While I was building SMA runbooks in the past couple of months I bumped into this rather strange error. So happen few days ago, I tried to call (invoke) a child runbook, from a parent runbook function. SMA returned an error “Root element is missing” I simplified the structure so it looks like this…

Function Call:

It seems, that you are not able to call a PowerShell Child-Runbook within a function in the Parent-Runbook workflow . Why would you want to do that anyway? Well, I wanted to prevent code duplication and simplify the code,  therefore I dumped everything into a function.

The same, more widely known error happens, if you try to call a runbook within an inlinescript, for example like this…

Inlinescript Call:

If you try to call the runbook via cmdlet Start-SmaRunbook it is possible to start the Child-Runbook in both cases…

Function Call:

Inlinescript Call:

Although you are capable to call the runbook via Start-SmaRunbook, there are some pro and contra. Microsoft has published a very good series of blog posts about SMA explaining the differences between both techniques either invoking runbooks inline or call the runbook via SMA web service (Start-SmaRunbook).

Comparison of Child Runbooks that are Invoked Inline versus Started with Start-SmaRunbook

Invoked Inline

• Pro
  • Parent and child runbooks run in he same job, so there are fewer jobs in the system, which allows other runbooks to run.
  • The parent runbook waits for the child runbook to finish before continuing, so the parent runbook can directly get any return data from the child.
  • Exceptions thrown by the child runbook and stream output produced by the child are associated with the parent job, which can make troubleshooting easier, because there is only one job to investigate.
  • Runbook input parameters can be of any type, primitive to complex.
• Con
  • The parent runbook must wait for the child runbooks to complete, which can increase the overall time for the parent runbook to complete.
  • You cannot use a variable or parameter in the parent runbook to pass in the name of an inline child runbook.
  • The child runbook must be published before the parent runbook is published.

Started with Start-SmaRunbook

• Pro
  • The parent and child runbooks run in different jobs, which allows the parent to spin off multiple jobs that can run in parallel.
  • The parent runbook does not wait for the child runbooks, and so can continue processing while the child runbooks run.
  • You can use a parameter or variable in the parent runbook to pass in the name of the runbook to invoke.
• Con
  • Parent and child runbooks run in different jobs, so exceptions and stream output are stored separately and must be tracked down separately, which may make troubleshooting more difficult.
  • More jobs are created in the system which can cause job limits to be reached and block other runbooks from running.
  • Getting return data from a child runbook job is not straightforward.
  • Runbook input parameters are restricted to primitive types, array, and object, because they must survive the JSON serialization of objects that occurs with the call through the web service.

I hope this gives you some insights.

I had already written in the past, that I like to combine new technologies to build new solutions. There are new technologies coming which might get not that attention yet they would deserve. My recent attention got caught by Power BI. I had some sort of idea what Power BI would be but not in detail so I did some research to get a better picture. My intension is to give you a brief idea what Power BI for Office 365 and Power BI is, because I will do some future blog posts on Power BI and will refer to this post. Power BI for Office 365 will not be my focus, because it is somewhat “old” and too tight up.

Microsoft Power BI is a collection of online services and features that enables you to find and visualize data, share discoveries, and collaborate in intuitive new ways. There are two experiences now available for Power BI: the current experience, generally referred to as Power BI for Office 365, and a new experience for Power BI, currently offered as a public preview.

So there are TWO Power BI thingies out there.

• Power BI integrated into Office 365
• Power BI (I call it “standalone”)

The Power BI for Office 365 version is the older and probably more known version of the Power BI family, than the new Power BI version which currently is in a preview version available. So what are the main differences?

Power BI for Office 365

This version is a kind of available for Office 365 customers and is online integrated into Office 365.

The technology is based on Excel 2013 Power View / Power Pivot and SharePoint 2013 Excel Services. You probably could name it the “big online brother” from your local Excel 2013 Power View / Power Pivot / Power Query couple. It pulls the data, caches it and loads the needed tables into memory for analyzing it. To get the data in to Power BI for Office 365  there are more or less traditional data source provider available like SQL Server, Excel files, CSV, Oracle and others.

To make it short:

What is Power BI for Office 365?

Power BI for Office 365 is a cloud-based service that works with Excel to provide a complete self-service business intelligence (BI) solution. With both Excel and Power BI for Office 365, you can give everyone in your organization a powerful new way to work with data. In Excel, you can now discover, analyze, and visualize data like never before to find valuable business insights. With Power BI for Office 365 you can easily deploy a cloud-based BI environment for users to share insights, collaborate and access reports, from anywhere on any device.

Here are some very useful and detailed links about Power BI for Office 365:

Power BI for Office 365 FAQ

Power BI for Office 365 Service Description

Power BI for Office 365 Pricing

Power BI

Power BI (Preview), is another and a different thing than Power BI for Office 365. As the name implies it is currently in a preview phase, but will be soon (GA on July 24th). The new Power BI is available at PowerBI.com. It is also an online service, which is used for analyzing data and displaying this data in modern and appealing dashboards / reports. The Power BI service is a “standalone” service, meaning there is no dependency on Office 365 or anything else. You have 3 elements dashboards, reports and datasets.

Dataset:

A a dataset is the source of your dashboards and reports, so speaking something you can connect to. This source can be an Excel workbook, a database or many other data (sources). See the list of dataset types that can be used with Power BI.

ONE dataset…

• can be used over and over. 
• can be used in many different reports.
• Visualizations from that one dataset can display on many different dashboards.

Dashboard:

A dashboard is something you create or something a coworker creates and shares with you. It is a single canvas that contains one or more tiles. Each tile displays a single visualization that was created from the data in the underlying dataset(s).

ONE dashboard…

• can display visualizations from many different datasets
• can display visualizations from many different reports

Report:

A Power BI report is one or more pages of visualizations (charts and graphs).  Reports can be created from scratch within Power BI or can be imported with datasets and with shared dashboards. This doesn’t mean that you can create a Power BI report outside of Power BI.  What it means is that Power BI takes a look at data you’re connecting to and, if it can, creates a report based on some or all of the data. 

ONE report…

• can be associated with multiple dashboards (tiles pinned from that one report can appear on multiple dashboards). 
• can be created using data from one dataset. (the slight exception to this is that Power BI Desktop can combine more than 1 dataset into a single report and that report can be imported into Power BI)

As we have now a brief understanding what Power BI is, we need to see what other parts there are. Authoring reports and dashboards can be done either online or through a client tool Power BI Designer.

Web Authoring Experience & Power BI Designer

The dashboards, reports and datasets can be authored online through the web site…

or there is also Power BI Designer (future Power BI Desktop) to author reports and drag-and-drop exploration of your data on your Windows system…

The dashboards can be viewed bascially through any browser enabled device. In addition there is already an iOS Phone App, Windows Phone and Android apps will follow. For your Windows 8.1+  you can install the Windows App from the Store.

Mobile Phone App

In addition Power BI has (*wondering*) an IPhone app but no Android or Windows Phone app available in the store! The app can be used to view and edit the dashboards and reports…

Windows App

For Windows 8.1 and higher there is also a Windows app available in the store which can be used to edit reports and dashboards…

Finally there is also an API which REST based and uses JSON to upload data and interact with the service.

REST API

One of the very cool feature is the REST API which is using JSON to create datasets and upload data. The API is not complete yet e.g. so far you are not able to delete datasets, but we can see that Microsoft offers us an interface to interact with this service.

The pricing of Power BI is in my opinion a fair deal and for trying it out you have a free option which is limited in capacity and amount of data.

Pricing

As soon Power BI hits GA there will be a free plan with 1GB/user and 10K rows/hour limit. Here a more detailed chart

Sources

Here are also some good links which give you more detail about Power BI:

• Power BI vs. Power BI Preview: What’s the Difference?
• Power BI – Overview and Learning
• Power BI – basic concepts
• Announcing Power BI general availability coming July 24th
• Power BI Team Blog
• Power BI Knowledge Base
• Power BI REST API Overview

I will blog on some upcoming posts about Power BI, which will be GA on July 24th. I can see in this technology a very high potential in combination with other products and services. As you might have seen the Power BI is not full featured yet and what I have experienced yet, not very responsive and reliable BUT keep in mind it is just a preview and Microsoft is working hard to provide the best service.

Update 23.07.2015: I have written this post few days ago, and in the meantime, Microsoft already updated the Power BI service, and appears now with a better interface and seems to be more reliable and responsive.

I hope you got an idea and I promise the upcoming posts are really really cool!

As you know you can easily integrate SCOM with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). If both system live in the same forest this is not a problem and you can find all the steps here. What happen if one system lives in a separated trusted forest which has a firewall in between? For integrating SCVMM into SCOM you run the SCVMM connector wizard. So the connection starts from SCVMM to SCOM. On the firewall we could see a blocking connection on port 5724/TCP from SCVMM to SCOM. This means, the only port used for SCVMM connector is 5724/TCP, which is by the way the same port as the SCOM console uses for connecting to a SCOM management server. We opened that port and the SCVMM integration into SCOM ended successfully.

For all other firewall exceptions, see the list provided on TechNet.

During a past SCOM engagement I was asked to implement SQL Server Management Pack 6.6.0 for monitoring SQL Server 2012. This MP is getting better with every release and works in most cases without any issue.
I had two SQL Servers which were placed in the same domain and were configured identically. The only difference I met was, that I could not see any discovered database instances from SQL Server A, where SQL Server B showed up in the SCOM console with its database instances. Here just the similar view from my lab, so you understand which view I am talking about…

After checking the OperationsManager event log on each Server A and Server B, I found several events which did not relate to the missing database instances in the first place. I cleaned up the SCOM agent cache and restarted the SCOM agent service on each server. Finally I found a difference, on SQL Server A an event was logged…

You can find different solutions and reasons  for this event . In my case there is a small difference you have to watch out.

Please check to see if this is a valid WMI Query. Out of memory.

(Note here the “Out of memory”)

This means there is not even enough memory to create WMI objects or fire off WMI queries on that specific server from the SQL Server MP. Probably a lot admins would think “No problem give this VM more RAM”. This would be a temporarily relief probably and would help, but it fights only the symptoms not the cause. As you remember this is a SQL Server and there are certain settings you need to make in order to function properly. ONE REALLY REALLY necessary setting you would need to make is to set the max memory setting on your SQL Server. By default, SQL Server’s max memory is 2147483647 and SQL Server will just keep using more and more memory until there’s none left on the system. It is like killing yourself –  yup. So, the first thing is to limit the max memory setting. On Brent Ozars blog (there are many other blog which discuss these basic things) you find how to set this configuration. I have also written a post about the most basic SQL Server settings you would need to make for running a successful SQL / SCOM server environment. Find this post here http://stefanroth.net/2012/02/28/system-center-sql-server-2008-r2-performance-tuning/ . Have fun…

Microsoft announced few month ago SCOM 2012 R2 offers support for SQL Server 2014…

And if we go to the TechNet article it also clearly says, SCOM 2012 R2 is supported on SQL Server 2014 here described…

There is even a perfect table which explains everything clearly…

From my point of view, this let’s us assume, that we can just pick SQL Server 2014 and used it for a clean installation of SCOM 2012 R2. In this TechNet article we find even this sentence…

Use this information to evaluate if your SQL Server environment is ready to support the installation of or upgrade to System Center 2012 R2. Use this information whether you are deploying one or multiple components of System Center.

(Source)

So there is no doubt, that it is fully supported to install a clean installation of SCOM 2012 R2 on SQL Server 2014.

BUT I found a comment from Kevin Holman on his blog, and he says here:

I am not sure what I should believe now . There is a clear statement from Kevin Holman saying, it is not supported to use SQL 2014 for a clean SCOM 2012 R2 installation, only if we would migrate the databases with SCOM 2012 R2 UR5 installed. His comment makes sense from a technical standpoint, but it says the opposite from the above TechNet article as far I understand.

Now what does the real world experience say? Is it possible to install a clean copy of SCOM 2012 R2 installation on SQL Server 2014? Yes. I did not hit any problems installing the databases OperationsManager and OperationsManagerDW. My setup was a single SQL Server 2014 Standard and added two SCOM 2012 R2 management servers without any UR’s. When I tried to install the reporting part of SCOM, we started the setup under non-administrative credentials and we had to rollback the reporting installation. After fixing the user credential issue, I had to use ResetSRS.exe to restore the SSRS instance. This also worked as expected on SQL Server 2014 SSRS instance.

When I tried to install the SCOM 2012 R2 console I needed to install Report Viewer 2012 Redistributable Package…

as described here…

But hold on one moment. I used SQL Server 2014, should I not use Report Viewer 2014 Redistributable Package? Hmm…I could not find any clear statement from Microsoft, so I tried to install Report Viewer 2014 Redistributable Package and then run the SCOM console install wizard again. But first I needed to find the Report Viewer 2014 Redistributable Package source. There is no download from Microsoft directly, so I searched the SQL Server 2014 sources for this program. Finally I found it in the 1033_ENU_LP\x64\Setup\ReportViewer.msi path

…and the required  CLR types you will find in this directory 1033_ENU_LP\x64\Setup\x64\SQLSysClrTypes.msi…

After I installed the Report Viewer 2014 component, I re-run the wizard and it did not recognize this version…

So I installed the the Report Viewer 2012 Redistributable Package and everything worked as expected. After all SCOM 2012 R2 components were installed I updated the environment with UR6.

Conclusion:

You are able to install a clean copy of SCOM 2012 R2 using a single SQL 2014 Standard server. It is not supported, according to Kevin Holman, according to TechNet it sounds like that it is supported. If you apply at least the UR6 you are in a supported configuration mode according to Kevin Holman.

This is still everything confusing and I am trying to get some more insights from the product team. If I receive any update I will post it here.

If you need to install the SCOM 2012 R2 console you need to pick the Report Viewer 2012 Redistributable Package otherwise you will not be able to proceed.

Update 05.08.2015: Microsoft confirmed, that the installation of SCOM 2012 R2 RTM and SQL Server 2014 without any UR / CU is supported and works. Thanks to Suraj Suresh Guptha for clarifying! According to Microsoft at that point, when the TechNet article was initially written all System Center product required a fix which was in UR5 to work with SQL Server 2014. Later on the fix was not required for SCOM. That’s why there might be some confusion.

Doing same things again and again, does not mean they end up always the same way. At one point you want to monitor DPM 2012 R2 and you probably want to use the Central Console to manage your DPM servers. If you want to achieve this, you need to install the Central Console on the SCOM management server. The full installation instructions you will find here on TechNet. Usually this is not a huge deal and it works right away except this time. After I installed the DPM consoles and tried to open the DPM Administrator Console (remotely)on the SCOM management server, it ended up in a grey window (MMC) and few minutes later an error pop up appeared…

Opening the DPM Administrator Console on the DPM server itself worked without a hitch. Checking the DPM console log DPMUI0Curr.errlog on the SCOM management server under “C:\Users\[User]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Data Protection Manager\DPMUI0Curr.errlog” showed a clear SQL Server connection exception error was visible…

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 – No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.) —> System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it

Well, the first thoughts were, is the Windows firewall or any other firewall causing this error. After verifying this was not the issue, I checked all services from SQL- and DPM server, in a next step I made sure there is no DNS issue, GPO settings are ok, DPM patch level is on UR6 and there is no account permission problem. After checking EVERYTHING one million times, I got the feeling the SQL exception in DPMUI0Curr.errlog is somewhat misleading. Finally, my fellow DPM guru Philipp Witschi discovered an entry which I have missed so far. When we opened the console locally on the DPM server itself and checked the DPM version in About DPM Help menu, there was this entry…

It was suspicious that there was “localhost” which actually is wrong when you try to connect remotely. I tried to figure out where this setting is located, so I went for the registry and finally I found two connection strings, which I assumed would cause this problem. Under the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DB

I changed both connection strings to the DPM server name…

…then I restarted the DPM service in Windows Services, to reload the new registry settings…

Finally the DPM console opened on the SCOM management server and also the SCOM DPM tasks worked as expected.

I hope this helps!

I have been in the IT industry quite some time, starting from the client side and then moving towards the backend side. All these years, I used Windows operating systems starting from Windows 3.1 up to the latest and greatest Windows 10. But there is also another hot topic going on besides Windows 10 which is the release of Visual Studio 2015. Why? Well, Visual Studio 2015 and the Windows 10 platform provide a perfect combination to write “Universal Apps”. What does that mean? In a short version, it means that Windows 10 offers a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) which provides a common platform across all devices. In other words, you will be able to write apps once, which run on many different Windows 10 devices.

This means you can create a single app package that can be installed onto a wide range of devices. And, with that single app package, the Windows Store provides a unified distribution channel to reach all the device types your app can run on.

[Source]

[Source]

Now instead writing your app for an operating system, you will start to write apps for different kind of device families. All these device families inherit the API’s from the Universal device family which guarantees that the Universal device API’s are present on all “child families”. So if you want to run your app on as many devices as possible you will use the Universal device family API’s.

[Source]

The consequences of this very exciting approach of Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2015 is, that you have less work and more devices (targets) where you can run your apps on . If I think about all the countless “things” you are able to develop, I get very enthusiastic and excided. I think there is a good time to explore and learn this new possibilities and let’s start to unleash your skills.

I would like to share some good places to learn about Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2015. I also would like to compliment Microsoft for doing a very good job in providing learning material to the community over past few years!

Here just some of the most important links to get you started:

Windows 10:

• Windows 10 course on Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA)
• Windows 10 related videos on Channel 9
• Windows 10 Jump Start on Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA)

Visual Studio 2015:

• Download Visual Studio 2015
• Developing for Windows 10 – What’s New?
• Get started with Windows apps
• Design  Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps
• Develop Windows apps
• Publish Windows apps
• .NET Native – What it means for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) developers
• A Developer’s Guide to Windows 10
• How Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10 work better together in the Enterprise

I hope this gives you a very good starting point and shows you a new direction and you might want to try new things :).

It is not quite Christmas yet but you are right now allowed to submit your wish list for SCOM features and improvements! The SCOM product team opened yesterday a feedback form for submitting any ideas for SCOM vNext. There might be things you are missing, things you hate how they work or you just have seen things in other monitoring tools you would like to have in SCOM. Now is the time to let Microsoft know WHAT YOU WANT! YES! YOU! Don’t complain about SCOM, help to improve it and bring SCOM to the next level.

You can find the “wish list” here http://systemcenterom.uservoice.com/forums/293064-general-operations-manager-feedback .

I also submitted a couple of improvements and you might want to vote for them http://systemcenterom.uservoice.com/users/95583468-stefan-roth .

Nothing in life is perfect, but we can help to make SCOM almost perfect!

On August 12, Silect Software and Infront Consulting hosted a webinar about MP authoring with all the big shots in the management pack authoring space. I did also attend the webinar and the content was just awesome. If you mist the event, you are able to watch the recordings on YouTube. All of these guys did an awesome job and I highly recommend watching these recordings.

Brian Wren MP Best Practices

Randy Roffey (Silect) / Brian Wren Visual Studio Authoring Extensions

Freddy Mora Silva MP Reporting Authoring

Mike Sargeant  How to Monitor a Network Device

Kevin Holman Authoring PowerShell Performance Rules

Jonathan Almquist MP Authoring for UNIX/Linux

Thank’s to all of the presenters for creating such great content! Find more details here http://www.systemcentercentral.com/infront_university/ .

Microsoft released SCOM 2016 TP3 end of August 2015 and of course I am eager to know what’s new. One problem I hit, was trying to onboard SCOM to Operations Management Suite (OMS) on Windows Server 2016 TP3. Onboarding to OMS is as easy as 1-2-3 (usually), but this time Internet Explorer settings are blocking the sign-in process.

I am talking about this connector here…

When you first start the connector, will face this screen…

Because this Windows contains just a embedded Website we check the URL…

…after adding the URL above to the Trusted Sites, you are prompted for credentials…

…you can try to sign in you will hit another error that cookies must be allowed. We check the URL and add this site to Trusted Sites in IE….

At one point, I even hit another error, showing me an URL, that OMS is not available. Checking the URL, redirected me to the ancestor of OMS :)…

After I added the URL above I still could not run the OMS connector wizard. Because we should enable JavaScript, I enabled the Active Scripting for Internet zone in IE…

I still was not able to run the configuration wizard, but luckily I saw a tweet from MVP Adin Ermie which mentioned to enable the settings Trusted Sites to Medium-Low…

…and finally adding these three sites to the Trusted Sites zone…

After all this configuration issues setup, I was able to run the OMS connector successfully.

If you have been working with SCOM for some time, you want to know more what is going on under the hood. You might want to know, how classes relate to each other or maybe what the management pack contains what kind of elements like monitors, rules, tasks, views and so on. In other terms you want to know what the service model respectively the health model looks like. Of course you could use many tools incl. SCOM console to figure this stuff out, but there is a much cooler way. During my daily work, I hit two websites, which I just found to be very useful.

Management Pack Document (http://mpdb.azurewebsites.net/)

The first page shows you the class hierarchy in SCOM. It shows all classes in a nice flat overview. I can’t remember of any other place where you could see this nice diagram…

In addition the website contains information about common relationships as also detailed information about basic management packs…

Very cool stuff and I really like the class hierarchy overview.

System Center Core (http://systemcentercore.com/)

The second site I would like to show is System Center Core. It is similar to Management Pack Document, but it has a bit more graphical and technical details…

For example if you pick a management pack…

…you are able to see the details. It is even possible to click through the elements, until you hit the script of the rules or monitors or even details about the tasks in the MP like here…

I have not checked if this provided information is 100% accurate and reliable, but my impression is, that these sites are well maintained and provide a good source of information for discovering the intestines of SCOM and help also troubleshooting and developing management packs.

I hope this is a good tip in your daily SCOM life!

Yet another interesting SCOM problem. Today I was at a customer for fixing some SCOM issues, respectively to reinstall SCOM. The problem was, that there was a SCOM incl. VMM integration in place. Because of many issues SCOM was removed without properly removing the VMM integration. So if you tried to remove the SCOM connector in VMM 2012 R2 an error appeared…

After some research I found a Cmdlet which seemed to be promising called SCOpsMgrConnector https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh801688.aspx , if you study this article you find that there is a –force switch. My general rule is, if there is a –force switch, I use the –force switch :). So we executed the command on the VMM server and the result looked like this…

After this task, we could run the SCOM connector wizard in VMM 2012 R2 without any further issues. I like!

SMA is a great tool for automation of many kind like IT related tasks or as an interface between two systems or business processes you would like to have done automatically. Building workflows is not that easy, but once you get the trick it is not that hard. After you built your workflows, at some point in time you need to troubleshoot, especially if you are dealing with highly available and highly automated environments which run many runbooks / workflows at the same time. Soon you will bump into the terms “job” and “sandbox”, but what is it and how do they relate to each other? Because there is a lot of confusion about these terms, I try to explain how this stuff fits together.

What is a SMA job?

Every time you start a runbook (= workflow) in SMA it generates a job, it is an instance of your workflow. If you open the Windows Azure Portal (WAP) you get a near real time overview of the jobs that are currently running in your SMA infrastructure.

It does not matter if you start the runbook by pressing the Start button in WAP or using Start-SMARunbook Cmdlet the runbook or if you schedule the workflow. In any case an instance of the workflow respectively a job is created.

What is a sandbox?

If you open the event log on a runbook worker you will find an event about the Orchestrator.Sandbox process.

So what is this event all about and what is this sandbox thing? When you start your first job in SMA a new sandbox (Orchestrator.Sandbox ) process is created.

The sandbox is basically a closed space where your SMA jobs live in. This means you have at least one sandbox on each runbook worker. Can you have more than one sandbox on your runbook worker? Yes. There are two cases when a new sandbox is created. The first case is if a new user module has been imported, which would allow to run runbook jobs to use the old module version and the runbooks using the new module version would run in a separate sandbox. The second case is, if the count of TotalAllowedJobs is hit. If you hit this limit a new sandbox will be created, but usually if a job is finished the job should be recycled. What does TotalAllowedJobs mean?

TotalAllowedJobs : The total number of jobs that a Sandbox can process during its lifetime. When this limit is hit, the Sandbox is no longer assigned new jobs and the existing jobs are allowed to complete. After that, the Sandbox is disposed. [Source: Microsoft]

Where can I find this setting? It is placed in the SMA configuration file C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012 R2\Service Management Automation\Orchestrator.Settings.config\Orchestrator.Settings.config.

So what is this sandbox for? A sandbox is an environment where SMA runs safely SMA jobs. Beth Cooper PM on the Microsoft automation team explained it like this:

A sandbox process is equivalent to a PowerShell runtime and ensures reliability.  By putting SMA jobs in sandboxes, if there is an unexpected error in a sandbox, we can kill that runtime process and resume the jobs in a new runtime with a clean state.  Sandboxes also allow for different PowerShell module versions since one PS session can have one version and the other can have an updated version.                                     

I think this explains it very well.

What is the relation between jobs and sandboxes?

So this means that there is always an Orchestrator.Sandbox process running on a runbook worker? No. If there is a runbook currently running, then yes, if the runbook / job is finished and no more jobs are running the Orchestrator.Sandbox process is disposed. Therefore no jobs, no Orchestrator.Sandbox process.

What if nested runbooks come into play?

What is a nested runbook? A nested runbook is if you create a Workflow A which calls inside Workflow B and Workflow C.

There are two different methods to call a nested / child workflow. Either you call Workflow B and Workflow C directly from Workflow A or you start these runbooks with Start-SMARunbook Cmdlet. So what is the difference? If you call the runbook directly from Workflow A, like in this picture, ONE SMA job and one sandbox is created.

If you call the child workflows using Start-SMARunbook like in this picture, THREE jobs and one sandbox are created.

I hope you get a better understanding of SMA and I would like to thank Beth Cooper from Microsoft for answering my questions! Additionally to this post, the automation team has published an excellent blog post about nested runbooks in SMA. After reading both posts, you should have the full understanding how things work in SMA / workflows.

Everyone talks these days about automation, services and self-service. Rarely you will find a session which is showing you a real world case showing how it is really done. I am happy to speak at the “Experts 2 Experts Virtualization Conference” in Lisbon together with my wingman Stefan Johner http://jhnr.ch/. The event takes place from November 13th-15th in Novotel Lisboa, Avenida José Malhoa 1 1A 1099-051 Lisbon Portugal.

We will show you what you can do with a self-service portal, System Center Service Manager (SCSM) and Service Management Automation (SMA). In addition we will give you insides how we started the project, things we faced during development and implementation, how the solution works and our “lessons learned”.

If you would like to attend the session, we will be speaking on Friday 13th from 17:10-18:00.

E2EVC Virtualization Conference is a non-commercial, virtualisation community Event.
Our main goal is to bring the best virtualisation experts together to exchange knowledge and to establish new connections. E2EVC is a weekend crammed with presentations, Master Classes and discussions delivered by both virtualisation vendors product teams and independent experts.
Started in 2003 with just 4 people and after 26 very successful events grown to awell-recognized event with over 150 attendees. In the last 12 years and 25 events, our conference has taken place in cities such as Munich, London, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt, Dublin, Orlando, Paris, Los Angeles, Munich, Nice, Lisbon, Rome, Hamburg, Hong Kong and Vienna. On average we have 30 sessions at each event. Topics are – server, application, desktop, storage virtualisation with products from vendors like Microsoft, VMware, Citrix and many more. Over 25 of the best virtualisation community experts present their topics. Many current virtualisation community leaders participated or still participate in our events. It’s the people that attend, presenters that present and our sponsors who make this event possible.

If you are interested in this event go and check out the website here .

I have been doing SCOM updates for the past few years and I rarely bumped into any issues. If you stick to the recommended procedures, then you will succeed. But recently I bumped into an issue while updating SCOM 2012 R2 UR7. As you know there are installer files which you must run on each SCOM component, in addition you need to run SQL scripts on your backed databases and finally import management packs. The entire procedure is well described here in this support article.

In my case I had to update 2 management servers and both databases OperationsManager and OperationsManagerDW. The installation was brand new and just after adding the last management server, my intension was to install UR7. When I tried to run the SQL script UR_Datawarehouse.sql, the following error appeared…

Because I have never faced this problem before, I was quite surprised and started investigating.

I tried to run the script multiple times and the error just slightly changed. If you read the message carefully, you will notice, that there are “objects” missing. In my case vManagedEntityMonitor, Microsoft_SystemCenter_Visualization_Library_
AggregatedPerfValuesForMultipleSeriesGet. The first object is a view and the second a stored procedure which the script is expecting. After some checking for errors I noticed a lot of error events in the OperationsManager event log on each management server. One event I noticed was, that the management server action account (MSAA) could not log on locally to the SCOM servers. Well this is a very bad issue and after checking the management servers in the SCOM console I saw also, that the management servers did not appear healthy, instead they just had the “green circle”. After some more digging, I finally figured out that there was a change in the domain GPO’s which restricted user accounts from log on locally to the servers. I temporarily fixed the issue by adding the SCOM service accounts to the local administrator group of each management server. I know just the SDK account needs local administrator permission on the management servers, but it is just a quick and dirty fix. Soon the error events disappeared and the event log didn’t contain any errors anymore. Few minutes later the management server objects appeared also in a healthy state.

After the management server turned healthy, the expected views and stored procedures appeared in the OperationsManagerDW.

vManagedEntityMonitor:

Microsoft_SystemCenter_Visualization_Library_
AggregatedPerfValuesForMultipleSeriesGet:

The first time I ran the script, there were more views and stored procedures missing and it seems, that those objects are only fully created after the management servers are in a healthy state. The reason I bumped into this issue was, because of the restricted permissions of the domain user accounts, which prevented to turn the management server into a healthy state and finally creating all the necessary database objects.

I hope this helps!

Few month ago, Microsoft released management packs for monitoring open source software like Apache HTTP Server or MySQL databases. In this post I would like to have an overview of monitoring Apache web server. So far there have not been many free options to actually monitor this web server, although it is a very common candidate out in the field. This management pack shows clearly Microsoft’s commitment to support open-source software in the SCOM world.

Support

This  current management pack supports version Apache HTTP Server version 2.2 and 2.4 if you install Apache from one of the SCOM supported Linux distributions. Find all supported *nix versions  here https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh212713.aspx . In SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 there is Apache version 2.2 and in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 there is Apache version 2.4 included. In this example I installed SUSE Enterprise Server 11 SP3.

The Apache management pack is part of the System Center 2016 Technical Preview 2 Management Packs for Open Source Software found here http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=46924 . Required is at least SCOM 2016 TP2, but SCOM TP2 has already expired few month ago, I will use SCOM 2016 TP3, which also works perfectly fine and can be found here https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/evalcenter/dn781241 .

Pre-requisites

First import all management packs for your Linux distribution from the SCOM source itself, depending on your distribution you need to add different MP’s. In my case I will use the SLES (SUSE) MP’s. Make sure you import all depended MP’s also …

After some time, you will find in the DownloadedKits directory,  the corresponding shell script bundles for your Linux distributions…

You might are used to have *.rpm or *.deb files in this directory, in this current version Microsoft delivers a *.sh package we need to extract later on. Because these are no installer file, I could not use the SCOM agent wizard to deploy these packages. So we need to take some manual steps to install the agent.

Copy this package to your Linux server using e.g. WinSCP https://winscp.net/eng/index.php . WinSCP will allow you to connect to your Linux server from your Windows box and upload any files from your local system…

Before we proceed make sure you have configured your Linux monitoring RunAs accounts properly. Please read this post for more details on how to configure the RunAs accounts http://stefanroth.net/2012/03/15/scom-2012-linux-monitoring-lab-part-1-setup-suse-11-1/ , it shows you exactly how to monitor a Linux server.

At this stage you should have the proper Linux distribution MP’s imported, RunAs accounts configured and also the agent source file scx-1.6.0-174.sles.11.x86.sh copied to the Linux server.

Note: We imported these management packs first, because this will place the agent file into the C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012 R2\Operations Manager\Server\AgentManagement\UnixAgents\DownloadedKits on your SCOM server, which is needed to install the agent.

Install SCOM Linux agent

Log into your Linux box and open a terminal session, in my case I am logged in as root into suse01.services.lab.itnetx.ch and changed to the /tmp directory where I copied the agent source scx-1.6.0-174.sles.11.x86.sh. There are multiple steps you need to execute:

1. Make the shell file scx-1.6.0-174.sles.11.x86.sh executable by executing the command:  chmod +x scx-1.6.0-174.sles.11.x86.sh
2. See all options you have for the scx-1.6.0-174.sles.11.x86.sh package: ./scx-1.6.0-174.sles.11.x86.sh – -help
3. Install the agent only scx-1.6.0-174.sles.11.x86.sh – -Install

As you can see the installation routine checks, if Apache is already installed or not. In my case I haven’t installed the web server and therefore we need to take additional steps. I did this on purpose, to see how it works to install the Apache cim-provider. Now you basically have the blank OMI agent installed but there is no “connection” between SCOM and this agent. Therefore we need to run the agent discovery for discovering the Linux box, sign the certificate and finally manage this server. Just run the Linux discovery wizard, as you would install a regular Linux agent. Your wizard should look like this if you configured everything properly…

…hit Manage and finally your Linux box is monitored by SCOM…

Go to the Monitoring pane and click through the views, you should see some objects popping up after a while …

At this point you should have the Linux server monitored and if this is ok we will take the next step and install the Apache HTTP Server.

Install Apache HTTP Server

In this step we will install a plane Apache HTTP Server using the SUSE package installer. Go to Install/Remove Software and search for Apache…

The search result will show up with all Apache modules and packages, I selected the following (some depended packages are selected automatically)…

…some dependencies are resolved…

After installation we need to switch to the terminal window and create a default index.html file, because there is no such file per default installed. Of course this step is optional, but I want to check if my web server works :) and therefore I want to show a default website. Change into the /srv/www/htdocs directory and create a index.html file…

…add some content to the index.html file…

Save the file and start the Apache service…

If you open http://localhost you should see the default site like this…

At this stage we have Apache HTTP server installed and running.

Import Apache HTTP Server  management packs

Next we need to import the management packs for monitoring the Apache HTTP Server itself. The management pack can be found here http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=46924 and contains also the MP for MySQL, which we don’t need. Import the following two files Microsoft.ApacheHTTPServer.Library.mp and Microsoft.Oss.Library.mp…

If you meet all dependencies, the import will succeed…

Configure CIM Provider

The last step is to configure the CIM Provider. The Apache CIM Provider package is automatically deployed during the installation of the Linux agent Operations Manager, if Apache HTTP Server is detected at that time. This detection and automatic installation occurs when installing the Linux agent for the first time on a computer, and it also occurs when upgrading a previous agent version to the current version. If the Apache HTTP Server is installed to the Linux computer after the Operations Manager agent is installed, the CIM Provider can be manually installed through the following mechanisms. Open a terminal window and change to /temp where uploaded the scx-1.6.0-174.sles.11.x86.sh  package.Then execute these steps…

1. Extract the scx-1.6.0-174.sles.11.x86.sh  package : sudo sh ./scx-1.6.0-174.sles.11.x86.sh  – -extract
2. Change into the directory: cd scxbundle.20141/
3. Extract the CIM Provider package: sudo ./apache-cimprov-1.0.0-545.universal.1.i686.sh – -extract
4. Change the directory: cd apache_22/
5. Run the installation: rpm –I apache-cimprov-1.0.0-545.universal.1.i686.rpm
6. Restart the agent: scxadmin –restart
7. Restart apache service: service apache2 restart

At this point the CIM Provider is installed and running. In order to load the module into Apache HTTP Server we need to modify the sudoers file. When you are monitoring *nix systems you need to modify the sudoers file which basically sets permission for the specific RunAs accounts we define in SCOM. For monitoring Apache HTTP Server we need to add an additional line…

1. Open the file: sudo visudo
2. Change to insert mode: press i
3. Scroll at the end of the file and insert the following line, assuming your monitoring account is called monuser. This allows your privileged monitoring account to execute the apache_config.sh script, which we will start from the SCOM console:
   monuser ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /opt/microsoft/apache-cimprov/bin/apache_config.sh
4. Press Esc-key to leave vi editor
5. Type :wq! to write and quit

Open the SCOM console and change to the Apache view, where you should see a not monitored object in the Apache HTTP Server view…

Click the Load Monitoring Module task, this will open this dialog…

…click Run, which will load the module into the web server using the privileged RunAs account. After a short time the task should finish successfully…

After some time you will see data dropping in…

Apache HTTP Servers…

Apache Virtual Hosts…

Performance counters…

Summary

There are multiple steps you need to take to monitor Apache HTTP Server. First monitor the basic Linux OS, if Apache has not been installed before, you need to install the CIM Provider afterwards. For monitoring Apache HTTP Server import the Apache MP’s and load the module apache-cimprov into the web server by executing the Load Monitoring Module SCOM task. At the end you get a pretty well monitored Apache HTTP Server having the most common performance counters out of the boy. Be aware the discoveries run every 4 hours and the rule collect data every 5 minutes. If you need to know what exactly is being monitored and which data is collected read the MP guide provided here http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=46924 . The intention here was to play around with the Apache monitoring and therefore this procedure might does not exactly meet the production requirements. I hope you get an impression how things play together.

Back in August, the yearly System Center Universe Europe event was held in Basel-Switzerland. Around 420 attendees joined this event and it was a great success. Here some more short facts…

• 420 people from 20 different countries
• 19 sponsors (thank you!)
• 62 breakout sessions
• 8 early morning discussions
• Multiple parties for fun and networking

If you missed this event you are now able to watch the recordings. Myself I had the great pleasure to present also two sessions as I already blogged here.

• Business Process Automation – A Real Real World Scenario, No Fakes Just Facts
• Speed Dating SCOM – Make it sexy

Sadly the recording god fooled with me/us and there is only the “Speed Dating SCOM – Make it sexy” session recording available which you can find here.

The other session recording from the entire System Center Universe Europe can be watched online on vimeo here.

If you missed this version of SCU Europe, make sure you don’t miss the upcoming SCU Europe event which will be held in Berlin at the Berlin Congress Center on August 24-26 2016. Keep an eye on http://www.systemcenteruniverse.ch for more news.

During their annual “Connection Days” event one week ago, Microsoft Switzerland announced their “Partners of the Year” for different competencies. itnetX has been awarded “Partner of the Year 2015 – Cloud Platform”! This award underlines our commitment to helping customers transform their business into cloud-first scenarios. It also highlights the huge changes to our company over the last months: transitioning to a modern cloud platform partner.

The latest award joins an impressive list:

• Microsoft Partner of the Year 2011 – Datacenter (itnetX)
• Microsoft Partner of the Year 2012 – Datacenter (itnetX)
• Microsoft Partner of the Year 2013 – Datacenter (itnetX)
• Microsoft Partner of the Year 2014 – Datacenter (Syliance IT Services, since merged with itnetX)
• Microsoft Partner of the Year 2015 – Cloud Platform (itnetX)

I am very proud to be part of this highly skilled company / teams / people who are deeply focused and deliver first-class Microsoft solutions to our customers.

I would like to spread the words about an upcoming user group session event in Basel, Switzerland. My buddy PowerShell MVP Stéphane van Gulick will host this event and we both will have a session. I will present what you can do with System Center Service Manager and Service Management automation in a session called “End-To-End Automation using Service Manager and SMA” and Stéphane van Gulick will show the new feature building classes in Powershell V5 and some practical use cases.

The schedule looks like this…

If you interested in attending this event you are very welcome. Please use Eventbrite for registering to this free event!

Operational Management Suite (OMS) is probably the final product of a long evolution process starting back in 2011 known as System Center Advisor, later on transforming into Microsoft Azure Operational Insight and finally into a growing management suite for Azure and on-premise services. Read my post here for more historical information on this awesome solution.

I think it is a historical move for Microsoft to support Open Source and Linux track the relationship goes even that far, Microsoft writes “love blog posts (not love letters :))” Microsoft Loves Linux, read the blog post series here. Because of that I would like to show how OMS supports Linux data collection.

The OMS Agent for Linux enables rich and real-time analytics for operational data (Syslog, Performance, Alerts, Inventory) from Linux servers, Docker Containers and monitoring tools like Nagios, Zabbix and System Center

Currently this Linux agent is in a preview stage and supports at this very moment the following operating systems…

• Amazon Linux 2012.09 –> 2015.09 (x86/x64)
• CentOS Linux 5,6, and 7 (x86/x64)
• Oracle Enterprise Linux 5,6, and 7 (x86/x64)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5,6 and 7 (x86/x64)
• Debian GNU/Linux 6, 7, and 8 (x86/x64)
• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, 14.04 LTS, 15.04 (x86/x64)
• SUSE Linux Enteprise Server 11 and 12 (x86/x64)

As things move fast this list will change within the next weeks / months. Keep an eye on GitHub where you find up-to-date information.

The amazing thing is, that the agent is built on open source components and for collecting the data and the aggregate it uses FluentD . FluentD has hundreds of existing plugins, which will make it really easy for you to add new data sources. So this perfectly to collect whatever data you want.

Pre-requisites:

In order to install successfully the agent you need to make sure the following packages are installed…

In addition if you want to collect syslog data either rsyslog or syslog-ng are required to collect syslog messages. The default syslog daemon on version 5 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Oracle Linux version (sysklog) is not supported for syslog event collection. To collect syslog data from this version of these distributions, the rsyslog daemon should be installed and configured to replace sysklog,

Installation:

Some of us are just Microsoft geeks and might not know too much about Linux. So here I set first hostname of the Linux server, in my case it is a SUSE Enterprise Linux 12 and running uname –m shows me x86_64 which tells me it is a x64 bit server.

Download the agent from GitHub https://github.com/MSFTOSSMgmt/OMS-Agent-for-Linux

or us wget

wget https://github.com/MSFTOSSMgmt/OMS-Agent-for-Linux/releases/download/1.0.0-47/omsagent-1.0.0-47.universal.x64.sh

Check the md5 checksum md5sum ./omsagent-1.0.0-47.universal.x64.sh and install the agent sudo sh ./omsagent-1.0.0-47.universal.x64.sh –install -w <YOUR OMS WORKSPACE ID> -s <YOUR OMS WORKSPACE PRIMARY KEY>. Get your WORKSPACE ID and PRIMARY KEY from the OMS portal by logging in into http://www.microsoft.com/oms… 

…the installation should run like this…

…immediately you should see the agent has connected… 

Checks:

To see what data floating in there are multiple places to check.

First check you installation by running the command service omsagent status…

Go to the Log Search in OMS and type a query like this Computer=suse007 Type=Perf of course change the computer name accordingly…

…and some graphical details should appear…

Conclusion:

This is the basic installation of a single OMS Linux agent. It goes without a hitch, if you make sure you have the proper libraries installed and supported OS versions. Microsoft does the right move to support and contribute to Open Source, it even does it very well in a good quality and it reflects this strategy in other products / tools as well. Great!