System Center Operation Manager 2012
SCOM 2012 is a big deal. Microsoft is
overhauling the product to make it what it should be: A robust,
comprehensive monitoring tool that has no single points of failure and
that can provide comprehensive monitoring for Windows Systems, some
UNIX/Linux systems and network devices. In this article, you will learn
about the new and changed elements of SCOM 2012 and discover some
important prerequisites that you must understand before embarking on an
installation. In later parts of this series, we will delve deeper into
new features and discover how they can improve your business.
Elimination of a single point of failure
SCOM’s Achilles heel has always been the overall reliance on a single root management server. Without a functional RMS server, SCOM is non-functional. Administrative tasks cannot be performed, consoles won’t open and everything pretty much comes to a standstill.Although it’s possible to cluster RMS servers and promote other management servers to assume the root role, SCOM 2007 hasn’t made it simple to establish high availability in the monitoring system. SCOM 2012 corrects this deficiency by eliminating the RMS role and establishing an overall management server role that can be easily assigned to multiple servers, which operate as a pool and automatically distribute workload between them. Each management server will have the SDK service running which will allow any member to assume this functionality. I was to reiterate that this is an automatic mechanism. As you add management servers, high availability is a given.
However, there is a client-side challenge associated with this availability mechanism. An agent has traditionally reported to a single management server but with an automatic high availability mechanism, there needs to be a way for agents to report to multiple management servers. As such, a new Control Panel applet entitled “Operations Manager Agent Properties” has been added to client systems to enable easier management.
Changes to override default behavior
It has always been considered a best practice in Operations Manager to save overrides to a separate management pack in order to facilitate ease of managing management packs. However, SCOM’s default behavior has always been to save overrides to the default management pack. As such, many, many new SCOM administrators save their overrides to the default management pack and unwittingly create future headaches for themselves in the process. SCOM 2012 addresses this issue by not using the default management pack as the default override location.Enhanced network monitoring capabilities
SCOM 2012 includes
significant new network monitoring capabilities that make it a much more
comprehensive monitoring solution for network admins. Some very basic
features have been present in older versions, but SCOM 2012 expands on
these capabilities and Microsoft considers many new network monitoring
features to be “version 1” in SCOM 2012. This is very good news.
Personally, this is one area in SCOM that has always frustrated me due
to its lack of capability out of the box.
Included in SCOM 2012:
- Network device discovery, monitoring and reporting
- SNMP v3 support. Previous versions of SCOM supported SNMP v1 and v2.
- IPv4 and IPv6 support
- Port/interface monitoring which includes, along other monitors:
o Up/down monitoring
o Traffic volume
o Utilization
o Dropped packet rate
o Broadcast traffic stats - VLAN health monitoring (SCOM will discover all of the VLANs for you)
- Overall connection health
- Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) group health
- New visualization/dashboards
o Overall network summary. The health of the network.
o Network node. The health of a device on the network.
o Network interface. Provides the interface-level statistics listed above.
o Vicinity. Shows a device, it’s neighbors and connected Window servers monitored by SCOM. Aids in troubleshooting network issues.
New PowerShell cmdlets
If you’ve used any Microsoft product that has come out within the past five years, you’ve come across PowerShell. SCOM 2012 overhauls PowerShell support in the product through the introduction of a number of new cmdlets and the apparent deprecation of some existing cmdlets in favor of the new ones, although the old cmdlets still work for now. I will be covering the new PowerShell cmdlets in a future part of this article series.Console modifications
The overall look of the primary console in SCOM 2012 isn’t all that different from preceding versions although Microsoft has made a few changes, such as renaming the Actions pane Tasks. You will find other content modifications as you explore, which we’ll be doing later in this series, but the overall structure of the console remains consistent with previous versions.
Figure 1: SCOM 2012 console
The more significant change comes when you look at the SCOM 2012 web console, which has been completely redesigned. Now based on Silverlight, the new SCOM web console provides access to more SCOM features than the old version used to allow. However, the web console remains very limited when compared to the main console. For example, the main console provides you with monitoring and full management capabilities and task areas that include Monitoring, Authoring, Administration, Reporting and a My Workspace area. The web console provides access only to Monitoring and My Workspace.
Figure 2: SCOM 2012 web console
SCOM 2012 requirements
Bearing in mind that SCOM 2012 is still in beta, there are some important requirements you should keep in mind before embarking on your own installation.Virtualization notes
SCOM 2012 can run completely in a virtual environment. However, Microsoft recommends the use of a physical server for SCOM 2012’s operational and data warehouse databases unless you use direct-access mechanisms. Microsoft also indicates that the virtual platform used can’t use “any functionality where activity on the virtual computer is not immediately committed to the virtual hard drive. This includes making use of point-in-time snapshots and writing changes to a temporary virtual hard drive.”Primary role requirements
Here are Microsoft’s recommendations for each SCOM role.
Processor
|
RAM
|
Disk
|
.NET 3.5 SP1
|
.NET 4.0
| |
| Management Server |
2.8 GHz
|
2 GB
|
1 GB
|
X
|
X
|
| Operations Console |
2.8 GHz
|
2 GB
|
512 MB
|
X
|
X
|
| Web Console |
2.8 GHz
|
2 GB
|
X
|
X
| |
| Operational Database |
2.8 GHz
|
4 GB
|
1 GB
|
X
|
X
|
| Operations Manager Reporting |
2.8 GHz
|
2 GB
|
1 GB
|
X
|
X
|
| Operations Manager DW |
2.8 GHz
|
4 GB
|
1 GB
|
X
|
X
|
| Operations Manager Gateway |
2.8 GHz
|
2 GB
|
1 GB
|
Other requirements
For the purposes of this article, I’m using Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2. With the exception of the Reporting feature, all components will be installed to a single server. So, for my purposes, SCOM 2012 will be installed to the same server that holds the SQL Server instance for SCOM 2012.I’m going to install the Reporting feature later on. We’ll cover specific reporting requirements later in this series.
I won’t be covering the requirements for SQL Server 2008 R2 in this article. However, if you’re following along at home perform a installation of SQL Server 2008 R2 that includes Full Text Search and uses the SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS collation. I’m using the default SQL Server instance here.
For SCOM 2012, you also need:
- .NET 3.5 SP1
- .NET 4.0
Authoring in System Center 2012 Operations Manager
I’ve been pretty
silent here on the blog in the last few weeks as I was heads down in
getting through various milestones. As we are starting to get some
interesting things out there into the public though, I wanted to give
everyone some updates on what we’re working on and also to do some
clarification on some content that you may be seeing.
System Center 2012 Operations Manager Release Candidate
You should have noticed by now that the Release Candidate for System Center 2012 Operations Manager is available. There are some outstanding new features in this release, but if you go through the list of improvements you won’t see too much for authoring management packs. Once you install the product, you may notice that the Authoring pane is essentially the same as it was in Operations Manager 2007 R2.There is one very significant addition with the .NET Application Performance Monitoring template. That comes from our acquisition of AVIcode and provides deep monitoring of .NET applications with just come configuration required on your part. Rather than help you author management packs, that template will give you a whole lot of great monitoring without you having to author a darn thing. We also now have dashboards which are going to give you an entirely new set of possibilities for accessing information that your management packs are collecting.
But what about making your life easier when you want to create a custom monitor, or write a script to test some application feature, or design some custom model to represent your application? Those features have not changed from 2007 R2 to 2012. BUT, there are some very cool things going on in that area. You can get a brief preview of what’s coming on our new authoring landing page in the TechNet Wiki. I admit that’s awfully brief for the moment, but we will be expanding that content as soon as those tools come available. The bottom line is that you are definitely getting some effective new tools for creating custom monitoring – both for 2012 and for 2007 R2.
System Center 2012 Operations Manager Authoring Guide
Something else that you now have access to is the Release Candidate of the System Center 2012 Operations Manager Authoring Guide. If you’re familiar with the R2 Authoring Guide, then you may have a bit of confusion with the different type of content here so I wanted to provide some explanation and give some idea of where we’re going.The R2 Authoring Guide focuses on intermediate to advanced authors who require monitoring scenarios beyond what you can build in the Operations Console. This is a level of content that we had not provided until that point, and we needed to get that information out there. The more basic content for features in the Operations Console were kind of hidden inside the Operations Manager 2007 R2 User’s Guide.
We did some significant rethinking for the structure of the documentation for 2012 and have hopefully made the content more accessible. The Authoring Guide for System Center 2012 Operation Manager fits into that documentation set to provide a complete set of content for your experience in the Operations Console. It should also be a significant improvement over the User’s Guide for 2007 R2 by providing more context around the different monitoring scenarios.
Authoring Content for 2012
So what about the more advanced content and the content for the new tools? First, we will be maintaining the Management Pack Development Kit on MSDN.
That will be updated for changes in 2012, and it will remain the
reference for modules and data types. The other content is going to be
moving to the TechNet Wiki. Our rationale for moving this content out
of the TechNet Library is to provide a means for the community to
collaborate. We’ve seen a variety of great information and samples out
there that we couldn’t possibly create all on our own. Moving to the
Wiki is going to allow the community to add to our content and provide a
better set of information than we could create on our own. This will
also allow other Microsoft organizations to get provide their input,
such as our field resources in MCS and PFE who have a wealth of
information in this area.We are also going to be doing some additional restructuring of content and samples that we are providing. One thing that we’re not satisfied with at the moment is the sheer number of places that you have to go looking for stuff when you need some assistance in building some custom monitoring. We want to try to do a better job of consolidating the information that’s available and providing a single experience to guide you through the content.
I’ll be getting out more information here as these things start taking shape. In the meantime, comments are always welcome here or send a mail to mpauthor@microsoft.com.
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