MP Template ‘Windows Service’ in SCOM R2 doesn’t accept wild cards :(

Sometimes, when multiple services require monitoring, it would be nice to create the required Windows Service Monitor only once, edit the xml by adding wild cards and changing the Discovery to use a WMI query with wildcards as well.

This way the Discoveries and Monitors will cover all services which require monitoring without too much manual labor.

Last week I bumped into a similar situation and tried the approach as described in an old posting of Brian Wren. Even though this posting is based on SCOM RTM/SP1, I was hoping to to get it working in SCOM R2.

So I started the Windows Service Wizard, found under Authoring > Management Pack Templates.

Created the Monitor (put in a MP of its own), exported it and adjusted the XML as stated in Brian’s posting. Also adjusted the $MPElement section as advised by Graham Davies.

But as another comment to the posting of Brian already stated, it doesn’t work anymore.

The services aren’t Discovered. So no monitoring takes place. And the query was correct because when I ran the same query in WBEMTEST, it showed all related services…

Tried the same approach in one of mine test environments, with the same ‘results’: nothing. Time to contact some respected people in the SCOM community/world and they told me they experienced the same. So it simply doesn’t work anymore. Which is too bad.

Gladly another approach is available. It involves real MP authoring (so the MP Authoring Console is required) but it works. Kevin Holman wrote a posting about it, even though the aim is different it works . Follow it step-by-step (of course, add your own ingredients to the mix!), and you will end up with a working MP.

Posting to be found here.

Whenever someone has another approach, step forward please. I will update the posting accordingly.