January 18 2012 7:36 AM

How to prepare for Orchestrator? Learn Opalis in a month of Friday afternoons! (free online resources)

“Should I learn learn System Center now, or what until System Center 2012 comes out?” I hear this question fairly often from customers. What if I told you that a month from now, you could add a relevant, important skill to your resume in a month of Frida...

January 17 2012 11:59 AM

Why I am no longer an Operations Manager MVP… but I am a System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP!

There was an interesting discussion today (Taming IT with the Microsoft Private Cloud) which shows the deeper level of integration occurring in the System Center space. The following is my “Summary for Geeks” from the meeting above: Packaging and Pricing...

January 11 2012 4:58 PM

What does the Root Management Server Emulator (RMSE) actually DO in OpsMgr (#SCOM)?

OpsMgr 2007 introduced the concept of a Root Management Server and Secondary Management Servers. In OpsMgr2007 the RMS comprised 3 services providing the following functionality: · SDK Service o Console access and role based access control o Connectors t...

January 09 2012 1:20 PM

Exchange Back Pressure & OpsMgr Notification Channels

Up until recently in environment where the client has a highly available Exchange server environment I used to agree to using a single SMTP relay when defining an OpsMgr channel for notification. My thought process was that as long as the Exchange server...

January 07 2012 1:12 PM

A quick question about groups in OpsMgr (#SCOM)

I received a good question from a colleague of mine in Atlanta recently (shout-out to the Atlanta user group!). Here’s the question: “Can you have both explicit and dynamic members in a group? Simple question but no one seems to address it.” Just to keep...

January 06 2012 11:17 AM

Wanna look into your OpsMgr Instance Space?

When I am explaining how OpsMgr works “under the hood” and describe the OpsMgr instance space, the question frequently comes up, “how can I see that?”. Well, there is actually a report in the Operational Data Reporting MP called “ODR – Instance Space” th...

December 13 2011 7:47 AM

MP Authoring: How can I monitor FTP site availability in OpsMgr 2012?

This question was asked by a customer recently: How can I monitor FTP site availbility in OpsMgr 2012? Well, the good news is that investments in OpsMgr 2007 monitoring scripts can generally be carried forward to OpsMgr 2012 (see OpsMgr 2012: Will my Ops...

November 22 2011 8:13 AM

Call for MMS 2012 Community Speakers…

Microsoft has officially sent the call to previous speakers and now the community at large. The first time you access this page, you will need to enter an access code (Code below). After a profile is created, you can then enter the information for your to...

November 17 2011 10:05 PM

MMS 2012 Registration now open

MMS 2012 registration is now open, and we’re back in the Venetian! Register for the big event at http://www.mms-2012.com/ Innovation. Expertise. Community. At the 2012 Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) the brightest and most skilled IT Professionals from...

November 16 2011 8:57 AM

OpsMgr–(#SCOM) Query to return all recent processor performance counters

The following is another dashboard component for the Service Manager Dashboard customized for OpsMgr (#SCOM). This queries for from the OperationsManagerDW database to gather the most recent counters for Processor Utilization for all servers in the envir...