The TechEd 2011 is now finished, for the one who didn’t get the chance to be there, the Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012: Setup and Config session is now available online. (Speaker : Maarten Goet, Rob Kuehfus)

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Hi all,

Today, I will present a little case that I need to deal with at one of my customer. My case Study is quite simple, I’ve got a Monitor Policy which creates an Incident/Ticket each time that a critical alert is raised in Operations Manager.

I will simplify this policy to the one below :

The scenario, a maintenance is planned on my Incident management platform, so at the convenience time I need to stop my Monitor Policy, wait the end of the maintenance window and after start my Monitor Policy again. As Opalis allows us to orchestrate our activities, I want to automate that task.

No object presents in the default integration packs allow us to do these actions easily.

· How could I stop an Opalis policy through another policy ?
· How could I schedule the start of an Opalis policy ?
· How could I pause my policy for some minutes ?

So we just have to create it with the Opalis Quick Integration Kit (QIK). J

Basically, I need to schedule an action, stop a policy, wait the end of the maintenance window and start my policy.

I invite you to read carefully the post of Adam Hall, Snr. Technical Product Manager for System Center Opalis/Orchestrator : Migrating a PowerShell script to an Opalis Activity

Thanks to this article and some PowerShell command I’ve been able to create three 3 new Opalis objects :

1. Sleep object: As input it simply takes a number of seconds and your policy will pause for the define time.
2. Start At: Specify a date and time for starting/continuing your policy.

3. Stop Policy: This object allows you to stop an Opalis policy from another one. It uses the sp_StopAllRequestsForPolicy SQL store procedure. As input it needs the Opalis Sql server name, database name, and the name of the policy that you want to stop.

Be carefull, the policy name that you specified must be unique, because this object will stop all the policies that are using the specified policy name. For example, if you’ve go more than one policy that is named “1.Monitor”, this object will stop all of them, and that certainly not what you want because that impact directly the others running policies. So be careful with it and always use an unique name for the policy that you want to top.
Now, we will use these news objects for stopping the Monitor Policy below during a maintenance window and restart it after, for that we created a Maintenance Window Policy.

Let’s configuring it

Monitor policy (Policy that we want to plan the stop)

Maintenance window policy

Start At: We decided to plan the stop of the Monitor policy the 05/17/2011 at 04:28 PM.

Stop Policy: We want to stop the Monitor policy (which is my OEA-IncidentCreation).

Sleep: Here we defined a maintenance window of 5 minutes.

Start Policy: Simply use the Trigger Policy object provided in the default integration pack for starting the Monitor Policy.

Let’s testing it

1. Now, we just have to start the Maintenance Window policy and go on weekend, Opalis will orchestrate the maintenance for us.

2. The Start At object will wait the specified date/time for releasing/continuing the rest of the policy.

3. At the defined date/time, the policy is released and our Monitor Policy well is stopped by the Maintenance Policy.

4. Our monitor policy is stopped

5. The sleep object will now pause the policy for the duration of your maintenance window.

6. When the maintenance window is ended, the monitor policy will start automatically.

7. Our Monitor Policy has been well started.

You can directly download the integration pack which is containing these news objects and the source code: Download.

Remember, this is provided “As is” without any support and/or guarantee.

Feel free to contact me through the blog comments for any questions and/or remarks.

Christopher KEYAERT

operations manager · opsmgr · Scom

The first of four sessions on Operations Manager 2012 has been presented at the Tech Ed North America 2011. This session provides you with an overview of the capabilities in Operations Manager 2012.

operations manager · opsmgr · Scom

I invite you to read the previous posts :

ACS Part I : Introduction & Collector Installation
ACS Part II : ACS Reports Deployment & Access

Now that your collector and reporting servers are up and running, we will enable the Forwarder service for the servers that you want to store security events in the ACS database.

1. Go to the OpsMgr Console > Monitoring > Operations Manager > Agent State.

2. Select the servers for which you want to enable the ACS forwarder and in the task pane, click on Enable Audit Collection.

3. Click on Override  and precise your ACS Collector server name in the new value field.

4. Review your configuration :

5. Click on Run and review the result :

6. To check if your forwarders are well connected to your Collector, you could go to the OpsMgr Console > Microsoft Audit Collection Services > Collector > Performance > Connected Clients.

You have now a functional ACS environment.  
The next posts will be about the ACS Reports utilization and on how to use ACS in an untrusted environment.

Christopher KEYAERT.

ACS

Previous post about ACS :

ACS Part I : Introduction & Collector Installation

Reports Deployment

Now that you have a running ACS Collector, you have to publish the ACS Reports on your SQL Reports Services server. 

1. From the Operations Manager source, copy the files and folders present in the ReportModelsACS to temporary folder, for example: D:ACS

2. Open a command prompt
3. Go to the folder you just created (D:ACS)
4. Executing the following command

UploadAuditReports.cmd reportsrvfqdn http://reportsrvfqdn/ReportServer ACSFOLDER

5. Don’t take care of the two warnings

6. Start your web Brower and go to http://reportsrvfqdn/Reports

7. Click on Show Details and go to DB Audit.
8. Adapt the Connection String field to point to your ACS Database
For example:
data source= xxxxSQLDB1;initial catalog=OperationsManagerAC;Integrated Security=SSPI

9. If you are using the same reporting for Operations Mananger and ACS, select also the option Credentials supplied by the user running the report and check Use as Windows Credentials when connection to the data source.

10. Click Apply.

Access Control List

1. Create a new Active Directory group for your Security Administrator and add them as member. (By example: SCOM2007-ACSAuditors)

2. Go to your Database server and add the group as Users for you ACS DB.

3. Grant your group as db_datareader of your ACS database.

4. Your Security Administrator could now access to the ACS Reports through the SQL Reporting Services Web Interface : http://reportsrvfqdn/Reports  > Audit Reports

The next post will be about the ACS Forwarder Configuration.
Feel free to contact in case of any remarks and/or comments.

Christopher KEYAERT

ACS · Audit Collection Services · operations manager · opsmgr · Scom