Friday, July 4, 2014

SCOM 2012 R2 & SCA Integration: When Not Used Disable It

Issue
With SCOM 2012 R2 the integration with System Center Advisor (SCA) is default. For this an Advisor MP is in place which is imported when SCOM 2012 R2 is installed.

So far so good. However, when you don’t use SCA or you don’t want to integrate it with SCOM 2012 R2, it’s better to take some actions. For some obscure reason the Discoveries in this MP runs once per 10 minutes!

Normally a Discovery shouldn’t that often. Once per 24 hours is already a tight schedule. Even though most of these Discoveries of the Advisor MP are targeted against Objects which aren’t there when SCA isn’t integrated, there is one Discovery aimed against Windows Computers.

And that’s bad. As a Best Practice in MP authoring Microsoft(!) recommends NOT to target the Windows Computer object for ANYTHING. Simply because this object is far to generic, resulting in hitting way too many objects with Discoveries, Monitors, Rules and so on. And yes, this Discovery of the Advisor MP also runs once per 10 minutes.

The Discovery I am talking about is the Advisor Connector Discovery:
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And:
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How to deal with it when you don’t use SCA integration
You don’t want ANY Discovery hitting your systems that often, even when you use SCA integration with SCOM. More about that particular scenario later on. In this case I am talking about the scenario where you don’t use SCA integration with SCOM 2012 R2.

There are multiple approaches:

  1. The BAD approach :Delete the SCA MPs;
  2. The FAST lane approach: Disable the Discovery Advisor Connector Discovery;
  3. The BEST approach:Disable ALL Discoveries, Monitors & Rules present in the Advisor MP.

Personally I opt for the third option. The second option will do the trick as well and will be done within a few seconds. Option 1 isn’t an option IMHO. Simply because Microsoft really pushes the integration with SCA and SCOM 202 R2. So it’s better to keep these MPs since they’re part of the core of SCOM 2012 R2 now.

So when using Options 2 or 3, always put those Overrides in a MP of their own. Whenever you choose to enable SCA integration with SCOM 2012 R2 you only have to delete the MP containing the Overrides for SCA and you can start configuring the integration as Microsoft describes.

When using Option 3 these are the Discoveries, Rules and Monitors you have to disable:
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How to deal with it when you use SCA integration
No matter what, but ANY Discovery hitting a system once per 10 minutes is bad for those systems. So the Discoveries used by the SCA MP require some additional attention. Simply Override the frequency of these Discoveries and let them run less often, like once per 24 hours (86400 seconds).
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And:
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Now these Discoveries won’t hit your systems that often any more.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was researching the same for a while now and also created a override MP which disables the unnecessary discoveries, rules and monitors.
Here the link to the override MP which disables all Discoveries, Monitors and Rules.
Tested with SCOM 2012 R2 UR3 in a three different management groups.
OneDrive Download:
http://1drv.ms/19Hw44M