Note 1: Adding Subscribers for a existing subscription

If you add a new subscriber to an existing subscription, i recommend to delete ALL existing subscribers and then re-add them including the new subscribers. If you do no delete the existing subscribers i found out, that it is almost certain, that the added subscriber will not get notified…

Note 2: If you use Notification Command Channels, it might be useful to increase the maximum number of asynchronous responses

Maybe you will get an Alert:

The process could not be created because the maximum number of asynchronous responses (5) has already been reached, and it will be dropped.

Then you should consider increasing the number of responses, which can be run on the RMS. You can increase the number via this registry setting:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Operations Manager\3.0\Modules\Global\Command Executer]
“AsyncProcessLimit”=dword:0000000a

But before doing so, i recommend to read the blog post from Clive Eastwood carefully: http://blogs.technet.com/cliveeastwood/archive/2008/04/16/some-more-command-notification-tricks-and-tips.aspx

To be continued…

Subsciber address menu

1. Issue: Adding a new Command Channel Address

If you want to add a new command channel address you have to click on “Add”, give the new address a name and then select the “Channel type”.
If you select “Command Channel” the input box delivery address will be greyed out!

Workaround:
First select E-Mail Channel, enter the delivery address …

… and then switch the channel type back to Command:

2. Issue: Editing a command channel delivery address

If you want to edit the delivery address and click on the Edit button, you will loose all of the informations:

I have not found any workarounds for this behaviour yet. If anybody has some hints or suggestions, please let me know.

• There is not a “one stop shop” report for all necessary information. You need multiple reports to gain a complete overview of the performance.
• Some important information are not available in standard reports like the table sizes or table fragmentation

So how can we get a better solution with all necessary information in one place? A lot of folks on the web (thanks to Kevin Holman and Steve Rachui and many others) have published SQL queries, which can help to analyze the health of the OperationsManager database.

So I tried some of the queries and was amazed, what wealth of information they provide.  But what always disturbs me was on the one hand the number of different scripts I had to run and on the other hand the lack of automation.

Ok, so let’s create a simple automated SQL Performance reporting solution:

Step 1:  Create a structured SQL script, with all necessary queries
Step 2:  Create a PowerShell wrapper for the command
Step 3: Run the wrapper as an automated task with a task scheduler

Step 1: the SQL Script

Please note, that I am not a DBA, in fact I am a complete SQL newbie, so if you can provide some optimizations to my script, please let me know.

The attached SQL script generates a text file with the following information:

• All Event counts per Day, incl. Sum for the whole DB
• TOP 50 Events, sorted by Creator
• Top 20 Computer with most Events in the DB
• Alerts per Day
• Top 50 Monitors with most State Change Events
• Top 20 Alerts, sorted by  Alert count
• Top 20 Alerts, sorted by  Repeat count
• Inserted Performance counter per day
• Top 100 Performance Counter
•  Database Size
• Top 10 Tables sorted by size
• Database Defragmentation (Scan Density should be > 80%, Logical Scan Fragmentation < 30%)

Of course you can extend this script indefinitely

What about the runtime? This script runs about 1-2 Minutes on a very slow SQL 2005 cluster with a 7 GB DB.

New announced features for version 4 are:

• MP Development Center with far better capabilities to create new MPs
• The whole MP workflow can now be automated via PowerShell, so it is much easier to comply with  your company processes
• Better Source and version control of MPs
• Improved administrative capabilities

I will test the current Beta in the next days and will post my experiences here.