Archives for: February 2009, 13

Yesterday Microsoft released the new Windows Server 2008 cluster Management Pack. This Management Pack provides both proactive and reactive monitoring of your Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 cluster deployments. It monitors the Cluster services components such as nodes, networks, resources, and resource groups—to report issues that can cause downtime or poor performance.

The MP provides:

• Configuration or hardware issues that interfere with starting the Cluster service
• Connectivity problems that affect communication between cluster nodes or between a node and a domain controller

• Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) settings that affect the cluster; for example, permissions needed by the computer account that is used by the cluster

• Configuration issues with the network infrastructure needed by the cluster; for example, issues with Domain Name System (DNS)

• Issues with the availability of a cluster resource, such as a clustered file share
• Issues with the cluster storage

You can download it here.

I’m just back in the Netherlands for a couple of hours after a 4 day stay in Seattle and Redmond. Last 2 days I worked very close with the Microsoft OpsMgr 2007 product team for the second release (R2) of OpsMgr 2007.
I can share a couple of things that are currently in beta 1 which is publicly available for download.

The key investments of Microsoft for this second release are:
• Cross platform monitoring
• Service level tracking
• Better Usability
• Performance and scalability

Regarding usability the performance of the console has been improved a lot. Other thing regarding this investment is that the workflow of configuration notification channel and subscribers is changed and much easier. Note the extensions in the administrator console:

Other new feature regarding notification is that you can subscribe to an alert right from the monitoring pane:

This was in MOM2005, removed in OpsMgr and OpsMgr Sp1 but now is back.

Other thing that is improved is that you can now download the latest management pack from the Microsoft online catalog through the console and that a dependency like missing library are noted and can be resolved automatically by adding them as well.

With the cross-platform features you see the following extensions in the console:

The Unix/Linux logfile and service mentioned above are new monitoring templates.

Let’s look at the UNIX/Linux logfile monitoring template wizard:

With this monitor you can monitor for text that occur in a logfile. In this example my logfile is in the /tmp/testlogdirectory and with the expression; .*test.* I say look for anything which has the word test in it.
To test that your expression is successfully configured you have the Expression test feature. So I tested it with a sample !!!123 test 123 !!! in this case but it will also work with !!!123test123!!!.

Unfortunately this test option is not available with basic Windows log monitoring. In my previous post I mentioned that the prerequisite checker is a bit confused because of SQL 2005 and the hotfix warning you have while running SQL 2008. This is not likely to change in the RTM.

That’s it for now; watch my blog for future posts. We keep in touch!