Just noticed the availability of the community edition of the Azure Monitor management solution for RDS, Citrix and Windows VDI. Organizations that provide services through VDI have a need for monitoring the solution to various degrees beyond just server-side and infrastructure and performance monitoring, but also monitoring for user experience, session monitoring etc. These solutions enable you to deeply analyze sizing, performance, and user experience at each time frame in the past and for lowest expenses. You will also be able to leverage your existing event management, and alerting workflows in Azure monitor and investments in Azure. Check out the solutions here: https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/sepagogmbh.loganalyticsagent-rds?tab=Overviewhttps://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/sepagogmbh.loganalyticsagent-rds?tab=PlansAndPrice
OMS is now Azure Monitor
Microsoft has recently made some branding changes that have resulted in the unification of many of its erstwhile standalone infrastructure and application monitoring services under the Azure Monitor banner. Azure Monitor, which previously was the recommended core infrastructure monitoring tool in Azure for collecting, visualizing, analyzing and responded to events related to metrics and a subset of logs, has now evolved into a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your on-premises and cloud (cloud agnostic) environments. I’d like to preface the rest of this article by clarifying what I mean when I say “OMS is now Azure Monitor”, which while technically inaccurate, is arguably an apt assertion. The Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) was a collection … 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
Application Discovery and Mapping with OMS Service Map
The Service Map solution in Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) is now generally available. Service Map discovers components of applications running on both Windows and Linux systems, and intuitively maps the communication between the services. This capability enables you to view the connections that affect your systems, and better understand the relationships between the various components of your distributed applications. IMAGE SOURCE: TechNet The benefits are many and include discovery of your application and system components, incident management and root cause analysis, migration assurance, patch management, and BCDR strategy and planning. You can read more about its capabilities in the official Service Map articles. It is worth noting that the concept of Application Dependency Mapping (ADM) and attendant capabilities is … 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
OMS AD Assessment No data Found errors
The Active Directory (AD) Assessment management pack is one of the many solutions available to users in OMS. This solution assesses the risk and health of your server environments on a regular interval and provides a prioritized list of recommendations specific to your deployed server infrastructure. If upon adding this solution to your OMS workspace, you encounter “No data found” errors, it’s a likely indication that you do not have the OMS agent installed on any domain controllers managed in your workspace. You can further verify this by using the following OMS search query and reviewing the results. Type=Operation and Solution=ADAssessment | sort OperationStatus The search result detail for managed computers will indicate whether or not they meet the requirements … 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