Wednesday, May 30, 2007

SQL Failed Jobs report

I went to pull a listing of failed SQL jobs from Operations Manager a while back and found that there is no report to provide this information. I wrote a quick report to gather this information from the Operations Manager data warehouse. Grab the rdl and/ sql script from the links below.

--SQL Failed Jobs SQL query (.sql)

--Failed SQL Jobs report (.rdl)

Jeff

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Enable Detailed Logging for ACS Forwarder

In order to troubleshoot various ACS issues this past week, I enabled detailed logging on the ACS forwarder. The below steps will write detailed log entries to C:\Windows\Temp\AdtAgent.log.

  1. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\AdtAgent\Parameters
  2. Create DWORD value = TraceFlags
  3. Edit the TraceFlags entry and enter decimal value 524420
  4. Restart the AdtAgent service

SMS 2003 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007

Microsoft released the SMS 2003 MP for Operations Manager 2007 on 5/9/2007. It may be downloaded here.

Feature Summary:

• Detects all SMS 2003 server computers and site systems.

• Monitors the starting and stopping of all SMS 2003 services, including critical dependent services such as Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Internet Information Server (IIS), and Microsoft SQL Server.

• Provides alerts for SMS service stops, service failures, performance thresholds, status messages, and site system status.

• Presents the state of all roles and computers in the SMS 2003 environment.

• Provides a topology diagram that displays site, site server and site system relationships along with health status.

• Monitors processing rates.

• Monitors backlogs of discovery data records (DDRs), software inventory, hardware inventory, status messages, and software metering on both primary site servers and management points.

• Monitors core system resource usage.

• Includes tasks that enable users of the Operations Manager Operations Console to diagnose and resolve problems on remote computers through the use of SMS Administrator Console.

• Configuration, availability and performance reports. Monitors the performance trends of many SMS performance counters.

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Auditing events on untrusted computers – Audit collection Services (ACS)

After having successfully deployed Operations Manager framework to our primary domain and a few untrusted computers in a workgroup, I ventured to enable ACS and begin collecting audit events. While the documented procedure works fine for those servers within the trusted domain (using Kerberos), the workgroup computers posed a bit of a challenge. Specifically, after enabling audit services on the workgroup computers, numerous security events 529 and 680 began appearing and the computers were refused connection to the collector.

Microsoft mentions in the ACS documentation that Kerberos is used by adtagent.exe to authenticate to the collector, by default, but offers no workaround for computers that are not joined to the domain. The document below steps one through the process of using certificate authentication with ACS. As you will see from the steps required this could be troublesome, from a management standpoint, when you have many untrusted agents forwarding events.

As time allows, I will publish a more through guide. This document, in the interim, should help those that are struggling with this issue. Feel free to contact me at jeff.skelton@gmail.com with any issues to validate that this procedure worked in your environment.

http://helpmemanage.googlepages.com/ACSCertificates.pdf

Jeff