SCOM

DPM 2012 R2 Reporting Improvements

by

A while back I released a custom DPM report that could be loaded in SSRS. This report is community based and only offered reporting on one DPM server at a time. It was however an improvement over the out of the box DPM reporting. More about the custom DPM report here: https://www.buchatech.com/2014/04/free-dpm-backup-summary-report/ . Finally Microsoft has taken the step to improve the out of the box reporting within DPM. Hats off to the DPM team for stepping up and taking steps to improve this. Recently at TechEd Europe new DPM reporting was announced. It is not available as of now but is coming soon.

The video covering this can be found here starting at 19:43:

Cloud Integrated Data Protection with System Center Data Protection Manager and Microsoft Azure Backup

http://channel9.msdn.com/events/TechEd/Europe/2014/CDP-B334

In this blog post I will take a look at what is coming. As you can see there is some success SLA reporting, protected data source overview on specific workloads such as Exchange, SharePoint and SQL, duration summary in hours, top backup failure reasons, bandwidth, and transfer data, and even data around deduplication! The new reporting will be surfaced in SCOM. This is what the report will look like.

clip_image001

With the new reporting you can chose to use what is their out of the box or extend this further without any coding. This reporting framework will cover all of your DPM servers because it is surfaced in SCOM. The new reporting leverages the SCOM management pack and the DPM management pack. All of your DPM servers are aggregated up through SCOM and therefore will show up in reports. Below are two diagrams one that breaks down the new reporting framework and one that covers the new reporting architecture:

clip_image002

clip_image003

To enable the reporting you will need to first have the two DPM management packs loaded in your SCOM deployment. Your DPM servers need to be discovered. You then will need to add a third DPM reporting management pack. The following screenshot shows the new DPM Reporting management pack for SCOM.

clip_image004

After the new management pack is loaded the some new DPM views are added within the SCOM DW database as seen in the following screenshot. Note that the new reporting has not been released and therefore we may see more changes to the views. The new report can be accessed and used or you can build your own report based on the views using a tool like report builder.

clip_image005

The new reporting is estimated to be public in January as a part of the next update rollup. Thanks DPM team for making improvements such as this to DPM. If you have specific requests or feedback about what you want to see in DPM reporting feel free to email me.

Read more

SCOM Cannot initialize report after DB move

by

After moving the SCOM database, DW database and Reporting database to a SQL 2012 cluster I was no longer able to run reports. I would get a Cannot initialize report error as shown in the following screenshot. More of the error: Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportServerException: An error has occurred during report processing. (rsProcessingAborted) —> Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportServerException: Cannot create a … Read more

MVP Unplugged at TechED Video

by

Savision just released a video they put together of interviews with several MVP’s from TechEd NA 2014. MVP’s in the video include: Robert Butler’ Cameron Fuller Kevin Greene Ahmed Nabil Mahmoud Rick Heiges Colin Smith and me The video was to gather our opinions on the following topics: System Center & VMM Security Concerns in … Read more

SysCTR 2012 R2 UR2 – SCSM fixes, DPM SRV 03 support, & new SCOM DB Widgets

by

Microsoft has release UR2 for System Center 2012 R2. There are many good fixes for the System Center products in this release.

For Service Manager a good amount of console issues are resolved including the annoying FullAdapter error. Here is the list:

  • Assume that users have both SMTP and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) endpoints. When you send email messages to these users from the Service Manager console, Service Manager uses the Lync SIP endpoint as the email address.
  • After you select the Service Requests with Service Level Warning feature, an error occurs about one hour later.
  • After you select the Assigned to me view, a FullAdapter exception occurs about one hour later.
  • When the Service Manager console runs in maximized mode, you encounter one or more of the following issues:When you run PowerShell workflows at the same time, the results are displayed as successful. Actually, the workflows fail.
    • You experience slow performance in the console, and the console consumes excessive CPU resources.
    • Context menus in the console are not displayed as expected, and instead it is displayed at the upper-right hand corner of the main window.
    • Scroll bars for the work items preview pane do not display when you run in full-screen mode. Even if the scroll bars display, they are still inactive and you cannot move the slider.
    • Certain forms or wizards do not display appropriately. Specifically, only the left navigation pane displays and the right area is blank.
    • When you create or edit on a User Prompts page in a request offering, the page is not displayed appropriately.
    • When you scroll on an open work item or a configuration item form, the scrolling does not work. In this case, you can have the mouse held over the scroll bar for scrolling.
  • When a user tries to open an already opened attachment from a work item form, an exception is thrown.
  • After you mark a release record as Closed, the attachment and associated details cannot be retrieved.
  • When you create service requests from Request Offerings, it takes a long time to display the request offerings form.
  • When you try to use a service request template, the console crashes.
  • When you try to create a service request, a NullReferenceException exception is thrown and the console crashes.
  • The Service Manager console shows a generic Microsoft SQL exception instead of the detailed Data Collision exception when you run in a non-English environment.

The DPM update includes support for Windows 2003 Servers. This from the KB article:

DPM 2012 R2 now supports backup and recovery of Windows 2003 servers. In Update Rollup 2, you can now protect Windows Server 2003 by using DPM 2012 R2. The following workloads are also supported in Windows Server 2003:

Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007

Other highlights are:  SQL AlwaysOn with Clustering now supported and the ability to schedule backup and CC jobs defined by time windows on individual protection groups. There also are a number of issues that are resolved.

Some highlights from the Operations Manager UR 2 are:

Service Level Objectives (SLO) dashboard load times will be more consistent. When member of a member of a custom Operator role views load slow. This is resolved. There also has been updates to the Unix and Linux monitoring and SQL issues resolved. Something else to note that is new with this SCOM UR is new widgets for the dashboards. Very exciting! Here is a blog specifically about this http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2014/04/24/new-widgets-and-dashboard.aspx and a wiki article http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/24133.operations-manager-dashboard-widgets.aspx with details on them. Here are screenshots of some of the widgets:

NewSCOmWidget1  

NewSCOmWidget2  NewSCOmWidget3

UR downloads and full details can be found here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2932881

Read more

Featured on IT PRO Experts

by

Lee Berg a Systems Management Specialist, active member in the System Center community and now coworker of mine at Concurrency.com has a great YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com//LeeAlanBerg with Microsoft technology videos for the IT Pro community. It features Weekly Service Manager and Private Cloud round up’s, Demos, Reviews, and Interviews. Lee has been doing these IT … Read more

Monitor Scheduled Tasks with SCOM

by

Recently I was on a search for a management pack that would let me monitor Scheduled Tasks on Windows servers. A fellow System Center MVP Daniele Grandini let me know that his company Progel has one available. Progel has made the management pack available to the community for free that can monitor Scheduled Tasks on … Read more

Free SCSM, SCOM, DPM Tools for the Community

by

Wow what an exciting week in the System Center space! Lately there has been several free tools released for various System Center products in the community. I wanted to mention them here in one blog. Service Manager: Advanced Send Mail This one is very cool and something that has been needed for some time. Big … Read more

Enable Proxy as SCOM Console Task

by

Here comes another post about a console task. This time it is in SCOM. I have been doing something for a while that makes life a little bit easier. What I do is add a console task to SCOM that enables proxy on monitored servers when it is launched.

NOTE: For a discussion on why you would enable proxy on monitored servers visit this link:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/systemcenter/en-US/a373b34d-9b01-486c-a4f2-4b1f19bea46e/why-enable-scom-proxy-agent-?forum=operationsmanagergeneral

The nice thing about this console task is that it searches through monitored servers, finds the ones that do not have proxy enabled, enables them and then outputs who they are. This is possible thanks to a tool that Mark Manty of Microsoft built called SetAgentProxyEnabled. You can find that tool here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/markmanty/archive/2012/02/02/automate-setting-allow-agent-to-act-as-proxy-on-scom-agents.aspx

Here is the process I use to add this tool as a console task in SCOM.

  • Create a windows share on one of the management servers. I call it something like SCOMTasks.
  • Extract the tool into this share.
  • In SCOM navigate to Authoring>Management Pack Objects>Tasks.
  • Right click on Tasks and select Create a new Task.
  • In the Create Task Wizard expand Console Tasks and select Command line. Select or create a new management pack to store this task in and click Next.

clip_image001

Read more

New Dashboard for SCOM 2012

by

There is another cool solution from Coretech. Coretech has recently released a new Dashboard for SCOM 2012. This dashboard does a good job of presenting the health of your Business and IT Service in an easy to see format. It gives you a single place to show the health of the Distributed Applications and the … Read more