Tuesday, January 11, 2011

SCOM R2: Am I Healthy? – Part I – Introduction

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Postings in the same series:
Part  IIKnow What You Have
Part III – Are the DBs OK?
Part IV – Is SCOM R2 Up-to-date or Outdated?

Part  V – Let’s Use The Community
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In order for any SCOM R2 environment to operate at a good and reliable level, it needs to be healthy. Otherwise you end up with a situation which is described best as Garbage In, Garbage Out.
image

Sometimes I get questions/comments coming from people who run their SCOM R2 environment for a while without properly maintaining it. And that it is not so good. Like every other ICT based solution it needs proper care. For SCOM R2 updates (Cumulative Updates) are published on a a regular schedule. The core MP (the MP of SCOM R2 itself) is also regularly updated. And for the other MPs updates do come out as well.

Of course, it is not wise to implement every update as soon it comes out. It needs some testing and sometimes it is good to wait some weeks as well in order to see what the community has to say about its experiences with the updated product. And when in doubt, go to the official TechNet SCOM Forum and post a question about it. You will definitely get an answer there.

Actually it is nothing new I am telling here. It is all about good Change Management and proper maintenance of your ICT assets. And SCOM R2 makes no difference here. But somehow, sometimes I have the feeling that SCOM R2 gets neglected. And when it does and issues start to occur, like a partially malfunctioning SCOM R2 environment, people start to complain.

Of course, it can be solved. But wouldn’t it be better to prevent it? So no hick ups will occur or even worse, outages of your SCOM R2 environment?

Therefore I have decided to post a whole new series about this topic, or better, how to check whether your SCOM R2 environment is still healthy and operating as it should.

This series will look like this:

  1. Posting I: Introduction;
  2. Posting II: Know What You Have;
  3. Posting III: Are The DBs OK?;
  4. Posting IV: Is SCOM R2 Up-to-date Or Outdated?;
  5. Posting V: Let’s Use The Community.

So stay tuned. See you all next time.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Marnix,

I’m trying to figure a way to monitor agent health as wall. i know it sound like OPSMGR can monitor failed agents but in my experience, i found out in several sites that OPSMGR servers are well and up-to-date, agents are seems to be OK but they don't, they stop alerting on problems!

I’m trying to figure how to alert on those agents. Hope you will find it interesting to write about agent health as well.

Kobi