Operations Manager 2007 Capacity Planning Model released for System Center Capacity Planner 2007

http://blogs.technet.com/cliveeastwood/archive/2008/05/05/operations-manager-2007-capacity-planning-model-released-for-system-center-capacity-planner-2007.aspx  |  Comments

The capacity planning model for OpsMgr07 has now been released for SCCP 2007. You can download from here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6fec1f12-a62c-4e8d-8a19-56879192adc3&displaylang=en

The SCCP model download catalog on http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sccp/bb969059.aspx will be updated to reflect the release shortly.

Running the MSI on the download page above will install the model on a computer with SCCP 2007 already installed. If you need Capacity Planner 2007. Install it first from here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E754F35D-59DB-4BC4-8386-E83E66A16FAD&displaylang=en

Why cant I find the datawarehouse properties report?

http://blogs.msdn.com/boris_yanushpolsky/archive/2008/05/05/why-cant-i-find-the-datawarehouse-properties-report.aspx  |  Comments

During the Best Practices session at MMS we have shown the DW properties report. The one thing I want to point out is that the management pack that contains this report is not imported by default when you install OpsMgr SP1. In order to get the report, you need to import the Microsoft.SystemCenter.DataWarehouse.Reports MP which is located in the ManagementPacks folder in the OpsMgr install folder. Shortly after importing the MP, the report will be available in the reporting space under the "Data Warehouse Reports" folder in the reports tree.

Cluster resource groups are not monitored! Is there anything I can do?

Marius Sutara: Recently I saw some questions about why cluster infrastructure is only partially discovered and it is not monitored when all cluster services are healthy. I replied to some of those questions either internally or at the newsgroup, where I was trying to explain why such health model was possible (so this answer is not subject of this post, but I will explain again if needed; just ask thru comment and I will get back to you). Back to the original problem, I was never really able to provide information what was indeed wrong with cluster infrastructure discovery. In fact, this issue turned rather tricky to repro locally in order to investigate. Luckily, thanks to Brian, one of the possible root causes was containing trailing spaces in cluster resource group name and/or containing such trailing spaces in cluster resource name.

This issue will be addressed in next web release of management packs responsible for monitoring of cluster infrastructure. Closest future release is Windows 2008 Failover cluster management pack, Right now I do not have enough information to provide and disclose detail release date, MP will be verified and deployed in MSIT and in TAP customers to get as much as possible verification of its functionality prior releasing to web. The date I'd say if had to guess is midsummer or early fall timeframe.

Alternative to Baseline Monitoring - Exchange MP

Baseline monitoring is excellent for identifying what a particular performance value is considered 'normal' for a given organization. Recently, a rather large organization was a little tired of tuning the pre-defined monitors, baseline, monitors, for Exchange. The whole 'inner, outter' sensitivity issue. They simply wished for more surgical control. So the first thing was to leverage Reporting to identify the average, Hi and Low values for a particular monitor. Basically, generate a trend report. After identifying what "normal" truly is and the length of sustained spikes, they came up with a set of criteria to determine when an Alert should be generated. Next, the default monitor that was using 'baselining' is disabled and a new unit monitor was created, adhering to all best practices around creating monitors :-) Windows Performance Counter /Static Threshold and then depending on the criteria, Double or Single Threshold. Nothing new or fancy , just an alternative. The primary benefit is a monitor that is simply easier to tune.