I often times create graphs for SCOM and other reporting needs, and have come to appreciate the cleanliness of the Dundas reporting widget included in SCOM. below are the steps needed to setup the tools, inspired by http://blogs.msdn.com/eugenebykov/archive/2007/11/20/enabling-enterprisemanagementchartcontrol-in-visual-studio-2005.aspx Copy the files MicrosoftRSChart.dll and MicrosoftRSChartDesigner.dll from the SCOM reporting server to %programfiles%Microsoft Visual Studio 8Common7IDEPrivateAssemblies Edit […]

One of the items I have tried to have SCOM do is monitor network traffic on some of our routers/switches. The basics of this is fairly simple – create an SNMP monitor to poll on a set frequency and then store it as performance data. However I ran into issues with SCOM reporting that the […]

The default service monitor employed in SCOM intelligently identifies if the service is set to Automatic startup and only monitors the service if it is. This is a helpful default so that if you set the service to Manual startup or Disabled for some administrative reason, then you don’t get alerted on the service stopping. […]

Most organizations have a standard naming scheme that they use based on server type, location, or department. For instance, the letters “DC” suggests a domain controller, “Mail” or “EX” suggests exchange, “SQL” suggests SQL servers, and “DR” could suggest disaster recovery (for location, not role). Based on these name standards we may want to manage […]

Gratuitously stolen from http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2007/12/12/adding-custom-information-to-alert-descriptions-and-notifications.aspx Adding custom information to alert description (s) and notifications This is just a dump of some alert description variables I pulled from several other bloggers: Custom Properties for Alert Description and Notification: Alert Description Variables: For event Rules: EventDisplayNumber (Event ID): $Data/EventDisplayNumber$ EventDescription (Description): $Data/EventDescription$ Publisher Name (Event Source): $Data/PublisherName$ EventCategory: […]

In a large environment you need to know when something goes wrong. This is not necessarily because you want to know every issue that can occur, but because a single small issue can quickly grow into many small issues; which results in one large issue. Say for instance that you have a logon script that […]

In SCOM I created several groups to group our systems together logically: each VLAN, each application type, core infrastructure, etc… I then created master groups (VLANS, Applications, etc…) to house these logical groups as sub-groups. The idea was then to create a Diagram View targeted at the master groups and display the relation of the […]

As with most environments, I have some applications that require custom monitoring and tweaking. In this instance the application is our backup system (Tivoli Storage Manager to be specific), and due to the high I/O of the application SCOM is alerting on it daily. So here is the plan: Create a group based on the […]