Its all about semantics

Hmm. Had my piece of semantics today. At a customers site the Forefront TMG MP had been imported and configured, all by the book (the related MP guide that is).

Soon all the Forefront TMG related information started to show up in the SCOM R2 Console. All roles were neatly discovered, the topology views got populated. At least, that’s what we thought.

But when we looked at the Enterprise Topology view, it turned up empty:

Time to take a look at the Discovered Inventory view and target it at Enterprise Management Server Role:

Strange. The customer told me TMG Enterprise to be in place.

No errors to be found in the OpsMgr event log of the Forefront TMG servers. Nor did the SCOM R2 Console show any Alert relating to a Discovery going sour. Lowered the interval to 5 minutes, hoping to get some more information why no Enterprise servers got discovered, but also no difference there. Removed that override.

Time to take a deeper look at TMG itself. When the TMG console is opened this is shown in the right top side:

Looks like Enterprise to me. Or not?

As it turned out, it is all about semantics. The situation is that the Enterprise edition of TMG has been installed. But the TMG MP does not look at that. It checks whether the TMG servers and arrays are Enterprise Managed!

This is simply checked by right clicking on the Array and go to its properties. As is turned out here it is a Standalone Array and not Enterprise Managed:

So in this case the Enterprise Topology view will stay empty simply because there is no TMG Enterprise in place!

Lesson learned: semantics can play an important role when using SCOM R2.