgr

SCOM, Tools No Responses »

Apr 212010

From the MOMTeam

If you’re looking for a reason to roll out Visio 2010, have I got a doozie for you!

Using the new Visio 2010 add-in for OpsMgr 2007 R2 and the SharePoint 2010 Visio Services Data Provider, you’ll be able to create a visio-based view of a web application, a service, or even an infrastructure (Or even import one with the OpsMgr add-in for Visio 2007) then publish it to SharePoint 2010 as a web drawing.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll get a ‘live’ view of what your environment looks like – in the way you want to see it. Perfect for a big board application in a NOC!

And there’s some even neater things coming down the pipe. Check out this MMS 2010 keynote to see this and more in action!

And go pick up the downloads from Visio Toolbox while you’re at it!

Hopefully I’ll have a nice little tutorial about how to set all of this up, as I need to rebuild my OpsMgr environment several times over the next 30 days to ensure I’m ready to go for my next assignment! Can never have too much practice, right?

Silect Agent Explorer

Authoring, SCOM, Tools No Responses »

Mar 052010

Now this seems really promising! I’ve been involved with Silect Software since their inception years ago. They make some great tools – MP Studio in particular. But its costs has always made it a hard sell with clients, since there’s “already a way to author management packs in SCOM”.

But what there isn’t in OpsMgr is a quick, easy, and simple way to find out just what’s running on that server – until now.

Silect is announcing the Agent Explorer feature of the next version of MP Studio.
With Agent Explorer you’ll be able see exactly what rules, monitors, discoveries and management packs are running on a given server.

Interested? View the 5 min screencap and then email Randy R and tell him you want to try this out!

Just a few things

Community, R2, SCOM, Web Service No Responses »

Mar 032010

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.

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

More Web Service Fun

Fun, SCOM, SDK No Responses »

Jan 102010

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.

No longer an MVP

Community, SCOM No Responses »

Jan 032010

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’.

On writing an OpsMgr WebService

SCOM, SDK No Responses »

Nov 112009

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”. ((Yes, I know, there already exists a connector, but it’s old and isn’t optimal))

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!