Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Xplat: Where Are The SCX-Certificates Stored?

When running a SCOM 2012 based MG which is involved in monitoring UNIX/Linux servers and the Resource Pool used for this purpose consists out of more SCOM 2012 Management Servers, one has to export the SCX-certificates on those very same SCOM 2012 Management Servers and import them on the other ones.

These articles are very clear about it:

  1. Posting by Kevin Holman;
  2. This TechNet article.

However, the tool operated from the command line for this purpose, scxcertconfig.exe, is rather silent. There is not a single statement telling you all went okay. Of course, for the export switch we do see a result (the exported SCX certificate) but when importing those certificates on the other SCOM 2012 Management Servers, there is no feedback whatever.

And yes, we may ASSUME everything went just fine, but as we all know, assumption is the mother of all… So how to check for the correct execution of the import command? This is actually simple and straight forward and takes no time what so ever.

Along came MMC

  1. Start mmc.exe;
  2. File > Add/Remove Snap-in > CertificatesAdd > Service Account > Local Computer > Next;
  3. Now select the Microsoft Monitoring Agent (SCOM 2012 R2, for previous version select System Center Management);
    image
  4. > Finish > OK > Console Root > Certificates – Service > HealthService\Trusted Root Certification Authorities;
  5. Now in the middle pane you’ll see the imported SCX certificates. The Friendly Name tells you by what SCOM 2012 Management Server the SCX certificate is issued:
    image

Run this procedure on every SCOM 2012 Management Server which is part of the Resource Pool, used for monitoring the UNIX/Linux based servers/workloads.

3 comments:

Jonathan said...

That is another way of checking things out - thanks! However, I think the excitement over R2 is underwhelming - I am willing to bet $$ it won't be adopted right away... ;)

Jonathan said...

you *really* do need to revisit your commenting app - it's terrible. Why moderate? Try http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-comments-widget/

Marnix Wolf said...

Hi Jonathan.

The commenting app isn't good indeed, but part of the Blogspot package. The comments widget you refer to is for Wordpress based blogs, and mine isn't.

None the less I'll see what can be done about it.

Cheers
Marnix