Service Manager – Requirements Overview and Base Install

I was onsite last week deploying Service Manager 2010 and after much grumbling and moaning about it during the release candidate and beta releases, I’m actually starting to like it. Yes, it is still a little rough around the edges but what I do like is that rather than throw in lots of functionality that doesn’t work (remember Operations Manager 2007 RTM!), the Service Manager team have cut down on functionality but actually tried to make sure that what is there works and is stable. And I think they’ve done a good job.

I’ll start a few posts on the installation – as usual, the official documentation is really the place to look but I have taken this and tried to extract the key points and add some screen shots.

So, to start this series, the base install:
Part I – Overview of the service accounts and requirements. I can’t guarantee this is the “most” secure deployment but I have ensured that any administrator privileges handed out to service accounts are only ever local on a Service Manager core server.
Part II – Install Service Manager Management Server

Part III – Install Service Manager Data Warehouse Management Server

Operations Manager 2007 Versions numbers

SCOM 2007 RTM: 6.0.5000

SCOM 2007 SP1: 6.0.6278

SCOM 2007 R2 RTM: 6.1.7221

The monitoring of SNMP devices may stop intermittently in System Center Operations Manager or in System Center Essentials

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982501

Configuring SNMP monitoring with OpsMgr 2007

This comes up on the forums quite often so here are a summary of some of the best articles I’ve found on the net:

Configuring using the GUI:
The System Center Central team have a great series – Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV

David Allen has a good walkthrough here about creating SNMP Probe based monitors.

Issues with using the GUI to create monitors with numeric expressions – see Raphael Burri’s blog

SNMPVarBinds and the Alert Description Field – http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rslaten/archive/2007/10/31/snmpvarbinds-and-the-alert-description-field-in-opsmgr-2007.aspx

Authoring Console:
Kris Bash at Operating Quadrant has some great articles on SNMP monitoring.

Watch your Service Manager service account password

When installing Service Manager 2010 RTM, I kept getting an error at the end of the install – “Finalize: An error occurred while executing a custom action:RollbackCleanup”.

This seems to be a password issue if the Service Manager service account password contains a | symbol.

We removed the | symbol and the install completed fine. This has been replicated on a forum thread.

Some extra reports for OpsMgr 2007 R2

I’m a bit late catching up on these but there were some “new” reports posted on the MOM Team blog which may be of interest. They do require that the OpsMgr Data Warehouse is running on SQL 2008 as they don’t work on SQL 2005.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2010/04/29/reporting-scenarios-more-samples.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2010/05/10/reporting-scenarios-more-samples-updated-attachment.aspx

Updating Custom Fields using PowerShell

The question of how to update custom fields using PowerShell comes up quite often on the technet forum so I have tried to give a variety of approaches here on how to achieve this. PowerShell does seem to be quite resource intensive so keep a close eye on your RMS if you are running PowerShell scripts on a schedule and also test all of these scripts in a suitable test environment before deploying.

Here is the run through – https://systemcentersolutions.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/updatecustomfields.docx