Tech Insights 2009, Penang 17 - 18 September

Probably the only event of its kind to be held in Malaysia, Tech Insights is a 2-day event containing deep dive sessions conducted by MVPs and Field Experts. No marketing talk, no BS.. pure unadulterated technical knowledge.

Split to 2 tracks, Dev and ITPro and supported by the User Groups of Malaysia (SPUG, SCUG, Elite, MyVSTS, MIND), this event held in Penang is a must attend if you want to get deeper knowledge into chosen Microsoft technologies as well as interact and tap on the experience of field experts.

There is a limit in terms of the numbers of registrations allowed. So if you're keen and in Penang or willing to make the trip there... sign up at http://www.techinsights.my/

WIN @ System Center Central!

If you haven't already done so.. or perhaps haven't even heard of it... There is a contest running at System Center Central (www.systemcentercentral.com). For anyone of you who have not registered on the site.. well you will want to hear about this.

System Center Central is a huge database of resources about everything System Center and its members range from field experts, MVPs and Microsoft product team members themselves. If you are unsure of something related to System Center, just post your queries in the forums and you can expect an answer from one of these 'gurus'.

If that is not good motivation enough.. then go on over to www.systemcentercentral.com now and register yourself as a user cause there's going to be a drawing every 2 weeks to win a prize!!

It starts today!! and they will be drawing for winners on the following dates (August 31, September 14 and 28, October 12 and 26, November 9 and 13) based on new registrations from the previous two weeks!!

Check out Rory's blog entry on it...

What you waiting for? stop reading this blog entry and click on the link :)

Operations Manager R2 Connectors Released

Just got news that the Connectors for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 has been released today.

Connectors are needed for situations where u need to forward alerts to another Management system or Service Desk system. The connectors available for download are to connect to:

1. IBM Tivoli Enterprise console
2. HP Openview
3. BMC Remedy ARS

There is also a Universal Connector available. All of which can be downloaded here

Now I need to test this... how do i get my hands on some of these management systems??.. hmmm..

MP Update: Hyper-V MP Update with WinSvr 2008 R2 monitoring

The Windows Server 2008 /R2 Hyper-V Management Pack was released today. This management pack provides health and performance monitoring capabilities at the host and virtual machine levels for Hyper-V systems on Win6 and Win7 workloads (pending release of WS 2008 R2 and Server OS MP for WS 2008 R2).

Features include monitoring of critical host services and disk performance thresholds, monitoring of virtual machines and virtual hardware health from host perspectives, and visualization and complete application roll-up from host level to virtual machine component level to guest operating system level in a virtualized environment.

Download it here

This Management Pack is supported on both the OpsMgr 2007 SP1 and R2 platforms.

MP Update: Exchange 2007 Native MP for OpsMgr R2

Its been a long time coming.. but its finally here. Straight out of the oven.. the smoking hot Exchange 2007 native MP!! This MP has has gone through a great development process because it wasn't just the Product team that was doing the work and making decisions... but they got the OpsMgr MVPs, CSS experts like Kevin Holman and Adrian Doyle, the Exchange Center of Excellence, MCS Operations IT team and 512 Beta customers all involved!!

I for one was truly honored to be able to be part of the development of this MP, that even when down to scrutinizing areas like Wizard flows.

So here are some of the highlights of this MP:

• Discovery is turned off by default so that users can control the deployment of the MP
• Very extensive 95 page MP Guide
• Rollups reflect state of synthetic transactions. This means that the Availability metrics will reflect on user experience rather than server state
• The Availability metrics described above can be published to the OpsMgr R2 SLA Dashboard
• New Mailflow and Client Access Server synthetic transaction template and interactive wizards
• Support for monitoring multiple Exchange organizations from a single Management Group
• Cross-forest mail flow transaction great for monitoring an Exchange migration scenario which also works with the Cross Platform monitor for SMTP gateways
• Operators can see the links between Exchange Servers with visualized synthetic transactions using perspectives
• 15 Capacity planning reports like database size and message volumes, 30+ reports in total
• Matching 15 Service Level Objectives to view the state of Mail Operations such as whether mails are delivered based on the agreed SLA
• A nicely tuned set of Rules and Monitors making it a less noisy MP
• Threshold monitors go through consecutive samples to reduce noise
• Synthetic transactions are aware of maintenance mode
• Event log collection turned off by default
• Heavy workflows like report data collection scripts and synthetic transactions are spread out using Sync Time to reduce load on the agent
• The Exchange Best Practice Analyzer is run by the MP checking over 800 configuration aspects of an Exchange server compared to best practices.
• Clustering and log shipping scenarios are fully supported

A big shout out to my man Ake Pettersson and his team for this MP.

BIG NOTE: This MP only works for Ops Mgr R2. Also a watch out mentioned by Ake that if you are importing this MP through the new R2 console, the unsealed SLM reporting MP will not be downloaded. So go to the catalog for this.

Download it from the catalog here

Operations Manager R2 is RTMed

Its finally here!.. the official announcement that Operations Manager R2 is RTM was done late yesterday.

Some of the key enhancements are:

1. Monitoring of Unix and Linux natively
2. Service Level Tracking through detailed reports
3. New Process Monitoring Template, OLEDB Template, Windows servive template
4. Import MPs direct from the console
5. Overrides Summary view
6. View Health explorer via the Web Console
7. One-click maintenance mode that turns all neccessary objects appropriately
8. Console performance is fantastic!!

Read the full post of available datasheets, whitepapers, videos on Sacha's post http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter/archive/2009/05/22/om2007r2-rtm.aspx

TechNet Operations Manager Forums new home

Its moved!

The Forum site for Operations Manager on Technet has moved to http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/systemcenteroperationsmanager

As usual, MSFT folks and the MVPs are frequent flyers on the posts. My man Anders Bengston is probably going to light this one up too :)

OpsMgr R2 Upcoming Solutions: Novell Suse Management Pack

At MMS this year, i had a chat with Alex at the Novell booth and he also showed me a demo on what's coming in the Novell System Center Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).

The Management Pack contains ready monitors for BIND/DNS, DHCP, Samba, OpenLDAP, SUSE Firewall and CUPS.

Plucking the following info from the Novell Beta MP program, here is what Novell says that the MP will include:

• Discovery of SLES servers based on MS Cross platform discovery wizard
• Automatic deployment of plug-ins for the management agent
• For all services to report the state of the service running vs not-running
• For all services to stop/start/restart the service
• View alerts for most services
• Keep track of allocated IP addresses by DHCP service
• Statistical information for BIND/DNS service
• Able to monitor Samba shares, connections, sessions
• Provides connection information for OpenLDAP

I hope to find time to test this soon and report on it