The Microsoft SQL Server management packs for 2005 and 2008 will discover and monitor SQL 2005 Express edition and the Windows Internal Database by default. This is often not desired, and causes a lot of noise in the management group, because these are not full blown instances of SQL, and…
You will likely find that the default retention in the SCOM data warehouse will need to be adjusted for your environment. I often find customers are reluctant to adjust these – because they don’t know what they want to keep. So they assume the defaults are good, and they just…
This is something I see in almost all clients when we perform a SCOM RAAS (Health Check). The customer will have lots of data being inserted into the OpsDB from agents, about monitors that are constantly changing state. This can have a very negative effect on overall performance of the…
We often think of tuning OpsMgr by way of tuning “Alert Noise”…. by disabling rules that generate alerts that we don’t care about, or modifying thresholds on monitors to make the alert more actionable for our specific environment. However – one area of OpsMgr that often goes overlooked, is event…
This is something a LOT of people make mistakes on – so I wanted to write a post on the correct way to do this properly, using a very common target as an example. When we write a monitor for something like “Processor\% Processor Time\_Total” and target “Windows Server Operating…
I have been seeing this question come up a lot lately – as customers try and create groups of their disks – in order to create overrides for “certain” disks. So – I am creating this post to give some real world examples. Well – I will start this…
Config churn is basically, when your management server is in an almost never-ending loop of generating config. This can be caused by “less than optimized” management packs, pushing agents all the time, or injecting major changes into a management group, such as overrides or custom rules and monitors, or importing…
Sometimes agents either will not “talk” to the management server upon initial installation, and sometimes an agent can get unhealthy long after working fine. Agent health is an ongoing task of any OpsMgr Admin’s life. This post in NOT an “end to end” manual of all the factors that influence…
Quick download: Attached you will find a spreadsheet, with all the possible alert notification subscription variables that I am aware of. In this spreadsheet, I link these to the same values in the Alert table of the DB, the alert view of the DB, the Console alert view, the SDK…
By default – our generic reports access *aggregated* data in the warehouse… either daily or hourly. These contain information like number of data points, avg, min, max, and std. deviation data. However, sometimes users will want access to the RAW, individual data points. This is kept in the warehouse –…