Category Archive

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

****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

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

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

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

A client recently asked me how to obtain the agent files for installing UNIX/ Linux OpsMgr agents outside of OpsMgr, and from the command line for instance. After the cursory search for a good article on the web to pass along, I came up with nothing, and decided to correct that. This article will simply walk through how to obtain the agent files. I will not go over agent installation steps as there are numerous articles on the web that sufficiently cover that.   1. Let’s start by obtaining the management packs for UNIX/ Linux. Management packs can be found here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29696 2. Select the relevant files for your UNIX/ Linux distros. In my case, 2 flavors of CentOS and … Read More

This is the fourth article in a series of articles on how to monitor HP servers and storage with System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr). In the first part of this series, I reviewed the integration kit, and supported configuration and other environment considerations. In the second part of this series, I reviewed the steps for installing the HPE SCOM Integration kit. In the third article in this series, I reviewed the steps required for configuring the HPE SCOM Integration kit. In this article, I’ll review the HP Storage Management Pack features, and required configurations for the SNMP event delivery method. This article is based on the HP Storage Management Pack v4.2.1. The HP Storage Management Packs enhance your management capabilities, … Read More