SCOM 2012x & UX Monitoring. How About Account Distribution & Management Servers?

When you want to use SCOM 2012x to monitor UX based systems, not only name resolution has to be 100% okay, but the related UX Run As Accounts must be properly distributed as well.

In the more straight forward scenario’s where the UX monitoring is performed by a Resource Pool containing Management Servers, it’s obvious that the UX Run As Accounts involved have to be distributed to those very same Management Servers as well.

HOWEVER! In a NOC scenario where the UX systems reside behind one more Gateway Servers and those Gateway Servers report to other Gateway Servers, rolling up to the SCOM 2012x Management Servers, those very same UX accounts have to be distributed to ALL Management Servers as well.

Yeah, I hear you. Why should you? Because those very same Management Servers don’t touch the UX systems at all…

When you don’t do this, and want to run the Management Pack Template used for monitoring UX based processes, you’ll get an error like this: Unable to retrieve processes. The task has invalid configuration. The most likely cause is that a $RunAs account was not distributed to the target health service.

When I made sure the SCOM 2012x Management Servers also received the credential set for the UX accounts, this error disappeared…

Recap
When monitoring UX systems with SCOM 2012x, distribute the UX Run As Accounts to all SCOM 2012x Management Servers, whether or not they ‘touch’ the UX systems directly. When running tasks targeted at UX systems, the SCOM Management Servers require the credential sets in order to execute the Tasks in a proper manner.