David,
I’d rather do that, but for the Windows side, we have two different custom CMDBs [one for physical systems and the other for virtual systems] written by the same guy with different schema’s and no application level information or mapping. Our HP OMU guy has a 3rd written by someone else for Linux systems and all have a bit of outdated or suspect data in them. My goal is to get the SCOM 2007r2 environment gone and then see if we can do a CMDB with SCSM and get rid of the 3 custom solutions. Our HP guy is all on board with trying it too so that helps and we have the SC suite so why not. Since I will have a lot of the application level and team level data while building out the new monitoring environment, why not keep it and see what I can automate? Steven From: David Biot Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2015 11:38 PM To: [email protected] I did something like this recently. My customer has a custom written CMDB with all the information already present. Instead of adding a new regkey (and maintaining it), I created a discovery that runs once per hour and adds a lot of environment-specific data to SCOM, like: what team supports it, is it prod/test/..., what SLA is attributed to that system, is it virtual, what rack is the physical server installed in, what is the function of the server, etc... This makes it a little harder to create the initial discovery but eliminates the need to add a reg key and maintain it. I can also easily add a lot more environment-specific data: I just need to add a new property and change the discovery slightly to add more data that is already present in the CMDB. I can now make different overrides for PROD/ACC/... and send notifications with e.g. rack number of the server. I also use this to segment the alerts in different alert views in the SCOM console. On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 8:02 AM, Steven Peck <[email protected]> wrote: Sarbjit, Some additional considerations since you are looking at doing this. For my environment I essentially have 5-6 different teams who have a ‘primary’ responsibility for the health of a given set of servers. Being able to split out subscriptions is a requirement for me getting off the on call rotation for 60% of our servers (note, I am highly motivated). The initial ‘Team’ regkey entry will be set via a script since I know how to do this. Long term manual data entry is something that falls through the cracks and while I plan on building automation eventually, I can’t count on it short term. I plan on figuring out and creating a view/report/monitor for ‘no regkey’ (no class) and or ‘not a approved value’ to accommodate finding typo’s. I hate having to report I missed something and therefore a system isn’t being monitored. I recently also came across a task MP that would allow you to add/change that value from the console so I will either post here, or get my site up and post there and link to it. Probably a few weeks for that part. Just a consideration for this method when operating at a scale. Steven From: Sarbjit Singh Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2015 4:47 PM To: [email protected] Thanks for the discussion below. I was just about to start requirements gathering from customer for SCOM based dashboard for the operations team. Once I know how the customer wants the grouping to be, I will be creating the grouping via the methods discussed below. Regards Sarbjit Singh From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steven Peck Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2015 7:22 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [msmom] Groups in SCOM2012r2 Site died a while ago… been meaning to fix it… mumble mumble mumble … I was the documentation team lead for a large open source project so there was a lot of Drupal and PowerShell stuff on it which seems an odd mix now. Need to recover the backups and fix it. 😊 Maybe just start over. Got the Team attribute part of it implemented and working, I will export, save a version of the xml, seal it and import it back in tomorrow and get the next one done. It’s slowing me down as I am writing a MP doc on it as I go to correct a problem we had with the SCOM2007r2 environment (insufficient documentation over time). This is starting to be fun again! From: Kevin Holman Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2015 3:06 PM To: [email protected] Bingo. And agreed with blogging your examples…. super helpful for people to see blog examples put to the real world. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steven Peck Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2015 3:54 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [msmom] Groups in SCOM2012r2 So, looking at the article and putting on paper for me since I am at the rub sticks together to make fire stage of this… Create a MP named: FooBarInc Group Library (seal it) Regkey named: Team Create a discovery for the key Creates a class called Team and will have an attribute of what is in the registry key. (i.e your articles picture on SupportLevel) --- Create a MP named: FooBarInc Group Management Pack Dependency on FooBarInc Group Library. This is where I will create groups based on the attributes. In this starting case, one of 6. (t1, t2, s1, n1, s2 <- random examples) Since there is no discovery involved in this MP, any changes to ‘group names’, updates, added keys I make in future will not result in a new forced discovery. --- OK. Off to try it. I really need to get my site back up so I can post stuff like this so I can find it again. From: Steven Peck Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2015 9:32 AM To: [email protected] No no! I am all about trying to avoid the mistakes we made in the previous deployment. It’s why they pulled me back off messaging for the stalled SCOM deployment last week (Happy New Year, oh by the way we are re-org’ing and you are on a new team, best of luck because we want it done!). It just means relearning a lot of the changes since I missed all the stuff with SCOM 2012. Objects and classes have always been a challenge I was just getting a handle on my last go around. I had just finally created my first MP that did all the things I wanted it to the way I planned for (about my 5th stand alone MP) before the last re-org a few years ago and was realizing what we had done that wasn’t scalable or required so much more work to maintain because we didn’t understand the best practice at the time. Our current 2007r2 environment is a little fragile and inflexible at this point so trying to come up to speed and do it less wrong this time. We have a SCOM2012r2 dev/test SCOM environment now and have agents deployed and working on tuning, documentation and practices for production. The new production environment is built and awaiting agent deployment. Solving the teams/subscription issue and building and testing Orchestrator servers to talk with HP OMU in both places is the last component to all out work work work. I appreciate the advice and intend to act on it. From: Kevin Holman Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2015 9:06 AM To: [email protected] You could put them all together in a single MP. There is no requirement to separate them. It is simply a best practice – because you will make changes to the groups MP often…. but you will/should not be making as many changes to the one that contains the class and properties/discoveries. This will limit the impact on the clients for them all having to re-download the MP every time you make a change to a group which doesn’t affect them. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steven Peck Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2015 10:48 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [msmom] Groups in SCOM2012r2 That should get me started. I kept looking at it as one MP. For my needs, it looks like one class, five initial properties (5 teams). I was just starting to begin to understand this stuff last go around before they moved me. I suppose I had better get a better handle on it this time around! 😊 I think I had better schedule a meeting with myself so people leave alone while I play with this. Thanks! Steven From: Kevin Holman Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2015 8:35 AM To: [email protected] http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2009/06/10/creating-custom-dynamic-computer-groups-based-on-registry-keys-on-agents.aspx Basically – you want to create ONE new class, and use Windows Computer as your base class. Then keep adding properties to this class for anything special you will need. Put this extended class, and the discovery/discoveries to populate the class properties in its own MP and seal it. Only change it when you need to add a property. Adding properties can be done in XML or using the old SCOM 2007 R2 authoring console, or Visual Studio. Then – create another MP for your company groups. Place each group in there with whatever criteria you need, and leverage class properties from the above mentioned MP, or any others as needed. Seal this MP. Using the method above, you can leverage these groups anywhere else as needed in unsealed or other sealed MP’s, and use the groups for scoping views, notifications overrides, whatever. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steven Peck Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2015 10:13 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [msmom] Groups in SCOM2012r2 Greetings, I helped deploy our original SCOM 2007r2 environment several years ago and create some management pack using the original MP Authoring tool before they moved me to a different group. Our internal SCOM migration to 2012r2 sort of stalled and so they moved me back after an absence of a few years. Looking over our original environment I can say we learned a lot and are looking to not repeat some of the previous practices. 😊 With this change comes a requirement to ‘split the teams’ and alerts. I am looking to create a custom sealed management pack for us called ‘CompanyName Groups’. I figure the fastest, easiest way given our environment is to create a regkey on the servers and use this to determine which ‘group’ a server is in. Once I have this I will be able to filter subscriptions to various alerts. However, I am finding it challenging to find any docs or blog posts on this. One article I read seemed to indicate; create in console, export and seal, but I am somewhat concerned about modifying that in the future. Any pointers to blog posts or articles would be appreciated. Using either the Silect MP Authoring tool or the Visual Studio one (trying to go through Brian Wren’s presentations on MVA). I suspect I am just missing a concept or something others consider obvious. Thanks, Steven Peck
