~ Chandra Bose | Senior Software Engineer

There are times when you may want to revert back to older version of a Management Pack (MP) for a given workload. Currently, the Operations Manager UI allows you to delete and re-import Management Packs from the “Installed Management Packs” screen, however there can be issues when there are multiple and multi-level dependencies on the MP that you are trying to delete.

To mitigate these potential issues, we have a new script available that will help you to revert Management Packs with ease.

Note that this script is an enhanced version  of an earlier script provided by its original author here (thanks to Microsoft’s own Christopher Crammond!)

Here’s how to use the script:

1. Open the Operations Manager Command Shell prompt in Administrator mode.

2. Download the script to remove a management pack with dependencies from here.

3. Run the script using the name of the Management Pack you want to remove. For example:

(Example 1) –> .\RecursiveRemove.ps1 <ID or System Name of the MP>

(Example 2) –> .\RecursiveRemove.ps1 Microsoft.SQLServer.2014.Discovery

You can see the ID or System Name of the MP that you want to uninstall by selecting it in the Installed Management Packs view by clicking Properties in the Actions pane. Simply copy the content in the “ID :” text box in the General tab.

Chandra Bose | Senior Software Engineer | Microsoft

OpsMgr 2012 R2 OpsMgr 2007 OpsMgr 2016

Update rollup version 8.0.11030.0 for Microsoft Monitoring Agent is now available. The article below describes the issues that are fixed and also contains installation instructions. For complete details please see the following:

3206063 – Update rollup 8.0.11030.0 for Microsoft Monitoring Agent (KB3206063) (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3206063)

J.C. Hornbeck, Solution Asset PM
Microsoft Enterprise Cloud Group

OpsMgr 2012 R2

The Engyro Product Connector for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 will no longer be supported after July 11, 2017.  If you are using this product connector, please upgrade to System Center 2016 Operations Manager and integrate with a third-party connector as needed. Alternatively, you can use System Center Orchestrator and custom runbooks to integrate with third-party enterprise ITSM/monitoring systems using an integration pack from Microsoft or our partner Kelverion.  For more information about Engyro, please see the Engyro Support Bulletin from 2010.

Review these instructions for upgrading to System Center 2016 Operations Manager. If you are using Operations Manager 2007, this requires the following upgrade process: upgrade to Operations Manager 2007 R2, to System Center 2012 Operations Manager, to System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager, then to System Center 2016 Operations Manager.

Microsoft System Center 2016 Operations Manager Integration packs

Kelverion Integration packs

Have questions about supported products? Visit Microsoft Support Lifecycle to view a list of supported products and related policies.

The communication between System Center Operations Manager Management Server and the UNIX/Linux agents are secured with TLS/SSL. UNIX and Linux agents employ Server Authentication certificates (i.e. “agent certificates”) for the TLS/SSL channel and these certificates are signed by an Operations Manager Management Server’s “signing certificate.” As of System Center 2016 RTM, both agent certificates and signing certificates are generated with the sha1WithRSAEncryption signing algorithm. With System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager UR12 and System Center 2016 Operations Manager UR2, use of SHA1 certificate would be deprecated with a default preference for SHA 256 certificate. Customers can now update and sign their certificates on currently deployed agents by following the below procedure.

1. Install SCOM 2012 R2 UR12 – https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3209587/system-center-2012-r2-om-ur12 (or) SCOM 2016 UR2 – https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3209591/update-rollup-2-for-system-center-2016-operations-manager
2. Import the UNIX/Linux Management packs for SCOM 2012 R2/SCOM 2016 UR2 – https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=29696
3. Certificate can be updated from SHA1 to SHA 256 in one of the following ways

Option1:

Use the powershell script UpdateXplatCertificates.ps1. This when used without any parameters will update the certificate for all the agents.

.\UpdateXplatCertificates.ps1

This script can be downloaded from here.

Option2:

To update the certificate for specific agents use the below command

.\UpdateXplatCertificates.ps1 -AgentsDisplayName “<Agent1>“,”<Agent2>”

Option 3:

Certificate can be updated through SCOM Console –

Console –> Monitoring –> UNIX/Linux Computers –> select the server.

On the right task pane under UNIX/Linux Computer Tasks there are two tasks that could be performed.

1. Verify Certificate Signature – This task is used to verify the Signature algorithm of the agent’s signed certificate. This can be helpful in identifying SHA1 certificates that requires an update.On clicking Verify Certificate Signature you would get the below screen and the results.

         2. UNIX/Linux Update Certificate Task – This task updates the certificate from SHA1 to SHA 256.Click the server you wish to update the certificate and click UNIX/Linux Update    Certificate Task in the task pane.     

Please note:

 Already existing certificate will not be invalidated or deleted. Once the customer updates the certificate for all their monitored servers, the old certificates should be manually deleted.

 Once SCOM 2012 UR12 or SCOM 2016 UR2 is installed, the SHA 256 certificate will be used by default for newly discovered servers.

 User would need to update the certificate the same way for high availably configuration too.

Summary

APM feature in SCOM 2016 Agent may cause a crash for the IIS Application Pool running under .NET 2.0 runtime.

Cause

Several callbacks within APM code of SCOM 2016 Agent utilize memory allocation that’s incompatible with .NET 2.0 runtime and may cause an issue if this memory is later accessed in a certain way. Those particular modifications were added in SCOM 2016 Agent and are not present in SCOM 2012 R2 Agent.

Resolution

The fix for this issue is to be provided with SC 2016 OM Update Rollup 3. The aforementioned code paths will not be executed if the Application Pool is running under .NET 2.0 Runtime. We are also evaluating to release a hotfix for this issue.

Workaround

There are several workarounds for this issue:

• Application pool can be migrated to .NET 4.0 Runtime;
• SCOM 2016 Agent can be replaced with SCOM 2012 R2 Agent, it’s forward-compatible with SCOM 2016 Server and APM feature will continue to work with the older bits;
• SCOM 2016 Agent can be reinstalled with NOAPM=1 switch in msiexec.exe setup command line, APM feature will be excluded from setup;

This is a special guest blog from Squared Up

Since founding Squared Up in 2011, we’ve been on a mission to transform the way enterprises interact with their monitoring data and, in doing so, have enabled hundreds of clients worldwide to unlock the full potential of System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).

 “Together with SCOM, Squared Up is a key component in our strategy to deliver end-to-end monitoring for our entire set of enterprise applications – Shawn Williams, Systems Engineer, ITaP, Purdue University.”

We’ve always believed that no other enterprise-class monitoring tool offers the same power, flexibility and sheer breadth and depth of cross-platform monitoring capabilities as SCOM. Because of this, we believed that by building on top of SCOM we could take on the huge challenges of application monitoring in the enterprise environment.

“Blackboard is one of our key-line-of-business applications and SCOM, together with third party Management Packs, is able to provide us with detailed insights across the entire stack, from our F5s at the front-end, all the way through to the virtualization at the backend, and all of that data is then surfaced via Squared Up – Shawn Williams, Systems Engineer, ITaP, Purdue University.”

First up, we delivered a blazingly-fast, multi-platform HTML5 web console, which we then enhanced with powerful new features like interactive performance reporting from the Data Warehouse, export to Excel, seamless Visio integration and, above all, the ability to easily build and publish custom dashboards.

“One of the first things Squared Up allowed us to do was much more easily expose availability and uptime reporting to the wider business, both at a managerial level and for our Service Desk –  Shawn Williams, Systems Engineer, ITaP, Purdue University.”

With the simultaneous release of SCOM 2016 and Squared Up Version 3.1, we’ve now taken things to the next level.

Working in close conjunction with the SCOM Engineering Team and leveraging the significant performance enhancements introduced in SCOM 2016, Squared Up is now faster and more powerful than ever.

Taking full advantage of SCOM’s extremely powerful capabilities, Squared Up goes far beyond just enabling HTML5 access, allowing you to:

–  Dynamically map your applications and view live health states across the full stack, irrespective of the underlying technologies, all powered by your existing SCOM Agent.

“VADA is a tremendously powerful tool, allowing us to get a definitive handle on the exact topology and dependencies of all of our applications, of which there are several hundred – Shawn Williams, Systems Engineer, ITaP, Purdue University.”

– Integrate OMS and unify SCOM and OMS data behind a single-pane-of-glass User Interface

“As our monitoring strategy evolves, OMS is now starting to supplement our SCOM data with things like Security & Audit and Change Tracking, which will provide us with value-add insights on top of our existing SCOM data. The key to realizing that value is being able to deliver the data to our users in a single-pane-of-glass UI thanks to Squared Up – Shawn Williams, Systems Engineer, ITaP, Purdue University.”

– Provide top-to-bottom, full-stack visibility via technology-specific, customised drilldowns

“The speed, ease of use and vendor-neutral nature of Squared Up means we’ve been able to successfully bring non-Microsoft engineering teams – such as our Linux teams – into our SCOM-centric monitoring strategy, with a common portal through which all of our cross-platform monitoring data is consumed. That really helps in our efforts to break down siloed thinking and “Us versus Them” mentality within the organization – Shawn Williams, Systems Engineer, ITaP, Purdue University.”

We’re now five years into our mission to radically change the landscape of enterprise monitoring and, together with the release of SCOM 2016 & Squared Up Version 3.1, we believe this marks the perfect moment to unlock the potential of SCOM for literally every customer worldwide.

So, together with the support of Microsoft, we’re delighted to unveil our new, completely free, Community Edition license, which supports both SCOM 2012 and SCOM 2016, and allows you to deliver;

– Full HTML5 Web Console for SCOM

– Unlimited custom dashboards

– Interactive Performance Reporting from the Data Warehouse

– Visio Integration

– Data on Demand

– Total Dashboard Architecture

– Mobile & Tablet Access

– and lots, lots more

You can read more about our Community Edition license and request one for yourself via our website.

We’re looking forward to welcoming you into our Community and to helping you solve the challenges of Enterprise Application Monitoring.

Overview of the .NET 2.0 fix that was shipped in UR3

We have been investigating this issue actively and this fix has not solved the issue completely. We are actively working to resolve the issue and release a hotfix soon.

Workarounds:

• SCOM 2016 Agent can be replaced with SCOM 2012 R2 Agent, it’s forward-compatible with SCOM 2016 Server and APM feature will continue to work with the older bits
• SCOM 2016 Agent can be reinstalled with NOAPM=1 switch in msiexec.exe setup command line, APM feature will be excluded from setup

Additional issues along with the workaround

SharePoint Central Administration site stops working when SCOM 2016 Agent is installed onto the server

• Although SCOM 2016 Agent installs APM component in the disabled state by default, it adds a registry setting to load inactive APM into IIS Application pools
• If APM is not yet configured for this server, those application pools will only have APM loaded in inactive state without any monitoring
• The issue has been reported that inactive APM may crash SharePoint Central Administration v4 application pool and prevent this application from starting

Workarounds:

• If APM feature is required on that server: downgrade SCOM Agent to 2012 R2 and continue monitoring;
• If APM feature is not required on that server: keep SCOM 2016 Agent and re-install it with “NOAPM=1” in the setup command line

Web Site crashes during startup when SCOM 2016 Agent is installed onto the server

• Although SCOM 2016 Agent installs APM component in the disabled state by default, it adds a registry setting to load inactive APM into IIS Application pools.
• If APM is not yet configured for this server, those application pools will only have APM loaded in inactive state without any monitoring.
• If application pool account has no access to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\System Center Operations Manager\12\APMAgent registry key, inactive APM won’t be able to read that key and this application pool process may crash.

Workaround:

• Add “Read” access permission for the application pool account to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\System Center Operations Manager\12\APMAgent

Have you ever tried to use Distributed Applications in Operations Manager, but got frustrated with the manual process of creating the diagrams? They can be difficult to create and harder to maintain in modern, dynamic systems.

Wouldn’t it be great if those diagrams could be built and maintained for you automatically? With the public preview of the new Service Map management pack, that reality is here.

Service Map is an Azure service automatically discovers application components on Windows and Linux systems and maps the communication between services. You can create diagrams for individual servers or complex maps of groups of servers representing your business services.

With this new integration, you can take the dynamic maps that Service Map creates and have them automatically create and maintain your Distributed Application Diagrams in Operations Manager. As your business services change, your diagrams will change along with them. Now, you can set up dashboards showing the health of your services and trust that the underlying Distributed Applications represent the real-world infrastructures, even as they change.

For more information, look at the online documentation or download the management pack and try it out for yourself.

We’d love your feedback on this new feature. Feel free to send me an email at david.irwin@microsoft.com.

– David Irwin

In SCOM 2016, when the support for Nano was introduced, a regression caused issue in functioning of the WMI health monitor. This issue was hit only when

• WinRM was configured to use https only
• The Service Principal Name was registered to set http/servername to a user account

The issue has been fixed, the protocol used by the script that was causing the failure has been modified to use the DCOM protocol as in SCOM 2012 R2. We have released the inbox MP package here.

Installation Steps- Import the .msi package on to the SCOM 2016 machine and install the files. If the MPs already exists, they will be upgraded with the latest files.
The package has 2 inbox MPs, their names and versions are given below

• Microsoft.SystemCenter.2007.mp – 7.2.11907.0
• Microsoft.SystemCenter.Internal.mp 7.0.8437.10

Following is the work around for installing SC 2016 OM console and SC 2016 SM console on the same server:

1. Install SC 2016 OM console and then install SC 2016 SM console on the same server
2. Add system environment variable DEVPATH which contains folder path of the Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Core.dll with the value “C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2016\Operations Manager\Console\SDK Binaries”
3. Add following highlighted entry in the config file (C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2016\Operations Manager\Console\Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Monitoring.Console.exe.config)

                              <configuration>

                              ….

                             <runtime>

                            <developmentMode developerInstallation=”true” />

                            </runtime>

                            ….

                           </configuration>

  With above modifications both the consoles will co-exist on the same server.

As System Center gets ready for frequent and continuous releases, – see announcement​ here. We the System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) product team would love to hear your inputs on this change. And we would also like to hear from you on other improvements that we should focus on.

Please respond to the survey @https://aka.ms/scomsurvey. Your survey response will help us plan and prioritize features for the new release model.

If you have any trouble at all responding to the survey, please feel free to contact us at adgoda@microsoft.com.

We are listening to customers’ requests on User Voice. The issues reported on DHCP MP have been rectified and we have released a new version of the MP. You can download the Microsoft System Center Management Pack for Windows Server DHCP 2016 here and DHCP 2012 R2 MP here. The MP has below fixes

• DHCP Failover Server Relationship Discovery was failing as the Scope ID length max limit was 4000. The Scope ID length limit has been increased to 65536.
• Alert description for “DHCP IPv4 Runtime Service Bound to Static IP Address Monitor”, “DHCP Dependent Service Health Monitor”,”DHCP Database Integrity Monitor” have been updated, users can comprehend and troubleshoot the situation better with such information.
• To reduce the alert noise created with multiple alerts of same type, the alert rules “DHCP Back Up Database Warning”, “DHCP IPv4 Runtime DNS Registration Rule”,  “DHCP IPv4 Runtime Users Group Configuration Rule” and “DHCP Database Integrity Warning Rule” are suppressed so that only the alert count increases and not generate new alerts
• “Collect ALL DHCP Server Performance Data” rule has been fixed to ingest right data in the registry key, thus indicating the correct health state of the entity
• “DHCP Performance Health Monitor” which was always in not-monitored state has been rectified to correctly show the health state of the entity it monitors
• “DHCP Server 2012 R2 Super Scope Addresses Available Percentage Monitor” that was failing to change state on critical alerts, has been fixed to show the appropriate state so the users do not miss out on critical state

When creating a maintenance schedule, selecting more than 216 target objects (these can be any specific entity instances or groups) might result in the Operations Console to disconnect with the following error:
“The client has been disconnected from the server. Please call ManagementGroup.Reconnect() to reestablish the connection.”

You can use the following alternate option to put large number of objects in maintenance mode using a single maintenance schedule:

• Create a single group or multiple groups with all the objects you would like to put in maintenance schedule
• Create a maintenance schedule with these groups (number of groups should be less than 216)

Compliance organizations (like PCI) are mandating that customers use TLS 1.2 for all encrypted communications and disable all other protocols in their environments. SSL and early TLS are not considered strong cryptography and cannot be used as a security control after June 30, 2016. Microsoft has added official support for TLS1.2 security protocols in System Center 2016. This protocol is now supported in the following products

• System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)
• System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM)
• System Center Orchestrator (SCO)
• Service Management Automation (SMA)
• Service Provider Foundation (SPF)
• System Center Service Manager (SM)

The 3-step process of enabling TLS1.2 involves:

1. Installing the updates for Windows Server Security, .NET 4.6, SQL Server & System Center 2016 UR4. For System Center Virtual Machine Manage (SCVMM), Service Management Automation (SMA) and Service Provider Foundation (SPF), make sure that you upgrade to Update Rollup 3for System Center 2016. For SMA also update the SMA 2016 MP from here.
2. Changing the configuration settings to enable TLS1.2 in the Windows Environment and System Center across all components.
3. Making additional System Center component specific settings.

You can find more details in the System Center 2016 TLS1.2 Configuration article.

The following is a special guest blog from Squared Up

As part of our continuing commitment to the SCOM community we’re excited to announce a new PowerShell Monitoring Management Pack, freely available to the community, available to download from our site and open-sourced via GitHub.

Firstly, a big thanks to Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Wei H Lim for the inspiration behind the management pack and to the SCOM Product Team for encouraging this community effort.

We think this new management pack has incredible potential, are proud to make it openly available to the community and hope you’re as excited by this news as we are.

The PowerShell Monitoring MP adds support for PowerShell everywhere that you would expect to see it within the SCOM console’s authoring pane (ie. everywhere there is currently VBScript).

This means that custom two- and three-state monitors, custom performance and event collection rules and even custom agent tasks can all make use of PowerShell scripting, all through standard wizards in the SCOM console.

Because the MP isn’t just limited to custom monitors, you can get awesome results from the MP quickly and easily. For example, if you or your colleagues have useful PowerShell scripts that can pull back some handy troubleshooting data, or take a simple remediation action for a known problem, then, hey-presto, thanks to this MP you can quickly wrap that up as a SCOM agent task and push it out to your IT operations teams in just a few clicks.

To us, SCOM is and always has been a platform and, thanks to its management pack architecture, extensibility has always been at the heart of the power and potential of SCOM. But extending SCOM doesn’t need to be limited to simply what you can monitor, it includes how you monitor with SCOM.

So, we thought we’d harness the power of the community to help take SCOM to the next level. We’re delighted with the results and so are the many hundreds of users already well underway with the PowerShell Monitoring MP.

To help show you around the MP and what you can achieve with it, we ran a technical deep-dive webinar and the replay of that, together with access to the MP itself, is available via our website now.

We’re also pleased to say that this isn’t the last you’ll hear us in terms of harnessing the power of the community to help everyone do more with SCOM and to further extend its capabilities in line with the latest best-practices, techniques, and technologies; there’s lots more to come so why not join the community today and stay up to date with all the latest developments.

The following is a special guest blog from Savision

Modern enterprise IT infrastructures are becoming increasingly difficult to manage as the deployment of new services and applications continues to grow.  Applications tend to rely on many other services and applications to function, which often span many server and network components.  In order to fully understand the performance and availability of any particular application, a complete picture of all dependent services and applications is needed.  Without this picture, troubleshooting and root cause analysis are long, tedious, and typically involve many manual steps and processes.

Using Service Map

Service Map is an Azure management solution that automatically discovers and builds a common reference map of dependencies across servers, processes, and third-party services in real-time.  Using Service Map, IT organizations have access to the complete picture of application and system dependencies across Windows and Linux, whether running in an on-premises, pure cloud, or hybrid environment.

In addition to application and system dependencies, Service Map is also able to leverage other management solutions such as Log Analytics, Change Tracking, Update Management, and Security, providing a truly comprehensive view, all in the context of your service or application.

Discovered dependencies and contextual performance metrics from Service Map in Azure

Integration with System Center Operations Manager

Many organizations who are planning to or are already using Service Map may also have System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) deployed on-premises.  SCOM provides the most comprehensive cross-platform data center monitoring for operating systems, applications, and hypervisors.  For organizations who already rely on SCOM for critical IT operations, having visibility into the application and system dependencies discovered by Service Map is an essential feature. Thankfully, Microsoft has provided an integration between SCOM and Service Map, which automatically creates distributed application (DA) diagrams in SCOM based on the dynamic dependency maps in Service Map.  The Azure team has published a detailed article on how to setup the integration between SCOM and Service Map here.

This integration enables organizations that rely on SCOM to have a complete picture of all application and system dependencies in their IT infrastructure.  However, there are still more questions to be answered.  What if exceptions need to be made to the dependencies that are discovered?  There are cases where explicit inclusions or exclusions need to be made to the dependencies that are discovered.  What if service-level tracking is needed for these discovered applications and services?  How does an organization visualize all of these discovered services and applications in a single, dynamic, easy-to-understand dashboard?  This is where the integration with Savision Live Maps comes in.

Introducing Savision Live Maps

Savision Live Maps empowers organizations to create compelling visualizations and dashboards based on any information collected and stored by SCOM.  From executive-level service and application overviews, to detailed technical dashboards for critical IT infrastructure, any visualization or dashboard that can be imagined can be made a reality with Live Maps.  SCOM provides a role-based access control (RBAC) system to control what users are able to do and see within SCOM.  Live Maps provides full support for this RBAC model ensuring that users only see the visualizations and dashboards that they are entitled to see.

As mentioned in the previous section, Service Map can create DA diagrams right within SCOM detailing the application and system dependencies that have been discovered.  Live Maps is able to import any DA within SCOM and transform that flat model into a rich ITIL-based business service model.  This model provides many benefits above and beyond what is provided with native SCOM DA’s.  Better still, Live Maps automatically keeps this model up to date, so as Service Map discovers new dependencies, they are dynamically updated and shown in the business service models provided by Live Maps.

You can read more about how Live Maps dynamically updates SCOM DA’s in the following blog article:

https://www.savision.com/resources/blogs/new-features-in-live-maps-dynamically-updating-services/

Import Distributed Application Wizard from Savision Live Maps Authoring Console

Live Maps’ business service model provides different health perspectives for each service: end-user, application, and infrastructure.  This provides another level of visibility, ensuring that issues that impact end-users are highlighted for immediate attention and timely resolution.  Service-level tracking is a great capability offered by SCOM, however it can be difficult to configure and maintain.  Live Maps automatically creates service level agreements (SLA) for all business service models, and provides an intuitive user experience for configuring these SLA’s.  Organizations are able to easily define a goal for each business service and then view the real-time SLA and operational health of all business services from a single dynamic dashboard.

Services Overview from Savision Live Maps

In addition to the rich business service model provide by Live Maps, inclusions and exclusions can also be easily defined by Live Maps.  This allows organizations to make custom changes to what is discovered by Service Map.  These changes are intelligently applied to the model, so that new changes discovered by Service Map are respected, while also ensuring the inclusions and exclusions that have been defined are enforced.  IT organizations are highly-dynamic, so Live Maps doesn’t just provide manual inclusions and exclusions, but rather a rich rule system is available, allowing organizations to define complex rules to ensure the inclusions and exclusions they need can be achieved.

Conclusion

Through his article, you’ve seen how Service Map can discover application and system dependencies, and overlay other useful information from other Azure management solutions to provide a complete picture of discovered services and applications.  You’ve also seen how Service Map can feed this information back into SCOM, and how Live Maps can further enrich this model by providing end-user visibility, SLA monitoring, and executive-level overview dashboards.  We encourage you to check out Service Map to learn more about how your critical services and applications are interconnected.  Finally, to obtain visibility into this valuable information from within your SCOM environment, we encourage you to also request an evaluation of Live Maps and achieve 100% coverage of your business services, delivered via dynamic executive-level service and application dashboards.

You can easily explore the power of Live Maps through our online demo here, or request a free trial key using this link:

https://www.savision.com/trial

You can also watch a webinar that Savision recently released which focuses on the integration between Service Map and SCOM.  You can view the on-demand webinar here:

https://www.savision.com/resources/online-session-not-scomplicated-oms/

Visual Studio Authoring Extension(VSAE) is now updated to be compatible with Visual Studio(VS) 2017. VSAE is the most commonly used authoring extension by the Management Pack(MP) development community. The MP developers want to use it with the latest Visual Studio for the benefits that they get. The new VSAE(version 1.3.0.0) can be downloaded from here. For this extension to work as expected, the entire package of Visual Studio (including modeling SDK) must be pre-installed. You can verify if the extension is installed successfully by navigating to the Extensions and Updates section in Tools Menu.  

With this extension, user can create a Management Pack project, choose from one of the MP templates provided and author or edit an MP.  

If any queries, please write to us at SCOM user voice. 

The below PowerShell script can be used to automatically close old SCOM alerts. This script looks for active alerts along with the time when alert was created (alert age). If the alert age is greater than the specified number of days ($alertsTobeClosedBefore) then the script will close the alert for you. This script can help clean up some environments with lot of old alerts which are still active.

Script:

$alertsTobeClosedBefore = 5

$currentDate = Get-Date

Get-SCOMAlert | Where-Object {(($_.ResolutionState -ne 255) -and (($currentDate – $_.TimeRaised).TotalDays -ge $alertsTobeClosedBefore))} |Resolve-SCOMAlert