• ConfigMgr 2007 (SCCM)
• DPM 2007
• DPM 2010
• OpsMgr 2007 (SCOM)
• SCE 2007 / 2010 (Essentials) 
• SCVMM / Hyper-V
• Miscellaneous

 Click on the link to view the script list.

get-managementpack | export-managementpack -path D:\mgmt\backupMP

I’m currently monitoring too many servers to new the role per server individually.
Therefore I’m creating custom views where our customer can see the role and responsible department of that server.

-To get started I’ve created a new key in HKLM\Software\ and called it the “companyname”
-Next I’ve created tree String Values named “Owner”, “SLA” and “Description”
This is for the client part

Ok, I got all my registry values on all computers; big job but it’s a one-time task.
-The next step is to discover these registry entries in OpsMgr as attributes.
-Open the console, go to authoring pane, attributes and create a new attribute, we called it “Owner”

-Pick “Registry” for the discovery type.
-Choose a Target class (Windows Server Operating System). This will create a new class named “Windows Server Operating System_Extended”. You can use this one or rename is.

-Create a new management pack; i called it “Override – MP – Server Description, SLA and Stats (Sealed)” this is because i’m going to seal it.

-Next put in the Registry info (my info was a string value).
-In this example i put in the Owner name.
-The frequency is set to 86400 seconds which detects the information once a day (for test purposes you can set it shorter)

Do this also for the “Description” and the “SLA” registry key

Ok that’s one, now we have to seal the management pack. There is a perfect example on how to seal an management pack from onathan Almquist on sealing MP’s HERE and we will use his example. Don’t forget to set the frequency time to the original value.
I used this command to seal it.
mpseal.exe d:\sealmp\input\Override.MP.Server.Description.SLA.and.Stats.Sealed.xml /I “d:\sealmp\mp” /Keyfile “d:\sealmp\key\PairKey.snk” /Company “Advantive” /Outdir “d:\sealmp\output”

The SN command to create our key only needs to run once, be sure to backup this key because you’ll need it for re-sealing

-Go the the dashboard and create a new view.

-Target it to “Windows Server Operating System_Extended”

And you should see the following view!

As stated in the MP Guide install the DMO Feature on the SQL Servers:

Configuration for Monitoring SQL Server 2008

The registry key’s which are needed for the MP where available, the printers where installed and shared properly and the MP was imported correctly.

After some investigation I found that to monitor the print servers the “Print Services” role should be added on the print server. Once I did this and restarted the health servers everything worked properly.

See Kevin Holman’s blog for more information

This is an example how to use a timed script two state monitor to monitor a file exists. If the file hiberfil.sys exists the monitor is in error state.

Create the Two State Monitor

• Go to authoring, monitor and create a new unit monitor
• Choose Timed Script Two State Monitor
  
• Give it a name, target it to ““Windows Server 2008 Operating System” and set parent monitor to “Availibility”
• Schedule it when to run (we used every week)
• Input the script below
  ‘ check if hiberfil.sys is available
  ‘ and create a alert when its there
  Dim oAPI, oBag
  set oAPI = CreateObject(“MOM.ScriptAPI”)
  set oBag = oAPI.CreatePropertyBag()
  set objFSO = CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
  strFile = “C:\hiberfil.sys”
  If objFSO.FileExists(strFile) Then
  Call oBag.AddValue(“Status”,”Error”)
  Call oAPI.Return(oBag)
  Else
  Call oBag.AddValue(“Status”,”Ok”)
  Call oAPI.Return(oBag)
  End If
• As unhealthy expression input “Property[@Name='Status'] equals Error”
  
• As healthy expression input “Property[@Name='Status'] equals Ok”
  
• Fill in the proper alert settings
  

Create the “console task”

• Go to the authoring pane, Tasks and create a new task
  
• Select Agent Tasks, Command line
  
• Fill in the following commands
  

After this is finished the OpsMgr server will generate an alert when the Hiberfil.sys file is active and you can disable hybernation from the console!

-Windows Server 2008 Hibernation 
It looks like Windows 2008 Server enables hibernation by default. This is quite interesting since I’m not sure how many people actually hibernate a server. Nevertheless, it’s something we need to deal with. Particularly for those (like me) who do most of their work in VMs.

 
As you may know, Windows creates a file named hiberfil.sys in the root of the system drive for systems where hibernation is enabled. The hiberfil.sys file is always the same size as physical RAM. In a VM where hibernation is normally replaced with the VM software’s suspend feature, that can be quite a sizeable chunk of wasted space. In a production environment I would normally want to disable hibernation, too.

Trouble is, you can’t disable hibernation anywhere in the GUI. It must be disabled from the command line using the command: 
powercfg.exe /hibernate off

This is further documented in the following MS KB articles:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920730
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929658
• How to Disable Hibernation on Windows Vista

Also see my blog post on how to monitor the hibernation settings with OpsMgr.

-WINSXS Folder
After the installation of Windows 2008 server, the WINSXS directory consumed 3 Gb of disk space. After a while and several updates this folder growed to 10 Gb.Windows 2008 stores all language versions for all DLLs it downloads in the normal updating process. Just deleting stuff there is described as mortally dangerous as it contains vital components. 

After installing SP2 (which comes with compcln.exe) you can run this tool and it will clean unnecessary updates.
You can run compcln.exe to cleanup the WINSXS folder.

Next steps are to create a dashboard to monitor if the Processor, Memory and Disk are performing within the threshold we going to set.

First step is of course to install the SharePoint WSS features and the SQL dashboard. Steps to install the software are described in the documentation of the SLD dashboard; this is not covered in this document.

-          Create a new “Service Level Tracking” item
-          Give it a name; in this example it’s called “Disk Usage”
-          Next
-          Select a class of object to target “Windows Server 2008 Operating System”
-          Scope it to “Agent Managed Computer Group”
-          Select a management pack to save the  data
-          Next
-          Choose Add; “Collection rule SLO”

 % Processor Time
Service level objective name:
-          % Processor Time
Targeted class
-          Windows Server 2008 Operating System
Performance collection rule
-          Processor % Processor Time Total 2008
Aggregation Method
-          Avarage
Service level objective goal:
-          Less Than 40

 Available MBytes
Service level objective name:
-         Available Megabytes
Targeted class
-          Windows Server 2008 Operating System
Performance collection rule
-          Memory Available Megabytes 2008
Aggregation Method
-          Avarage
Service level objective goal:
-          More Than 300

 Available MBytes
Service level objective name:
-         Available Megabytes
Targeted class
-          Windows Server 2008 Operating System
Performance collection rule
-          Memory Available Megabytes 2008
Aggregation Method
-          Avarage
Service level objective goal:
-          More Than 300

After these steps we have to insert the KPI’s in the SharePoint site.
-          Open the “http://localhost/default.aspx” site on the SharePoint site server
-         Edit the “Hidden Dashboard Configration”

-         Select the “Hidden Dashboard Configuration” and select the counters you want to see.

-         Browse to http://localhost/default.aspx and you see the dashboard as shown below

Starting with the installation of SQL 2005 last year i noticed that the options with SQL 2008 R2 are much more comprehensive especially the reporting functions are very good. So let’s upgrade to 2008 R2.

Before taking the upgrade start with good backups of the databases, the SQL server and all the OpsMgr components.

1. Back up all databases
2. Be sure to only upgrade with OpsMgr R2 (if possible minimal Cumulative Update 2)
3. Upgrade Database components (OperationsManager, OperationsManagerDW and the ACS database)
4. Upgrade the Operational database to SQL 2008

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 adds support for using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for your databases. If you currently are using SQL Server 2005, you need to perform some steps on your Operations Manager 2007 data before and after you upgrade your SQL Server installation. Two tools are provided on the R2 installation media to facilitate the upgrade. These tools are also included in SP1 update rollup 971541 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=167911) if you are upgrading from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 with Operations Manager 2007 SP1.

To inplace upgrade from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 R2

1. Go to the reporting server and Run the SRSUpgradeTool program. This tool saves and restores three configuration files that were modified during Operations Manager 2007 Reporting installation. Run the following  command from a command prompt: SRSUpgradeTool.exe /InstanceName:<InstanceName> /Action:PreSQLUpgrade
   Instance name is the name of the SQL instance that houses the reporting database example: SRSUpgradeTool.exe /InstanceName:MSSQLSERVER /Action:PreSQLUpgrade
   Note that the SRSUpgrade tool should be from at least the  Cumulative Update 2 version
   
2. Restart the SQL Server Reporting services service
   
3. Upgrade the SQL Server 2005 installation to SQL Server 2008 R2, using the procedures outlined in the SQL Server 2008 product documentation (this is just a next next finish upgrade)
   
4. If you have a separate reporting server also upgrade this server.
5. After the upgrade it’s best to run a SQL query to clean up the localizedtext and publishermessage tables.
   The cleanup script (cleanup.sql) can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/nl-nl/library/dd789073(en-us).aspx.

The implace upgrade to SQL 2008 R2 of the OpsMgr servers worked like a charm! No issues or strange things.

When building custom reports at a customer site we ran into some issues with Reporting server.
All default reports functioned well but when we created a new report we ran into the following issue.

For more information about this error navigate to the report server on the local server machine, or enable remote errors
—————————-
Cannot create a connection to data source ‘dataSource1′.
—————————-
An error has occurred during report processing.

On the reporting server SSL was enabled to secure the reporting sites.
When i browsed to the reporting it came up with Unable to Connect to Remote Server Error when navigating to the web access. Typically an issue like this occurs in the RSWebApplication.config.
This file is located in the ReportManager Folder (Example: D:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.3\Reporting Services\ReportManager).
I did some investigating and checked the RSWebApplication.config file.

<ReportServerUrl></ReportServerUrl>
<ReportServerVirtualDirectory>ReportServer</ReportServerVirtualDirectory>
<ReportBuilderTrustLevel>FullTrust</ReportBuilderTrustLevel>

After changing the ReportServerUrl tag to contain both the server URL and the virtual directory, it could then connect to the remote server.

<ReportServerUrl>http://Servername/ReportServer/</ReportServerUrl>
<ReportServerVirtualDirectory></ReportServerVirtualDirectory>
<ReportBuilderTrustLevel>FullTrust</ReportBuilderTrustLevel>

After leaving the ReportServerUrl tag blank the problem was solved.

Ok next the issue on OpsMgr still exists so the next chapter was to investigate the datasource issue.

Investigating the datasource issue
After that i got the following message “Cannot create a connection to data source ‘dataSource1′.”

After some investigating I looked in the Reporting Server logfile Drive:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.10\Reporting Services\LogFiles and find out that it was generating a report with the NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON user which is not authenticated.

I finally resolved the issue:
Open your report server https://server/Reports, click on the “Data Sources” and configure it to use “Credentials stored securely in the report server” and enter the Windows authentication credentials of the account who has read access in the OperationsManagerDW database.