This document contains a conveniently formatted source of command line syntax for Windows Server 2008 Core, and includes both RTM and R2 commands. It started out as a convenient source for my own reference, but after sharing with a few colleagues, they suggested I share.In any event, it makes for a handy offline reference if you've not memorized all the configuration commands for server core.

We see from time to time posts on Security Events that are collected in the Security Logs

Seven Winds has seen once too often that support teams miss heartbeat failures. We created a tool to assist the monitoring team to easily catch these events and create an audio and visual alert to grab their attention.

by Kris Bash, automated solution including a PowerShell script that puts nodes (and clusters, if applicable) in maintenance mode when used as part a

by, Kris Bash, A vbs script (as a .txt file) for use in a SCOM unit monitor to locally check the status of a listening TCP port.

This is a PowerPoint presentation on “AD Integration for Large Environments in System Center OpsMgr 2007”, presented by Pete Zerger at the System Center Solutions Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Here's another great community solution for automated maintenance mode. In this case, J. Greg extended Derek Harkins 'Maintenance Mode without OpsMgr Admin Rights" solution to automate maintenance mode during monthly patch management.

This is a tool we originally released on systemcenterforum.org designed to run on the Essentials server or SCOM RMS to do one thing - export all management packs. Since the MP2XMLDumper.exe written by Clive errors out on the SCE 2010 platform, this is the best way to export MPs for deeper investigation today.

It allows you to start Maintenance Mode from an monitored server using just a vbscript. Using this requires absolutely no permissions in Operations Manager. The MaintMode.vbs writes an event to the event log that indicates the length of time Maintenance Mode should remain on. This is picked up by the management pack and processed on the RMS to turn on Maintenance Mode for that server. The on time can be specified in days, hours or minutes.

by Bob Messer and David Scheltens, this script, designed for use in an OpsMgr two-state monitor, will alert on databases not based up within a user-defined threshold.

by Andreas "Tenchuu" Wackenhut, when run from OpsMgr Command Shell, this script returns top rule and monitor generated alerts.

David Wallis of the U.K (www.wallis2000.co.uk) has written an application, called the SCOM Email Service, that allows Operations Manager 2007 administrators to acknowledge and resolve alerts via email.

This is the sample Process Monitoring script referenced in the "HOW-TO Create a 2-State Script Monitor" tutorial for OpsMgr and Essentials 2007. Use as a learning tool only, not for production environments.

Sometimes you may not wish to put the whole computer into maintenance mode. Instead you may wish to put just a number of databases or websites into maintenance mode. This script by Boris Yanushpolsky provides means to put any object into maintenance mode, regardless of class.

This sample script illustrates how to retrieve a list of agents based on a common search element, and then loop through these agents, updating the settings on each. Update setting as instructed in comments, then save with a .ps1 file. The script can be run on any computer with the Operations Console / Command Shell interfaces loaded.

By Kristopher Bash...While the SCOM Reporting implementation provides a great set of reports out of the box, there are a number of custom reports which I have found useful to develop. The report described here is one to report on aggregated hourly performance counters collected on SNMP Network Devices.

Another great meeting last week. I wanted to thank the Speakers Omid Abdollahpour for his Hyper-V talk, Morgan Holm for his insight to the Bridgways Virtual Machine MP, and finally, Raphael Burri and Pete Zerger for the Advanced MP Authoring in the R2 Console talk.

Here's an XML Diff Report for the ManagementPackSchema.xsd (which is the management pack schema) in SCOM 2007 R2 versus the previous versions. Among other things, you will notice the addition of Service Level Objective information for the Service Level Tracking feature.

Step-by-step walkthrough on the steps required to configure notification in Operations Manager 2007. Updated Sept '07

This sample monitoring script illustrates how run a T-SQL query on a database and sets monitor state based on value returned. Good example of how to dynamically create the connection string when database server & database name must be discovered at runtime.