Monday, August 25, 2008

SCOM: New certificates tool from the OpsMgr Product team

"CertGenWizard.exe is a wizard tool which will take your CA information as
input (it isn't required if you are running the wizard on the box with the CA),
take in the computer names (has to be FQDNs), and send out a request for the
certificates you need. Now, you no longer have to fill out the Certificate
Request form or enter parameters or connect to the web enrollment service.
Once the certificates are approved, there is a Retrieve button in the
CertGenWizard which will allow you to retrieve the certificates that you have
requested. On top of the personal certificates, the wizard will retrieve
the root CA certificate.

The biggest benefit to this tool is the
added ability to request multiple certificates at once. If you have 100
non-domain joined agents that you need to set up cert auth for, you can simply
request all 100 machine certificates at once, retrieve them all, and manually
bring them over to your other machines.

Once you have
brought them to your other machines, CertInstaller.exe is a second
tool that will install the certificates into the local machine store of
your computer and run MOMCertImport.exe for you. Note: Install OpsMgr
Agent FIRST and then run the tool!"

http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2008/08/22/obtaining-certificates-for-non-domain-joined-agents-made-easy.aspx

This tool will make lives easier for all those who need to deploy large numbers of SCOM agents that will require certificates to communicate.

SCOM: Sending notifications for a specific alert

Just raising awareness of this invaluable tool. Stephan Koell brings us an excellent powershell script that fills the gaping hole of not being able to send notification on specific alerts.

As many SCOM admins are already aware, SCOM out of the box only allows you to scope your notification subscriptions by target type, group, and severity. This works for most cases, however every client I've worked with to-date has expressed a need for a notification on a specific email.

Examples:
1. Exchange admins want emails for all exchange alerts, however they only want paged in the middle of the night if the servers go down.

2. A security analist only wants emails when a specific event is generated in the security logs on DC's.

3. A developer only wants to be emailed if the specific application pool for his application goes down.

Not possible via the gui by default. What the powershell linked below gives us is the ability to create a subscription that appears in the console (though cannot be modified) that notifies only when a specific alert name is detected.

I implemented this successfully today for a client, I find that it works best to use a generic recipient name, so you can later add notification channels should more people need the email that is generated.

Several other tips:
- See the comments about altering the script to use your local time zone
- The alert you target when running the PS script MUST have been generated at least once in the past.
- The script out of the box will only watch for alerts generated from monitors. There is a comment that includes a code update to include rules as well, however I have not yet tested that.

http://code4ward.net/cs2/blogs/code4ward/archive/2007/09/19/set-notificationforalert.aspx