Friday, August 21, 2009

OpsMgr R2 Management Pack Guide – RTFM…

For all MPs to be imported I have said it many times on this blog: RTFM (Read The Friendly Manual) first before importing any MP. So far so good.

But with an initial installation of OpsMgr, there are already some MPs in place. One of them is the OpsMgr MP. Much of it is configured, based on the answers which are given in the installation dialogues of OpsMgr. However, additional configuration is always needed, just to make sure the basis (OpsMgr without any other MP nor any monitored object but itself) is spic and span. Only then one has a good and solid foundation to built the rest of the enterprise monitoring solution upon.

As is the case with any MP, there is a guide for it. The guide for the OpsMgr R2 is to be found here. However, this guide might change overtime so it is better to go to the MP Catalog, and filter the page like this:
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Hit the button Search and the most recent guide will be displayed. Download it, and read it. In today's guide pages 7 & 8 tells one what has to be configured:
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As you can see, these are vital items for a correctly working OpsMgr environment. The guide itself isn’t that big, less then 30 pages. So download it, read it and perform those actions needed.

When done, don’t think: Hooray! Now I can push my Agents to the objects to be monitored. Wait and take one step back. Just go to the Administration Pane of the Console and click on the top-level node Administration. The middle section of the Console will display other useful information about what needs to be done before pushing any Agent to whatever object or importing any other MP:
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So one has to think about setting up notification, whether or not to use AD Integration (only when Agents aren’t pushed, but are part of an installation image. System Center Central has written a very good rock solid guide about it.)

With having answered those questions and whether or not configured the needed settings accordingly, now the rest of the construction of the OpsMgr environment can start.

Of course there are many other questions to be answered and items to be checked as well, but that is part of my trade. If you want those covered as well, just hire me. :)

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