OpsMgr gets hosed: EventID 5300 & the Dell MP version 3.1 A01

Dell MP version 3.1 A01 has many issues. It can even cause the whole OpsMgr environment to become unstable. The Healthservice of the RMS stalls and the eventlog of the RMS displays EventID 5300

Event Type: Error
Event Source: HealthService
Event Category: Health Service
Event ID: 5300
Date: xx-xx-xxxx
Time: xx:xx:xx
User: N/A
Computer: blah
Description:
Local health service is not healthy. Entity state change flow is stalled with pending acknowledgement.

Management Group: xxx
Management Group ID: xxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

When one restarts the Health Service all is well again (for a short period of time that is)

When you don't have the Dell MP inported there can be other issues at hand:
Networkproblems between the RMS & SQL server hosting the OpsMgr database

SQL server hosting the OpsMgr database is overloaded

Wrong authorizations for OpsMgr on the SQL server hosting the OpsMgr database

However, when you are running the most recent version of the Dell MP it is very likely this MP is the culprit. One can run a few queries on the OpsMgr database to see what components are causing the most noise in the OpsMgr environment. These queries will show many components of the Dell MP being the noisiest.

A faster way though is to simply remove the Dell MP and to see whether the EventID 5300 disappears.

Dell has acknowledged this issue and is working on a new MP. This MP is to be released in december this year.

1/16/2009 - Update : Dell has stated the new MP won't be released before April 2009.

Cause: the latest version of the Dell MP contains many SNMP rules & monitors. In fact far too many. They create so much noise the RMS sooner or later stalls by the flood created by these monitors and rules. These rules & monitors are mostly meant to monitor DRAC.

There is a modified MP to be found on the internet from which all these SNMP monitors and rules have been removed. However as stated before the Dell MP has also other problems which aren't nice as well. Kevin Holman has written an article about it. Certainly worth reading it.