Just wanted to let you know that version 6.0.7251.0 of System Center Management Pack for Windows 8 and 8.1 Client Operating System is now available for download from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38434.
This version includes fixes for correctly identifying the OS version, new alert messages for CPU utilization metrics, fixes for some of the discoveries and more. Complete details can be found in the management pack guide available in the above link.
We're happy to announce the public availability of the Surface Hub solution for OMS. Yes, Surface Hubs!
Through this solution, you can gain insights into Surface Hub availability, wired & wireless projections, and the Surface Hub's own calendar. This is one of multiple OMS solutions that enable enterprises to simplify IT management.
With availability data your IT team can determine if a Surface Hub is not available without the need to physically stop by each device. The calendar data shows whether the calendar for the Surface Hub has been initialized and is available. Through the wireless and wired projection views you can determine if a particular Hub is not able to project correctly. And of course, all of this data is searchable and can be used on top of alerting and other OMS capabilities.
Surface Hubs are shipping with the agent software needed to connect to OMS, so there is very little setup work needed. All you need to do is configure the Surface Hubs to connect to your OMS workspace, which you can do manually or programmatically. Once OMS detects a Surface Hub in your environment, the data will appear in the Surface Hub solution tile within 24 hours.
We’d love to get your feedback. Let us know if you have any comments or ideas.
Thanks,
Laura Cruz
Just a quick note to let you know that we updated System Center Operations Manager Management Packs for Windows Server 2016 roles. The table in this blog summarizes the updates made to each of the management packs. If you already installed the August 2015 version of management packs for the same role, please uninstall it manually before installing the updated management packs.
We are committed to creating management packs that are performat, address your monitoring needs but at the same time do not overwhelm you with too many alerts. We release management packs early so you can preview them and offer us feedback about the management packs. If you have feature requests for any of the management packs, please let us know at our Feedback website. If you find your feature has already been requested by someone else, please up-vote it. We consider the most up-voted feature requests for the next release of the management pack.
We are actively working on creating management packs for Windows Server 2016 server roles such as Active Directory Certificate Services, Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services, Remote Desktop Services, Hyper-V, Message Queuing, Host Guardian Service, Routing and Remote Access Service, Active Directory Web Application Proxy, Windows Server Update Services, Windows Deployment Services, Network Policy and Access Services, Active Directory Federation Services, Hyper V, MSMQ.
Windows Server 2016 Role Name | What’s new in the Management Pack |
Windows Server 2016 Operating System | Works on Windows Server 2016 Nano server monitoring support added |
DNS | Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 DNS Role Has one Folder view for DNS which rolls DNS 2016 and DNS 2012 R2 management packs together Nano server monitoring support Coming Soon! |
DHCP | Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 DHCP Role |
Failover Clustering | Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 Failover Cluster Role Nano server monitoring support added |
Network Load Balancing | Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 NLB Role |
Print Services | Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 Print Services Role |
Web Server IIS | Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 IIS Role Nano server monitoring support Coming Soon! |
Active Directory Domain Services | Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 ADDS Role |
DTC Transactions | Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 DTC Transactions Role |
Windows Defender | Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 Windows Defender Role |
Windows Server Essentials | Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 Windows Server Essentials Role |
Active Directory Rights Management Services | No changes since August 2015 Technical Preview |
Branch Cache | No changes since August 2015 Technical Preview |
File and iSCSI Services | No changes since August 2015 Technical Preview |
Suraj Suresh Guptha | Program Manager | Microsoft
Get the latest System Center news on Facebook and Twitter:
System Center All Up: http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/
Configuration Manager Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/configurationmgr/
Data Protection Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/
Orchestrator Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/orchestrator/
Operations Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/
Service Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager
Virtual Machine Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/scvmm
Many of you have already assisted in our efforts to learn about your monitoring problems and we appreciate your insights tremendously! I’m back with another opportunity to provide feedback to Microsoft about new server workloads you would like to see SCOM monitoring in the future. SCOM offers management packs for almost all Microsoft server workloads and many Non-Microsoft server workloads such as Linux OS, Unix OS, Apache, MySQL, etc. What other workloads (Including Non-Microsoft) would you like to see SCOM supporting monitoring in the future? Any workloads you or your customers were puzzled SCOM didn’t support?
Please let us know through the below survey link. The survey has just two questions and shouldn't take you more than a minute to complete.
Suraj Suresh Guptha | Program Manager | Microsoft
Get the latest System Center news on Facebook and Twitter:
System Center All Up: http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/
Configuration Manager Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/configurationmgr/
Data Protection Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/
Orchestrator Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/orchestrator/
Operations Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/
Service Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager
Virtual Machine Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/scvmm
Update Rollup 9 for System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager (OpsMgr 2012 R2 UR9) is now available to download. The KB article below describes the issues that are fixed and also contains the installation instructions for this update. For complete details including issues fixed, installation instructions and a download link, please see the following:
3129774 - Update Rollup 9 for System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3129774)
J.C. Hornbeck | Solution Asset PM | Microsoft
Our Blogs
Hey all, I wanted to share with you some details regarding the new Active Directory-Domain Services Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager that we will be releasing in conjunction with Windows Server 2016 (WS2016). But first who am I. My name is Eric Hunter and I have worked with the Active Directory (AD) product team for over 8 years now. A large part of that time I was responsible for the operational support of a live production domain that we, the Active Directory team here at Microsoft, use to validate the next version of AD through live, production usage. We validate it by promoting domain controllers with beta builds of the next version of Windows Server and having our employees and services use them daily. The one difference between our domain and yours is that we are constantly rebuilding domain controllers, other than that we are very similar. It is a multi-domain forest with thousands of users and computers, and mission critical systems relying on the domain to be operating with a high service quality.
Our approach for this new MP was to use it for our daily operations and to continually iterate on the MP functionality over time. The previous design philosophy had been a waterfall model where we would try to add features and bugs in a small window of time to ship with a version of Windows Server. But we found that was not conducive to creating an MP that we really wanted to use and that would work for us let alone you our customers. In the past we had relied on in-house monitoring tools to help fill in the monitoring gaps from the MP thinking that our environment was different from what a customer would have. What we found though was that what we wanted in the MP our customers wanted as well. So we decided to decrease the reliance on the in-house tools and shift to relying solely on SCOM in our environment. When we found a gap in the monitoring, we filled it. If the monitors we too noisy, we changed them. We have been working in this manner now for a few years and slowly but surely have been fixing many of the issues that were inherent in the old MP. Continually updating it over time, based on real world data, to eventually become what we rely on for domain health.
One of the biggest changes we made was to clean up the MP and remove anything that wasn’t working like we thought it should. We cleaned up all rules that did not auto-resolve, removed the oomads dependency from all scripts, reliance on down-level discovery MPs, and cleaned up some legacy monitors and OS specific libraries. We were removing so many of the legacy monitors, alerts, and libraries that we had to start over with a new library requiring a whole new MP. Thus the new MP that we are releasing with a shiny new name, Active Directory-Domain Services MP.
Another large change is how we monitor replication now. In the past replication was monitored by injecting a change into AD and tracking how long it took to replicate that change. The old way also required you to opt-in to the monitor, configuring it for individual DC’s or all at once. The old method generated a bunch of replication traffic and created objects in AD that could be confusing to admins. We didn’t like this method, and many customers did not either, and so we set out to find a way to monitor replication in a more passive manner. Now we use the built in tools in AD to track replication health. We added a replication queue monitor that will alert you when a DC starts lagging and a replication health check to make sure your DC has replicated within expected thresholds. Note that there are so many different replication environments out there and no one size fits all so some adjusting maybe necessary. As is the case with almost all of our new monitors, both the replication queue and replication health check monitors are configurable. You can set the thresholds for when they alert you so that they will fit your personal environment.
Lastly we changed our philosophy on how we monitor AD from an event driven model to synthetic monitors. In our experience, the event based model is both noisy and not very helpful. When an event rule fired, is there really a problem? Is it still a problem a few hours later? What’s the impact? Therefore we decided to move exclusively to synthetic based health monitors. We put a number of changes into the MP we now call the Domain Member Perspective MP (this was previously named Client Perspective). This MP verifies in a generic way if it can contact the domain so you know that clients are able to connect to it. It also tests the bind performance of your PDC and verifies that group policy is getting applied without errors on your member systems. But the biggest monitor we added to the Domain Member Perspective is the Domain Controller Health Monitor. This monitor has become my favorite for alerting me to an issue on a DC. We have spent a lot of time verifying and updating the logic of this monitor to not throw false alerts, but to know when a DC is not responding like it should and whether or not it is in a state that could impact users. It is our go to monitor in our environment and hopefully it will help you as well.
You can find the new ADDS 2016 MP at the DLC page for Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview Management Packs.
I hope you enjoy the changes we made to the ADDS MP and we would love to have your feedback as we continue to iterate on this and make it better for you and for us. We would especially like to hear from you about how you chose to change the defaults in the new monitors. It would really help us to know what the best default value is and if there are other monitors we can add or ways to adjust the MP to be more efficient out of the box. Please share your feedback about the MP at the SCOM Product Feedback forum. If your feedback has already been suggested by someone else, please up-vote it.
Eric Hunter | Software Engineer | Microsoft
Get the latest System Center news on Facebook and Twitter:
System Center All Up: http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/
Configuration Manager Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/configurationmgr/
Data Protection Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/
Orchestrator Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/orchestrator/
Operations Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/
Service Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager
Virtual Machine Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/scvmm
We're happy to announce the public availability of the Surface Hub solution for OMS. Yes, Surface Hubs!
Through this solution, you can gain insights into Surface Hub availability, wired & wireless projections, and the Surface Hub's own calendar. This is one of multiple OMS solutions that enable enterprises to simplify IT management.
With availability data your IT team can determine if a Surface Hub is not available without the need to physically stop by each device. The calendar data shows whether the calendar for the Surface Hub has been initialized and is available. Through the wireless and wired projection views you can determine if a particular Hub is not able to project correctly. And of course, all of this data is searchable and can be used on top of alerting and other OMS capabilities.
Surface Hubs are shipping with the agent software needed to connect to OMS, so there is very little setup work needed. All you need to do is configure the Surface Hubs to connect to your OMS workspace, which you can do manually or programmatically. Once OMS detects a Surface Hub in your environment, the data will appear in the Surface Hub solution tile within 24 hours.
We’d love to get your feedback. Let us know if you have any comments or ideas.
Thanks,
Laura Cruz
Just a quick note to let you know that we updated System Center Operations Manager Management Packs for Windows Server 2016 roles. The table in this blog summarizes the updates made to each of the management packs. If you already installed the August 2015 version of management packs for the same role, please uninstall it manually before installing the updated management packs.
We are committed to creating management packs that are performat, address your monitoring needs but at the same time do not overwhelm you with too many alerts. We release management packs early so you can preview them and offer us feedback about the management packs. If you have feature requests for any of the management packs, please let us know at our Feedback website. If you find your feature has already been requested by someone else, please up-vote it. We consider the most up-voted feature requests for the next release of the management pack.
We are actively working on creating management packs for Windows Server 2016 server roles such as Active Directory Certificate Services, Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services, Remote Desktop Services, Hyper-V, Message Queuing, Host Guardian Service, Routing and Remote Access Service, Active Directory Web Application Proxy, Windows Server Update Services, Windows Deployment Services, Network Policy and Access Services, Active Directory Federation Services, Hyper V, MSMQ.
|
Windows Server 2016 Role Name |
What’s new in the Management Pack |
|
Windows Server 2016 Operating System |
Works on Windows Server 2016 Nano server monitoring support added |
|
DNS |
Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 DNS Role Has one Folder view for DNS which rolls DNS 2016 and DNS 2012 R2 management packs together Nano server monitoring support Coming Soon! |
|
DHCP |
Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 DHCP Role |
|
Failover Clustering |
Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 Failover Cluster Role Nano server monitoring support added |
|
Network Load Balancing |
Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 NLB Role |
|
Print Services |
Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 Print Services Role |
|
Web Server IIS |
Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 IIS Role Nano server monitoring support Coming Soon! |
|
Active Directory Domain Services |
Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 ADDS Role |
|
DTC Transactions |
Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 DTC Transactions Role |
|
Windows Defender |
Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 Windows Defender Role |
|
Windows Server Essentials |
Works on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 Windows Server Essentials Role |
|
Active Directory Rights Management Services |
No changes since August 2015 Technical Preview |
|
Branch Cache |
No changes since August 2015 Technical Preview |
|
File and iSCSI Services |
No changes since August 2015 Technical Preview |
Suraj Suresh Guptha | Program Manager | Microsoft
Get the latest System Center news on Facebook and Twitter:
System Center All Up: http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/
Configuration Manager Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/configurationmgr/
Data Protection Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/
Orchestrator Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/orchestrator/
Operations Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/
Service Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager
Virtual Machine Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/scvmm
Many of you have already assisted in our efforts to learn about your monitoring problems and we appreciate your insights tremendously! I’m back with another opportunity to provide feedback to Microsoft about new server workloads you would like to see SCOM monitoring in the future. SCOM offers management packs for almost all Microsoft server workloads and many Non-Microsoft server workloads such as Linux OS, Unix OS, Apache, MySQL, etc. What other workloads (Including Non-Microsoft) would you like to see SCOM supporting monitoring in the future? Any workloads you or your customers were puzzled SCOM didn’t support?
Please let us know through the below survey link. The survey has just two questions and shouldn’t take you more than a minute to complete.
Suraj Suresh Guptha | Program Manager | Microsoft
Get the latest System Center news on Facebook and Twitter:
System Center All Up: http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/
Configuration Manager Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/configurationmgr/
Data Protection Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/
Orchestrator Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/orchestrator/
Operations Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/
Service Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager
Virtual Machine Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/scvmm
Update Rollup 9 for System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager (OpsMgr 2012 R2 UR9) is now available to download. The KB article below describes the issues that are fixed and also contains the installation instructions for this update. For complete details including issues fixed, installation instructions and a download link, please see the following:
3129774 – Update Rollup 9 for System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3129774)
J.C. Hornbeck | Solution Asset PM | Microsoft
Our Blogs
Hey all, I wanted to share with you some details regarding the new Active Directory-Domain Services Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager that we will be releasing in conjunction with Windows Server 2016 (WS2016). But first who am I. My name is Eric Hunter and I have worked with the Active Directory (AD) product team for over 8 years now. A large part of that time I was responsible for the operational support of a live production domain that we, the Active Directory team here at Microsoft, use to validate the next version of AD through live, production usage. We validate it by promoting domain controllers with beta builds of the next version of Windows Server and having our employees and services use them daily. The one difference between our domain and yours is that we are constantly rebuilding domain controllers, other than that we are very similar. It is a multi-domain forest with thousands of users and computers, and mission critical systems relying on the domain to be operating with a high service quality.
Our approach for this new MP was to use it for our daily operations and to continually iterate on the MP functionality over time. The previous design philosophy had been a waterfall model where we would try to add features and bugs in a small window of time to ship with a version of Windows Server. But we found that was not conducive to creating an MP that we really wanted to use and that would work for us let alone you our customers. In the past we had relied on in-house monitoring tools to help fill in the monitoring gaps from the MP thinking that our environment was different from what a customer would have. What we found though was that what we wanted in the MP our customers wanted as well. So we decided to decrease the reliance on the in-house tools and shift to relying solely on SCOM in our environment. When we found a gap in the monitoring, we filled it. If the monitors we too noisy, we changed them. We have been working in this manner now for a few years and slowly but surely have been fixing many of the issues that were inherent in the old MP. Continually updating it over time, based on real world data, to eventually become what we rely on for domain health.
One of the biggest changes we made was to clean up the MP and remove anything that wasn’t working like we thought it should. We cleaned up all rules that did not auto-resolve, removed the oomads dependency from all scripts, reliance on down-level discovery MPs, and cleaned up some legacy monitors and OS specific libraries. We were removing so many of the legacy monitors, alerts, and libraries that we had to start over with a new library requiring a whole new MP. Thus the new MP that we are releasing with a shiny new name, Active Directory-Domain Services MP.
Another large change is how we monitor replication now. In the past replication was monitored by injecting a change into AD and tracking how long it took to replicate that change. The old way also required you to opt-in to the monitor, configuring it for individual DC’s or all at once. The old method generated a bunch of replication traffic and created objects in AD that could be confusing to admins. We didn’t like this method, and many customers did not either, and so we set out to find a way to monitor replication in a more passive manner. Now we use the built in tools in AD to track replication health. We added a replication queue monitor that will alert you when a DC starts lagging and a replication health check to make sure your DC has replicated within expected thresholds. Note that there are so many different replication environments out there and no one size fits all so some adjusting maybe necessary. As is the case with almost all of our new monitors, both the replication queue and replication health check monitors are configurable. You can set the thresholds for when they alert you so that they will fit your personal environment.
Lastly we changed our philosophy on how we monitor AD from an event driven model to synthetic monitors. In our experience, the event based model is both noisy and not very helpful. When an event rule fired, is there really a problem? Is it still a problem a few hours later? What’s the impact? Therefore we decided to move exclusively to synthetic based health monitors. We put a number of changes into the MP we now call the Domain Member Perspective MP (this was previously named Client Perspective). This MP verifies in a generic way if it can contact the domain so you know that clients are able to connect to it. It also tests the bind performance of your PDC and verifies that group policy is getting applied without errors on your member systems. But the biggest monitor we added to the Domain Member Perspective is the Domain Controller Health Monitor. This monitor has become my favorite for alerting me to an issue on a DC. We have spent a lot of time verifying and updating the logic of this monitor to not throw false alerts, but to know when a DC is not responding like it should and whether or not it is in a state that could impact users. It is our go to monitor in our environment and hopefully it will help you as well.
You can find the new ADDS 2016 MP at the DLC page for Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview Management Packs.
I hope you enjoy the changes we made to the ADDS MP and we would love to have your feedback as we continue to iterate on this and make it better for you and for us. We would especially like to hear from you about how you chose to change the defaults in the new monitors. It would really help us to know what the best default value is and if there are other monitors we can add or ways to adjust the MP to be more efficient out of the box. Please share your feedback about the MP at the SCOM Product Feedback forum. If your feedback has already been suggested by someone else, please up-vote it.
Eric Hunter | Software Engineer | Microsoft
Get the latest System Center news on Facebook and Twitter:
System Center All Up: http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/
Configuration Manager Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/configurationmgr/
Data Protection Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/
Orchestrator Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/orchestrator/
Operations Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/
Service Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager
Virtual Machine Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/scvmm
We are pleased to announce that System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager (SCOM 2012 R2) now supports SQL Server 2012 SP3 as its database. There is no minimum SCOM Update Rollup (UR) requirement for SCOM to work with SQL 2012 SP3 but we highly recommend installing the latest SCOM UR.
We are currently doing comprehensive testing to validate if there are any issues using SCOM 2012 SP1 with SQL 2012 SP3. Please continue to watch the SCOM blog for news about SCOM 2012 SP1 support for SQL Server 2012 SP3.
Suraj Suresh Guptha | Program Manager | Microsoft
Get the latest System Center news on Facebook and Twitter:
Main System Center blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/
Configuration Manager Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/configurationmgr/
Data Protection Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/
Orchestrator Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/orchestrator/
Operations Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/
Service Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager
Virtual Machine Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/scvmm
Update Rollup 9 for System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager Management Packs for UNIX and Linux is now available to download. The KB article below describes the issues that are fixed and also contains the installation instructions for this update. For complete details including issues fixed, installation instructions and a download link, please see the following:
3141435 – Update Rollup 9 for System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager Management Packs for UNIX and Linux (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3141435)
J.C. Hornbeck | Solution Asset PM | Microsoft
Our Blogs
Operations Management Suite (OMS) is Microsoft’s simplified cloud-based IT management solution providing Log Analytics, Automation, VM Backup & Site Recovery, and Security & Compliance across any of your on-premises and public cloud environments. We are excited to announce new integration in the Azure portal with Log Analytics (OMS) allowing you to gain insights even faster.
OMS has a brand new management experience in the Azure portal. This new experience allows you to create a new OMS workspace, link an OMS workspace to an Azure subscription, and onboard Windows and Linux Azure VMs into the the OMS service.
To onboard your pre-existing Windows and Linux Azure VMs into OMS select the Log Analytics (OMS) resource.
Pro Tip: Click the star icon on the right to pin the Log Analytics (OMS) resource to your default menu
From here select the OMS workspace you wish to onboard your Azure VM into. On the OMS Workspace panel select the Virtual Machines button.
Lastly, select the Windows or Linux Virtual Machine and click Connect.
That’s it! Within a couple minutes your Azure VM is sending data to OMS.
If you are new to OMS and want an easy way to see the capabilities offered by the service, we highly recommend signing up for the free tier data plan that includes a 500 MB daily upload limit and seven-day data retention.
Once signed up with OMS, you can click the following buttons below to provision a brand new Windows or Linux VM that comes pre-installed with the OMS Agent.
Note: The OMS Workspace ID and OMS Workspace Key are required to onboard to the OMS Service. These can be found by logging into the OMS Portal and selecting Settings from the large blue pane or the drop down by clicking the Workspace name.
In Settings select CONNECTED SOURCES and the you are able to copy the WORKSPACE ID and PRIMARY KEY.
Windows VM OMS Quickstart
Ubuntu VM OMS Quickstart
Additionally, these templates can be deployed through Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell.
If your enterprise already has an arsenal of ARM Templates, you can insert the resource snippets below to easily add the OMS Agent.
Note: The OMS Workspace ID and OMS Workspace Key are required to onboard the OMS Service and can be found in the OMS Portal under Settings > Connected Sources
{
"type": "extensions",
"name": "Microsoft.EnterpriseCloud.Monitoring",
"apiVersion": "[variables('apiVersion')]",
"location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
"dependsOn": [
"[concat('Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/', variables('vmName'))]"
],
"properties": {
"publisher": "Microsoft.EnterpriseCloud.Monitoring",
"type": "MicrosoftMonitoringAgent",
"typeHandlerVersion": "1.0",
"autoUpgradeMinorVersion": true,
"settings": {
"workspaceId": "[parameters('workspaceId')]"
},
"protectedSettings": {
"workspaceKey": "[parameters('workspaceKey')]"
}
}
}
{
"type": "Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/extensions",
"name": "<extension-deployment-name>",
"apiVersion": "<api-version>",
"location": "<location>",
"dependsOn": [
"[concat('Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/', <vm-name>)]"
],
"properties": {
"publisher": "Microsoft.EnterpriseCloud.Monitoring",
"type": "OmsAgentForLinux",
"typeHandlerVersion": "1.0",
"settings": {
"workspaceId": "<workspace id>"
},
"protectedSettings": {
"workspaceKey": "<workspace key>"
}
}
}
| Supported Operating Systems | Version |
| Ubuntu Server | 12.04 LTS, 14.04 LTS, 15.04, 15.10 (x86/x64) |
| SUSE Linux Enterprise Server | 11 and 12 (x86/x64) |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server | 5,6, and 7 (x86/x64) |
| Oracle Linux Server | 5,6, and 7 (x86/x64) |
| CentOS Linux Server | 5,6, and 7 (x86/x64) |
| Amazon Linux Server | 2012.09 –> 2015.09 (x86/x64) |
| Windows Server | 2008 SP1 and above (x86/x64) |
Overall, the new Azure Integration streamlines creating and integrating Log Analytics into your Azure environment. Pair this ease of deployment with our OMS Free tier (500 MB Daily Upload and 7 Day data retention) and powerful Log Analytics and Insights are only a couple clicks away. We hope to see you on the OMS Service, and are happy to take feedback for new features on our User Voice or answer issues emailed to scdata@microsoft.com
Active Directory is a key component of an enterprise IT environment. To ensure high availability and high performance, each domain controller has its own copy of the Active Directory database. Domain controllers replicate with each other in order to propagate changes across the enterprise. Failures in this replication process can cause a host of problems across the enterprise, so staying on top of replication status is an important task for any Active Directory administrator.
To help with this task, we’ve recently released a new solution for Operations Management Suite: AD Replication Status. This solution gathers information about replication failures throughout your AD environment and surfaces it on your OMS dashboard.
If you don’t have an OMS workspace yet, you can create one here, for free.
Then you’ll need to connect least one of your domain controllers to OMS. You can view detailed documentation on how to connect a machine to OMS.
If you’d prefer to run from an OMS-connected member server in your domain, rather than a domain controller, you’ll need to set the following registry key on the member server, then restart the HealthService:
Key: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\AzureOperationalInsights\Assessments_Targets
Value: ADReplication
Once you have connected at least one domain controller (or member server with registry key set) to your OMS workspace, simply go to the Solutions Gallery from the main OMS dashboard, then click on the AD Replication Status solution.
When you add this solution to your workspace, you’ll start to see statistics on replication errors in your Active Directory environment, right on your OMS dashboard:
(The “critical” replication error number refers to errors that are over 75% of tombstone lifetime, or TSL. If you’re not familiar with TSL, we’ll talk about it more in just a minute.)
This tile will update automatically every few days, so you’ll always be able to see the latest information on replication errors in your environment.
Clicking this tile will take you into the AD Replication Status dashboard screen, which has more detailed information about the errors that were detected:
Let’s take a closer look at the specific blades that show on this screen.
These show destination servers and source servers, respectively, that are experiencing replication errors. The number after each domain controller name indicates the number of replication errors on that domain controller.
We show the errors by both source server and destination server because some problems are easier to troubleshoot from the source server perspective, and others from the destination server perspective. In this example, you can see that many destination servers have roughly the same number of errors, but there’s one source server (ADDC35) that has many more errors than all the others. It’s likely that there is some problem on ADDC35 that is causing it to fail to send data to its replication partners, and so fixing the problems on ADDC35 will likely resolve many of the errors that appear in the destination server blade.
If you click on a domain controller name, you will drop into the search screen, where you can see more detailed information on the errors on that specific domain controller.
Of course, all the great features of the OMS search screen are available to you to drill in to the root cause of the problem. Here, we’ve filtered down the results to just look at replication errors involving the Schema partition.
We can see that this source server is failing to replicate this same partition with 19 different destination servers, and at least the three shown here are failing with the same error (8451 – The replication operation encountered a database error). Again, this indicates that we can most likely focus our troubleshooting efforts on this single source server (ADDC35) and expect that a single fix will address multiple errors.
The search screen also displays a “HelpLink” for each error. Unfortunately, clicking on this link currently does not work properly, but you can copy/paste it into your browser window to view documentation on TechNet that has more information on the error and how to troubleshoot it. As an example, here’s a clickable link to the help on 8451 errors: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=228631
This blade gives you information on the types of errors detected throughout your enterprise. Each error has a unique numerical code, as well as a message that can help you determine the root cause of the error.
The donut at the top gives you an idea of which errors appear more/less frequently in your environment. In this example, we can see that the top occurring error codes were 8451 (152 occurrences), 1256 (93 occurrences), 1908 (22 occurrences), and 1722 (21 occurrences).
The list shows the error codes identified, along with the associated message. Again, you can click on an error in the list to drop into the search screen and see more detailed information on each occurrence of that particular error code, across all domain controllers in your enterprise. Here’s an example filtering down to just occurrences of error code 1908:
The tombstone lifetime determines how long a deleted object (called a “tombstone”) is retained in the Active Directory database. Once a deleted object passes the tombstone lifetime, a garbage collection process automatically removes it from the Active Directory database.
The default tombstone lifetime is 180 days for most recent versions of Windows, but it was 60 days on older versions, and it can be changed explicitly by an Active Directory administrator.
It’s important to know if you’re having replication errors that are approaching or are past the tombstone lifetime. If two domain controllers experience a replication error that persists past the tombstone lifetime, then replication will be disabled between those two DCs, even if the underlying replication error is fixed.
The “Tombstone Lifetime” blade helps you identify places where this is in danger of happening. In the example shown above, you can see that there are 64 errors that are over 100% of tombstone lifetime (the orange arc in the donut). Each of these errors represents a partition that has not replicated between its source and destination server for at least the tombstone lifetime for the forest. Again, you can click on the “Over 100% TSL” text to drill into details of these errors. Here is one example:
In this case, the data was collected by OMS on December 29, 2015 (TimeGenerated field). The last successful synchronization (LastSuccessfulSync field) was on January 27, 2015 – 11 months earlier. Clearly, this is way past the tombstone lifetime!
In this situation, simply fixing the replication error will not be enough. At a minimum, you’ll need to do some manual investigation to identify and clean up lingering objects before you can restart replication. You may even need to decommission a domain controller.
In addition to identifying any replication errors that have persisted past the tombstone lifetime, you’ll also want to pay attention to any errors falling into the “50-75% TSL” or “75-100% TSL” buckets. These are errors that are clearly lingering, not transient, so they likely need your intervention to resolve. The good news is that they have not yet reached the tombstone lifetime. If you fix these problems promptly, before they reach the tombstone lifetime, replication can restart with minimal manual intervention.
As noted earlier, the dashboard tile for the AD Replication Status solution shows the number of “critical” replication errors in your environment, which is defined as errors that are over 75% of tombstone lifetime (including errors that are over 100% of TSL). Strive to keep this number at 0.
Note: All the tombstone lifetime percentage calculations are based on the actual tombstone lifetime for your Active Directory forest, so you can trust those percentages are accurate, even if you have a custom tombstone lifetime value set.
Replication problems are one of the top call generators for Microsoft’s Active Directory support team. We hope this new OMS solution helps you stay on top of your replication errors and fix them quickly when they occur. For more information on Active Directory replication, please see the Active Directory Replication Technologies topic on TechNet.
Hello folks,
Just wanted to let you know that we made a bug fix to Windows Server management packs.
Windows Server Cluster Disks Monitoring MP had an issue with Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) state monitor alerting. When the monitor switches CSV state to critical (for example, for CSVs in maintenance mode), it will generate an appropriate alert in SCOM Console. However, because a non-existing property was being referred to in the alert description, additional superfluous warnings about property replacement failure were getting generated. This issue is now fixed.
The bug affected both Windows Server 2016 MP and Windows Server 2012 (and below) MP. These are available for download at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48256 and https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=9296 respectively.
Recently we announced the public availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) server images in a majority of Microsoft Azure regions. With the capability to deploy a Red Hat supported Virtual Machine in Azure, you may have the question “What else can I do with my Azure Red Hat VM?”. Luckily Azure has a rich marketplace ecosystem that allows you to add resources from Microsoft and partner resources for powerful functionality. One of the latest first-party Azure resources is Log Analytics (OMS). Log Analytics (OMS) brings the incredible analytic power of Operations Management Suite to your Windows and Linux Azure VMs. With Linux, Log Analytics (OMS) allows you to collect Syslog events, Performance data, and Nagios/Zabbix alerts.
This blog post takes you step-by-step through provisioning a brand new Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server in Azure, provisioning a new Operations Management Suite workspace, and bringing your Red Hat server under management, all in less than 15 minutes.
The only requirement to follow this walkthrough is an Azure subscription. Thankfully, Azure offers a great trial and the Log Analytics (OMS) offering has free tier option with 500 MB daily upload and 7-day data retention.
Provisioning a RHEL VM in Azure is straightforward and follows the same steps for a provisioning a normal Azure Linux VM. Here is a quick summary of the steps:
In Azure today, the offered Red Hat distributions are Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2. For this guide, we are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2.
Your deployment of RedHat Enterprise Linux 7.2 has started!
Let’s go ahead and provision a new Operations Management Suite Log Analytics workspace while our RHEL Virtual Machine is deployed into Azure.
Now that we have provisioned the RHEL VM and the OMS Workspace we need to send our RHEL VM data into OMS.
Now that your Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server is connected to OMS let’s take a look at the data in the OMS Portal.
To search Syslog data, enter the Search query “Type=Syslog” or select All Syslogs under Log Management saved queries
Performance monitoring with OMS gives you the same granular counters you get with the top Enterprise Monitoring Tool: System Center Operations Manager. These counters include data points about Logical Disk, Processor, Physical Disk, and Memory.
Performance data is broken into two main results. The first is a 30-minute aggregated log that lets you see the minimum, maximum, standard deviation.
The 30-minute performance log aggregation can be retrieved by searching Type=Perf
The second way you can view Performance is a standard visual view. Where the number of results are displayed a Metrics result also appears. By clicking on the Metrics result you get a graph view over time with the same “Type=Perf” query. By hovering over the result you can see exact values over a given time. These performance metrics are both Near Real Time with 10 second interval – that are updated live on the search screen.
As you can see spinning up a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Virtual Machine on Azure is simple, straightforward, and fast. In addition, the power of the Azure ecosystem allows us to add powerful Log Analytics to our servers within a matter of minutes, all with a couple of clicks.
Additionally, all the features on top of Operations Management Suite Log Analytics are now available for your Red Hat Virtual Machine, including alerting, exporting to excel, and custom dashboarding.
Let us know your new feature requests here: https://feedback.azure.com/forums/267889-operational-insights, and email any issues to scdata@microsoft.com
When attempting to delete a management pack from a management group in Operations Manager, it can become very time consuming to recursively track down and delete all of the dependent management packs before deleting the originally intended management pack. Fortunately we have a new script that you can use in a situation like this to identify and remove all of the dependent management packs automatically. It was written by Microsoft’s own Chandra Bose (Senior Software Engineer) and you can get the script it as well as instructions for how to use it here:
J.C. Hornbeck, Solution Asset PM
Microsoft Enterprise Cloud Group
Since we released the Alerting Public Preview in December, we’ve seen a fantastic amount of active usage of the feature – and some complex querying to go with it! It’s been great working with all of you and gathering feedback on what’s been working well, and what needs improvement.
We’ve also gotten great help from our community. Here are some really useful articles from some of our MVPs and partners:
Currently, we are in the midst of acting on all that great feedback. Over the next few weeks, you’ll be seeing a steady rollout of new capabilities– starting today with WebHook support for OMS Alerts.
A WebHook is just an HTTP callback URL. When an Alert fires, you can choose to send the alert to a URL of your choosing. Many services create unique URL’s to talk to a specific part of the product – like a Slack channel or an incident management table. In the same way that a REST API became a standard way for you to talk to applications, a WebHook is becoming the standard way for applications to talk to you when an event occurs.
Using WebHooks allows you to do things like send a message to Slack, raise an incident in an ITSM tool or integrate with your own custom tool. In short, you want to use WebHooks with OMS because it’s going to make integrating into your existing workflow really easy – no code required! I’ll run you through the basics of how to use WebHooks, as well as an example of sending the details of the alert to a Slack channel.
To use a WebHook, you need to provide one mandatory field (Webhook URL) and one optional field (custom JSON payload):
In this example, I’m going to alert when I have too many event log errors in my environment. So I’ll execute the following query:
Type=Event EventLevelName=error
1. Configure your alert
If you haven’t already, enable the Alerting preview by navigating to Settings -> Preview Features.
I’m not going to go through all the details of how to set up an alert – for that, you can check out my post from December here – but here’s my configuration:
2. Copy the WebHook URL from Slack
Each service is going to have their own method of generating a WebHook. I’ll show you where to find it in Slack. This is all assuming you already have a Slack account.
Start by clicking the drop down for the channel you want to send a message to.
In the App Directory, search for WebHooks and select “Incoming WebHooks”
Select “Install” next to your team name (because I’ve already set this up, my screen says “Configure”). Select “Add Configuration”, choose the channel you’d like to send the message to and click “Add incoming WebHooks integration”. Copy this WebHook URL, which we will paste into our Alert configuration.
3. Add the WebHook URL to the OMS alert
Simply paste this URL into the “WebHook URL” field in the alert creation pane.
4. Add a custom JSON payload to match what Slack is expecting
Here’s where WebHook support gets really powerful – we are going to add some JSON formatted data to be sent with the alert. These fields are going to match what Slack is expecting. Here’s a really simple example of what you can add to this payload to send a simple message to Slack:
{
“text”:”#alertrulename fired with #searchresultcount results exceeding the threshold of #thresholdvalue”
}
Now just add this to the Custom JSON payload box and click “Save”.
Here’s what this would look like in Slack:
You’ll notice we use the ‘#’ symbol to add properties of the alert like the “name”, “threshold” and “result count” to the message being sent. You can view the full list of ‘#’ parameters here in our documentation.
Slack allows for lots of customization of this payload. You can read all about it here. This is the payload we’ve been using within our dev team:
{
“attachments”: [
{
“title”:”OMS Alerts Custom Payload”,
“fields”: [
{
“title”: “Alert Rule Name”,
“value”: “#alertrulename”
},
{
“title”: “Link To SearchResults”,
“value”: “<#linktosearchresults|OMS Search Results>”
},
{
“title”: “Search Interval”,
“value”: “#searchinterval”
},
{
“title”: “Threshold Operator”,
“value”: “#thresholdoperator”
},
{
“title”: “Threshold Value”,
“value”: “#thresholdvalue”
}
],
“color”: “#F35A00″
}
]
}
Which corresponds to this message in Slack:
Pretty much anywhere! Some services will explicitly support WebHooks in a variety of ways, but even if your product doesn’t have WebHook support, in many cases you can just leverage that products API. Typically, that just means including some important parameters in your custom JSON payload field.
With WebHook support for OMS, we are laying the foundation of using OMS as a platform that can easily be integrated into your existing workflow. We will continue to add functionality to WebHooks, as we see this as a key tool for powerful integration scenarios – both into and out of OMS.
As always, let us know what you think in the comments here, or feel free to email me directly at alfran@microsoft.com. We’re looking forward to seeing what you can do!