MMS 2013: Meet The OM Reporting Guru

Yes, MMS 2013 started yesterday with the keynote by Brad Anderson. From that moment on the show started.

Before I knew it, I found myself at the Veeam booth where a big crowd was gathered. Soon I saw the reason why: the book System Center 2012 – Operations Manager UNLEASHED, was given away for FREE! In total 250 copies were handed out in the matter of minutes!

Now that’s a COOL and AWESOME swag! And very generous as well. Cameron Fuller was there for signing those books and before I knew it, I was asked to sign the books as well. Later on Kerrie Meyler joined us so the three of us were signing these books. It felt special to be asked by so many people to sign their book. Awesome!

I talked with many people that day and went on a ‘swag hunt’ with Kevin Greene from Ireland. A good guy he is and we had a lot of fun. One of the sessions I attended that day and really stood out was the session Hacking The Data Warehouse.

This session was presented by Veeam: Alec King and the Veeam OM Reporting Guru, Oleg Kapustin. No marketing mumbo jumbo nor sales pitch. But everything about OM Reporting and how to get the most out of the Data Warehouse.

It was a very good session with a level rating starting at 300 and ending at 500+. Even though Oleg said many times ‘…it isn’t rocket science at all…’ the audience, myself included were deeply impressed and doing their utmost best to keep up with him. And yes, he most certainly is the OM Reporting Guru. A title well deserved.

In the audience Stefan Stranger was present as well. I know him personally and he’s famous for his PowerShell knowledge. Besides that he’s a good SQL guru as well so he could have presented that session as well, at the same level. Was good to be in a room with so many people with so much knowledge and experience.

During this session Alec and Oleg explained why Veeam built their GRL, Veeam Extended Generic Report Library. Simply because the GRL default present in SCOM doesn’t deliver the quality Veeam requires for their reports. (These words are mine, not Veeam’s!).

Since Veeam is dedicated to the community they have made their GRL generally available, for FREE. The GRL they demonstrated during this session is the latest one, to be found in the Veeam MP for monitoring VMware, version 6.0.

For now the previous version is available for download and soon the newest version will be replacing the older version. And again it will be available for FREE. And yes, GRL works in SCOM no matter what MPs you have in place. So it doesn’t require the Veeam MP to function for instance.

Back to the OM Reporting Guru
Oleg demonstrated how to build a MP containing special customized Reports on the fly by simply using three command-line based tools, also home grown by Veeam. This was amazing! The first command line tool generated an Excel sheet. After having edited some entries in this sheet, another command line tool was run and the MP, containing the required Reports MP was build in the matter of seconds.

And yes, these command-line tools are also available for download. Not to be found on the Veeam website but on the blog run by Oleg himself: Oleg Kapustin's Sandbox: http://ok-sandbox.com.

This was a very good session and would love to see more of those!