Notifications not working in SCOM 2012: "Notifications not working in SCOM 2012"
'via Blog this'
Friday, January 27, 2012
Operations Manager 2012 RC Console Memory Leak
As you may know by now, the Operations Manager 2012 console has a memory leak. Microsoft has acknowledged the issue, and put it into the release notes for RC. It isn't that big of a deal. Just close the console and reopen it, if it begins taking too much memory. They will probably fix it in RTM.
Having said that, this is the real warning I want to give. Many administrators will log into the management server and use the console for various reasons. Many times an administrator will disconnect his session, rather than logging out. If you do this, make sure you close the console...because I didn't. The console "ate" all the memory and brought the management server to its knees. I closed and reopened the console, it freed the memory, and all was good.
Having said that, this is the real warning I want to give. Many administrators will log into the management server and use the console for various reasons. Many times an administrator will disconnect his session, rather than logging out. If you do this, make sure you close the console...because I didn't. The console "ate" all the memory and brought the management server to its knees. I closed and reopened the console, it freed the memory, and all was good.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
My First Look at Network Monitoring in a Real Environment
I recently deployed System Center 2012: Operations Manager in a development environment. I don't mean a small virtual lab. I mean a real environment with multiple devices that can be monitored via SNMP.
I will try to categorize a little here to make reading more structured.
Initial Discovery
Without reading any documentation, I went into the administration pane, looked around a little and noticed the Network Management category, which includes Discovery rules. First, I created a recursive discovery rule. I decided to use a router as a seed, to which a couple of switches were connected. I only filtered to the subnet I was discovering. I was disappointed when the initial discovery only discovered the router and its interfaces, but NONE of the attached devices. I went back into the discovery, and this time I used a switch as a seed. By using the switch as the seed, I was able to discover all connected devices, as expected.
SO, question 1: Why am I unable to use a router as a seed device to use for discovery? I don't know the answer to this, and would love to find out.
Besides the one question I have, device discovery was a breeze. It was very easy, the steps are intuitive, and the nodes/interfaces were discovered and related as expected.
In terms of speed, the discovery was quite show for such a small number of devices on a Gigabit network. My Management Server was well-under utilized. I currently don't see this as an issue, but we will see where it takes us later.
Network Device Layouts and Dashboard
Microsoft did a pretty good job providing some nice out-of the box views. The views include a couple of dashboards, network vicinity, performance, availability, etc. You can see some screen shots here. http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/networking/using-the-network-dashboard-views-in-scom-2012/5226
Rules and Monitoring
Besides the normal up/down monitors, Microsoft provides a nice set of SNMP rules and monitors to monitoring performance and availability. Many of the rules are off by default. If you want to view a list of the rules from the console, you can scope you rule view the the Node and Interface classes.
Alerting
So it looks like Microsoft fell a little short on alerting. While alerting exists, there is not correlation. For example, ideally, if you have a router that goes down, and on that router you have a switch and ten devices connected to that switch, you would get ONE ALERT for the router itself, while all other alerts are suppressed. Unfortunately, this is not the case. You will get 12 ALERTS!!! One for the Router, One for the Switch, and ten for the Devices (assuming no backup link). Most of us can live with this, but I hope this is one of the first things that is changed.
Overall
In a sense, this is version 2 of SCOM Network monitoring. However, I am going to call it version 1, because they didn't really try to first time around in SCOM 2007. Overall, they did a fine job. If you are looking to replace your current network monitoring solution, you really need to bring SCOM 2012 up in your environment and take a look first. If you don't have a network monitoring solution, SCOM 2012 will provide a great foundation on which to build and customize.
I will try to categorize a little here to make reading more structured.
Initial Discovery
Without reading any documentation, I went into the administration pane, looked around a little and noticed the Network Management category, which includes Discovery rules. First, I created a recursive discovery rule. I decided to use a router as a seed, to which a couple of switches were connected. I only filtered to the subnet I was discovering. I was disappointed when the initial discovery only discovered the router and its interfaces, but NONE of the attached devices. I went back into the discovery, and this time I used a switch as a seed. By using the switch as the seed, I was able to discover all connected devices, as expected.
SO, question 1: Why am I unable to use a router as a seed device to use for discovery? I don't know the answer to this, and would love to find out.
Besides the one question I have, device discovery was a breeze. It was very easy, the steps are intuitive, and the nodes/interfaces were discovered and related as expected.
In terms of speed, the discovery was quite show for such a small number of devices on a Gigabit network. My Management Server was well-under utilized. I currently don't see this as an issue, but we will see where it takes us later.
Network Device Layouts and Dashboard
Microsoft did a pretty good job providing some nice out-of the box views. The views include a couple of dashboards, network vicinity, performance, availability, etc. You can see some screen shots here. http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/networking/using-the-network-dashboard-views-in-scom-2012/5226
Rules and Monitoring
Besides the normal up/down monitors, Microsoft provides a nice set of SNMP rules and monitors to monitoring performance and availability. Many of the rules are off by default. If you want to view a list of the rules from the console, you can scope you rule view the the Node and Interface classes.
Alerting
So it looks like Microsoft fell a little short on alerting. While alerting exists, there is not correlation. For example, ideally, if you have a router that goes down, and on that router you have a switch and ten devices connected to that switch, you would get ONE ALERT for the router itself, while all other alerts are suppressed. Unfortunately, this is not the case. You will get 12 ALERTS!!! One for the Router, One for the Switch, and ten for the Devices (assuming no backup link). Most of us can live with this, but I hope this is one of the first things that is changed.
Overall
In a sense, this is version 2 of SCOM Network monitoring. However, I am going to call it version 1, because they didn't really try to first time around in SCOM 2007. Overall, they did a fine job. If you are looking to replace your current network monitoring solution, you really need to bring SCOM 2012 up in your environment and take a look first. If you don't have a network monitoring solution, SCOM 2012 will provide a great foundation on which to build and customize.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)