October 27 2011 11:14 AM

Tips for using Reporting in Operations Manager–How do I make the most of my Operations Manager Reports?

Confused on OpsMgr reporting? Running reports with no data? Check out the latest edition of Windows IT Pro! (http://www.windowsitpro.com/issues/issue.aspx?IssueID=1011) Excerpt from the article with Windows IT Pro in the November 2011 edition: “Although...

October 25 2011 3:51 PM

Consulting, Working Conditions & Cool Technology

One of the most commonly overlooked sections of a Statement of Work or proposal focuses around the area of working conditions for consultants. Paraphrased it says that a consultant will have a space to sit, a phone to use and equipment required to perfor...

October 24 2011 9:26 AM

OpsMgr–”Not Monitored” agent

There are a variety of different reasons which can cause an agent to appear as “Not Monitored”. We were debugging some of these on a client site, and ran through potential issues such as these: DNS issues: http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/2009/10/ops...

October 21 2011 12:15 PM

System Center 2012 & 8 more reasons why Silverlight needs to run on Internet Explorer x64

Up until recently, the information below would have caused me little to no concern. However, as I have been digging deeper into System Center 2012 Silverlight is becoming more of a core piece of functionality. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that...

October 21 2011 8:58 AM

OpsMgr Web Console, Savision Live Maps, SSL

My friend Larry has an OpsMgr 2007 R2 environment with Savision Live Maps. Recently they enabled SSL on the OpsMgr Web Console. This caused an issue with the links in Live maps when you drill down and try to open a SCOM object, the URL still includes Por...

October 20 2011 8:45 AM

How can I remotely access my home lab environment?

So you have built a home lab to test our some new technologies like System Center, or SharePoint, Exchange or Lync but now you need to be able to remotely access those lab environments. What are the options available? Recently I sent the following questi...

October 19 2011 8:41 AM

OpsMgr Dashboard Integration: Third Party dashboarding solutions: Bay Dynamics IT Analytics for Microsoft System Center

For this blog article I’ll be focusing on Bay Dynamics and their product IT Analytics for Microsoft System Center. Their product takes a different approach to surfacing System Center data by creating cubes. Bay Dynamics gave me an excellent demonstration...

October 18 2011 11:55 AM

Coming to Dallas Texas – October 26th: "What’s New in System Center 2012?”

Do you work in System Center or are you interested in what’s coming in System Center 2012? If so and you live or work in or around Dallas, this event is for you! Registration is available here! I will be presenting on System Center 2012 including what’s...

October 18 2011 8:15 AM

OpsMgr Dashboard Integration: Custom dashboarding with Visual Studio

I saw this and had to write a shout-out to others out there who have built their own customized dashboard solutions which I hadn’t seen yet. Check this one out which was written in Visual Studio over SQL reporting services. Or his earlier version: For in...

October 17 2011 8:32 AM

OpsMgr Dashboard Integration: Third Party dashboarding solutions: Silect ConfigWise

In my dashboard integration series (shout from the hecklers '”hey, Cameron’s back on that again – I was wondering if he ever was going to finish those”) I have primarily focused on either free solutions or solutions based upon Microsoft technologies (lik...