Config Churn & Exchange 2010 MP

01-24-2010 Update: Based on a comment it turned out that the Discovery Cycle can’t be more than 25 hours (86400 seconds). This blog posting has been corrected based on that input. Thanks for keeping me sharp!

Based on this blog posting of Kevin Holman I changed some Discovery Rules in the Management Groups which I control for some customers of mine.

However, many more MGs from other customers I do not control anymore but I still want those MGs to be in good condition. So I contacted the system engineers running those environments and told them about the issue and sent them the url of the blog posting.

Some of them reported back with the issue being fixed. Others told me they could not find the Discoveries being described in Kevin’s posting. So this posting is all about how to find these Discoveries and to change them accordingly, or better, a quicker way to get the job done. So let’s start.

1. Open the SCOM R2 Console with Admin permissions. Go to Monitoring (or whatever Wunderbar for that matter…). In the pane go to Tools > Search > and click on Object Discoveries.
   
   
   
2. The Search Window is opened. Type owningserver and click Search. The two Object Discovery Rules as described in Kevin’s posting are shown now:
   
   
   
3. Select the first one. In the Object Discovery Details pane more information is shown. Click on the View Knowledge link and the properties for this Discovery Rule will be shown.
   
   
   
4. Go to the last tab Overrides > click on the button Override… > select the first option For all objects of class: Mailbox. Set the override as stated in Kevin’s blog. However, even though it is Best Practice to save all overrides targeted against a certain MP into a MP of its own and NOT the Default MP, another approach is to be advised. As Kevin states in the same posting, the new MP will solve this issue. So by storing these particular overrides in a new MP, these overrides are easily removed when the newest version of the MP is imported by simply removing this particular MP containing these overrides. So your MP will look like this:
   
   
   And now the override will look like this: 
     
   Click Apply and OK.
   
   
5. Repeat Steps 3 to 5 for the other Discovery Rule and be happy.

Never ever be afraid to ask any question because you think it might sound stupid. To my humble opinion there is only ONE truly stupid question which is the question which is NEVER asked….