Happy Holidays friends! I’ve been rather busy with several riveting initiatives of recent, and thought I’d share one of them. In this case, some ideas on migrating clients to a ConfigMgr destination hierarchy that is configured for HTTPS which means that all client to server communication happens over HTTPS. This article will expressly cover ideas on said migration. This article will not cover the steps for configuring HTTPs communication in ConfigMgr. Refer to the links below for some guidance on HTTPS configuration for ConfigMgr. https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/configmgrdogs/2015/01/21/configmgr-2012-r2-certificate-requirements-and-https-configuration/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sccm/core/plan-design/network/pki-certificate-requirements I strongly recommend that you acquaint yourself with the concepts and material covered in both articles and elesewhere steps before continuing with this article. Additionally, I recommend reading the fairly detailed conceptual guidelines on … Read More
DPM Modify Protection Group Error 31224
Here’s a Scenario: I protected some SQL data sources in DPM in a bid to ensure that transaction logs got backed up, and I configured my DPM protection group synchronization frequency accordingly, but wasn’t seeing my data getting backed up as frequently as expected. To remediate this, I modified my protection group by unprotecting said data, and re-protecting by defining desired settings in another protection group. At this point my data was protected and had several recovery points, but not with the desired frequency. I then unprotected to test with different settings, and upon attempting to protect the data again, I encountered the following error below: Modify protection group: [group name] failed: Error 31224: [data path] has recently been migrated. … Read More
UPDATE: APM Feature in SCOM 2016 Causes Failures in certain IIS Application Pools
I recently wrote an article about an issue that came to the fore a few months ago relating to how the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) feature in SCOM 2016 agent causes IIS Application pools running under the .NET Framework 2.0 runtime to fail. See the article here: http://www.mrchiyo.com/scom-2016-apm-linked-to-iis-application-pool-failures/. It was expected that a definitive fix for this issue would ship with Update rollup 3 for SCOM 2016. However, update rollup 3 (UR3) for SCOM 2016 was released a few days ago, but it does not appear to have a definitive fix for this issue. See the official update notes here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4016126/update-rollup-3-for-system-center-2016-operations-manager MICROSOFT RECOMMENDED WORKAROUNDS: Instead of a definitive fix, the Microsoft product team has highlighted various deployment scenarios, and … Read More
SCOM 2016 APM Linked to IIS Application Pool Failures.
****UPDATES: See update notes at bottom of the page. I recently encountered an issue where a client running a couple of SharePoint (SP) 2013 Farms was starting to see service failures across the board which adversely affected the availability of their sites. Prior to these failures, this client had recently upgraded their SCOM 2012 R2 environments to SCOM 2016, but there’s no definitive indication of causality as it relates to the SCOM upgrade. This article will provide an in-depth review of the issue, and a tested workaround. I’ll also update it with any new information that the Microsoft product group brings to light. The Issue: Firstly we determined that the affected sites were based on legacy IIS application pools … Read More
SCOM 2016 Certificate Errors. Event ID 20049
In this article, I’ll review SCOM Certificate Event ID 20049. This error event can be seen during an attempt to initiate mutual authentication across untrusted boundaries such as in a gateway or workgroup boundary scenario. In SCOM, certificates will need to be used for mutual authentication between the management servers and any gateway servers/ agents when Kerberos-based mutual authentication is not possible. If there’s an issue with the certificate, mutual authentication will fail, and one of the errors you could likely encounter is as shown below: The event detail reads: “The specified certificate could not be loaded because the key Usage specified does not meet OpsMgr requirements. The certificate must have the following usage types: Digital Signature, Key Encipherment.” This … Read More
SCOM 2016 – Creating Maintenance Mode Schedules
Firstly, this shall be short, but sweet. I won’t delve too deep. There’s already an entire bible, okay maybe half, on the subject. Find the authoritative Maintenance mode guide from Microsoft. Maintenance mode in SCOM enables you to avoid any alerts or errors that might occur when a monitored object, such as a computer, database, cluster, etc. is taken offline for maintenance. Maintenance mode suspends the following features: (SOURCE: TechNet) Rules and monitors Notifications Automatic responses State changes New alerts SCOM 2016 extends the on-demand placement of monitored objects into maintenance mode that existed in previous versions of SCOM, and provides you with the ability to define schedules aligned with your service or maintenance windows, and automatically place monitored … Read More
Why Upgrade to SCOM 2016 – A Review of New Features and Capabilities.
In this article, I’ll highlight, in no particular order, some of the new features in SCOM 2016 that are garnering a lot of attention, and hopefully make a compelling enough case for you the current SCOM Admin, you the curious Admin, you who lies in desperate need of a well-thought out SCOM, and you the former SCOM Admin/user sworn off SCOM and riddled with a thousand critical and crippling assessments of the erstwhile painful to use and implement versions of this paragon of monitoring beauty to actually give it another look…and no SCOM and OMS are not mutually exclusive. Au contraire! And so here it goes… Maintenance Mode scheduling from Monitoring Pane and from Clients Maintenance mode in SCOM enables … Read More
October 2016 Windows Updates and SCOM 2012 R2/ 2016 Console Crash Issues
The October 2016 Windows security updates appears to have come bearing gifts for SCOM Admins this year. These surfaced in the form of specific OS updates that appear to crash SCOM consoles across various server OS versions. Microsoft has identified the culprit updates as certain Windows security updates KB3194798/3192392/3185330/3185331 and it would seem that consoles installed on Server 2008R2 through 2016 are affected. I’ve seen various faulting modules referenced throughout out the community with ntdll.dll appearing to be one of the main ones out there. In my case, I see an additional issue with the ieframe.dll as seen below. UPDATE: HOTFIX Released. The product group released a hotfix for this issue and Security Update for Microsoft Windows (KB3200006) appears … Read More
Manually Trigger Object Discoveries in SCOM
System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), a component of Microsoft System Center 2016 is a software that helps you monitor services, devices, and operations for computers within your infrastructure. This article provides an overview of object discoveries in SCOM and how to manually trigger them. Note that System Center Operations Manager (SCOM 2016) is still in its technical preview (TP5) at the time of this posting but will be launched in a few weeks during Microsoft Ignite 2016. SCOM uses a agent installed on a computer to collect data, compare sampled data to predefined values, create alerts, and run responses. The agent then sends monitoring data to the management server in the SCOM management group. Management servers run various services, including … Read More
Configure OMS Connection to ConfigMgr — Step by Step
The 1606 release of System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) comes with a whole slew of new features, including a pre-release Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) Connector feature. Learn about ConfigMgr 1606 here. The OMS connector will enable you to sync data such as your collections from ConfigMgr to OMS. Once the collection information is synced to OMS you can then subject any OMS agent-managed endpoint to some action, such as patching, by virtue of its membership in a collection. When you combine this capability with existing system update and other update information that exists in OMS, the practical and other applications are rather evident. Note that because this is a pre-release feature it is meant for early pre-production testing, and … Read More