The OMS Log Analytics Forwarder enables customers to have their OMS managed devices (Windows and Linux) to send data to a central server which has access to the internet. OMS Log Analytics Forwarder is a HTTP forward proxy that support HTTP tunneling via HTTP CONNECT command. The Forwarder can handle up to 1000 OMS concurrent connected devices if run on a 4 core CPU, 8GB Windows Server with a 1Gbps network connection. In order to use the OMS Log Analytics Forwarder, you need to install the OMS agent on the Forwarder Server.
Description: This preview release of “Inside the Microsoft Operations Management Suite” is an end-to-end deep dive into the full range of Microsoft OMS features and functionality, complete with downloadable sample scripts. This early edition is being shared with the community while final edits are being completed.
The chapter list in this edition is shown below:
Chapter 1: Introduction and Onboarding
Chapter 2: Searching and Presenting OMS Data
Chapter 3: Alert Management
Chapter 4: Configuration Assessment and Change Tracking
Chapter 5: Working with Performance Data
Chapter 6: Process Automation and Desired State Configuration
Chapter 7: Backup and Disaster Recovery
Chapter 8: Security Configuration and Event Analysis
Chapter 9: Analyzing Network Data
Chapter 10: Accessing OMS Data Programmatically
Chapter 11: Custom MP Authoring
Chapter 12: Cross Platform Management and Automation
Wow a lot has happened in 2015, I don’t even know where to begin with a recap of 2015 in a Mobile and Cloud first world ! What I have learned that’s it’s all about
applications on your Mobile Phone, Tablet, or any Device to Work, Learn in any environment you want. Sharing Microsoft technology with the Community and in Education via Social media is what I love to do on a daily bases. I hope you enjoyed the information in 2015 with Microsoft Products like :
I wish you all a Healthy Life and a lot of Success in 2016 !
Microsoft is transforming Datacenters with New Technology and making Hybrid Cloud possible for your Applications.
What I personally like is the Microsoft Hololensthis is something different, but very Cool to be in a Virtual Reality World with
awesome possibilities in 2016 and in the Future 🙂
Thank you Community, Followers, Microsoft Product Teams, MVP Award Program, MVP’s, Developers, ITpro’s, Students, for Sharing !
I’m very proud to receive the 5th Microsoft Global MVP Award for System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management (SCCDM) !
A Big Thank YOU community for following me via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and my Blog, is really appreciated 🙂
A Big Thank YOU Microsoft for all the support and PGI sessions, really Awesome working together as a Great Team 😉
A Big Thank YOU MVP Mates for sharing information with the community 🙂
A Big Thank YOU to my Family for supporting me all the way ! 🙂
2015 – 2016 will be a beautiful Microsoft year with Awesome new technologies in Windows Server 2016, Hyper-V, System Center, Azure, and we will Bring
Microsoft Azure Cloud Services to your Datacenter with AzureStack.
A lot of New Microsoft information and Great solutions for blogging and sharing with the Community on Social Media.
Update System Center Management Pack for Microsoft Azure Fabric :
Oct 2014
Fix for an issue in version 1.1.42.0, where Azure VMs do not persist on the “Virtual machines” tab when you click OK and reopen the template UI. This happens when you configure Azure monitoring using the template.
The Management Pack for Microsoft Azure enables you to monitor the availability and performance of Azure fabric resources that are running on Microsoft Azure. The management pack runs on a specified server pool and then uses various Microsoft Azure APIs to remotely discover and collect instrumentation information about a specified Microsoft Azure resource, such as a Cloud Service, Storage, or Virtual Machines. The Management Pack for Microsoft Azure provides no functionality on import. For each Microsoft Azure subscription that contains Azure resources you want to monitor, you must configure discovery and monitoring by first using the Microsoft Azure wizard in the administration section of the Operations Console, then the Microsoft Azure Monitoring template in the authoring section of the Operations Console. For more information, see Configuring the Management Pack for Microsoft Azure Fabric.
After configuration, the Management Pack for Microsoft Azure Fabric offers the following functionality:
• Discovers Microsoft Azure Cloud services.
• Provides status of each role instance.
• Collects and monitors performance information per role instance.
• Collects and monitors Windows events per role instance
• Collects and monitors the .NET Framework trace messages from each role instance.
• Grooms performance, event, and the .NET Framework trace data from Microsoft Azure storage.
• Changes the number of role instances.
• Discovers Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines
• Provides status of each role instance of the Virtual Machine
• Discovers Microsoft Azure Storage
• Monitors availability and size of each Storage and optionally alerts
• Discover relationships between discovered Azure resources, to see which other resources a particular Azure resource uses. This information is then displayed in a topology dashboard
• Monitors management and cloud service certificates and alerts if the certificates are about to expire
• Includes a new Distributed Application template that lets you create distributed applications that span Azure as well as on-premise resources, for Hybrid monitoring scenarios.
• Includes a set of dashboards for the Hybrid monitoring scenarios
Monitoring a Large Number of Azure Instances
The Operations Manager Management Pack monitors memory usage of the proxy agent. If you are monitoring more than 500 Microsoft Azure instances from a particular agent, you should increase the threshold for the Monitoring Host Private Bytes Threshold monitor to 350 MB or higher. Prerequisites
The following requirements must be met to run this Management Pack:
• You must have an Operations Manager 2012 SP1 or later environment, this Management Pack will not import on Operations Manager 2007 R2 or Operations Manager 2012 RTM.
• At least one machine in your server pool must have internet connectivity in order to be able to communicate with Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft Azure Diagnostics must be enabled. For more information about Microsoft Azure Diagnostics, see Collect Logging Data by Using Microsoft Azure Diagnostics
• Microsoft Azure Diagnostics must be configured to forward diagnostic data to a Microsoft Azure storage. For more information about configuring Microsoft Azure Diagnostics, see Transferring Diagnostic Data to Microsoft Azure Storage
• If you create an Azure subscription on a console computer that is not connected to the Internet – even when all management servers in the group are connected to the Internet, you will receive the following exception:
Severity: Warning
Message: Could not get subscription details
Important
The connection string for Microsoft Azure Diagnostics must be specified in the service configuration file (.cscfg) and should not be hardcoded in the application. By default, the Management Pack for Microsoft Azure Applications references the DiagnosticsConnectionString setting name in the service configuration file. If a different name is used in the service configuration file, you must override the Diagnostics Storage Account Setting Name parameter for Microsoft Azure Hosted Service Total Discovery.
You must manually ensure that the prerequisites are met. The management pack does not validate that prerequisites are met.
The Management pack for SQL Server provides the capabilities for Operations Manager 2007 R2 and Operations Manager 2012 to discover SQL Server 2005, 2008, 2008 R2, and SQL Server 2012. It monitors SQL Server components such as database engine instances, databases, and SQL Server agents.
The monitoring provided by this management pack includes performance, availability, and configuration monitoring, performance data collection, and default thresholds. You can integrate the monitoring of SQL Server components into your service-oriented monitoring scenarios.
In addition to health monitoring capabilities, this management pack includes dashboard views, diagram views and extensive knowledge with embedded inline tasks, and views that enable near real-time diagnosis and resolution of detected issues. Important Prerequisite Notes: Clusters: In order to ensure that all monitoring works correctly for clustered instances of SQL Server ensure that your OpsMgr agents on the physical nodes of the cluster are running either OpsMgr 2007 R2 or OpsMgr 2007 SP1 with the most recent cumulative update for OpsMgr 2007 SP1 applied or OpsMgr 2012. Feature Summary: The following list gives an overview of the features of the SQL Server management pack. Refer to the SQL Server management pack guide for more detail. New features:
New Dashboard for SQL Server 2012 DB
New Monitors and Rules – only for SQL 2008 and SQL 2012
Collect DB Active Connections count
Collect DB Active Requests count
Collect DB Active Sessions count
Collect DB Active Transactions count
Collect DB Engine Thread count
Thread Count monitor
Transaction Log Free Space (%) monitor
Transaction Log Free Space (%) collection
Collect DB Engine CPU Utilization (%)
CPU Utilization (%) monitor for DB engine
Buffer Cache Hit Ratio monitor
Collect DB Engine Page Life Expectancy (s)
Page Life Expectancy monitor
Collect DB Disk Read Latency (ms)
Collect DB Disk Write Latency (ms)
Disk Read Latency monitor
Disk Write Latency monitor
Collect DB Transactions per second count
Collect DB Engine Average Wait Time (ms)
Average Wait Time monitor
Collect DB Engine Stolen Server Memory (MB)
Stolen Server Memory monitor
Collect DB Allocated Free Space (MB)
Collect DB Used Space (MB)
Collect DB Disk Free Space (MB)
SQL Re-Compilation monitor
Run As configuration changes to support Low privilege for SQL Server 2012 Cluster
Additional features:
AlwaysOn Monitoring
Automatically discover and monitor availability groups, availability replicas, and availability databases for hundreds of computers.
Health roll-up from availability database to availability replicas.
Detailed knowledge with every critical health state to enable faster resolution to a problem.
Seamless integration with Policy based management (PBM)
Auto-discover custom PBM polices targeting AlwaysOn and database components.
Rollup of health of policy execution within the SQL monitoring pack under extended health.
Support for Mirroring and Replication Monitoring (only applicable to SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 version of management pack)
Discover mirroring databases, witness, and mirroring group.
Custom diagram view to visually represent the primary and the mirrored databases.
Approximately twenty rules to detect replication events.
Improved Freespace monitoring with mount point support
Support for Enterprise, Standard and Express editions of SQL Server 2005, 2008, 2008 R2, and 2012 and 32bit, 64bit and ia64 architectures.
Support for both simple and complex SQL Server configurations such as clustered installations, multiple instances and 32bit roles running on a 64bit OS. For full details on supported configurations refer to the guide included with the management pack.
Discovery and monitoring of SQL Server roles such as DB Engine, Reporting Services, Analysis Services, Integrations Services.
Discovery of SQL Server components such as databases, the SQL Agent and SQL jobs.
Views covering areas such as database free space, SQL Server related performance, SQL Server related alerts, and lists of the various SQL Server roles and components which are discovered and their related state.
Discovery and basic monitoring for SQL Server Reporting Services and Integration Services.
Reports for longer-term analysis of common problem areas related to SQL Server such as SQL Server lock analysis and top deadlocked databases, SQL Server service pack levels across discovered roles, user connection activity. Likewise the generic reports from the Microsoft Generic Report Library can be used against the roles and components discovered by the SQL MPs to review availability and performance across many systems and over longer periods of time.
Role and component specific tasks which provide access to common tools, triage information, or corrective actions without needing to leave the Operations Console in most cases.
Monitoring of databases covers database status, database free space, log shipping monitoring for both the source and destination, and transaction log free space.
Monitoring of key SQL Server related services.
Monitoring for persistent SPID blocking.
Monitoring of numerous SQL Server events and performance data points. Alerts bring the issue to your attention and provide knowledge on the impact and possible resolutions.
A low-privilege configuration for discovery and monitoring that eliminates the need for SQL Server sysadmin, dbo, db_owner, and box admin privileges
The System Center Management Pack for Windows Server Operating System consists of the following management packs: Microsoft Windows Server Library, Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Discovery, Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Monitoring, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Discovery, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Monitoring, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Monitoring BPA, Microsoft Windows Server Clustered Shared and Volume Monitoring, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, and Microsoft Windows 2000 Server. The System Center Monitoring Pack for Windows Server Operating System monitor the performance, health, and availability of Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2, 2003and Windows 2000 Server.
By detecting, alerting on, and automatically responding to critical events and performance indicators, these management packs reduce resolution times for issues and increase the overall availability and performance of your systems running the Windows Server operating systems, thereby helping to reduce the total cost of ownership. Feature Summary
Availability
Key Operating System Services: Required services are checked for status (for example, running, not running, or paused)
Storage: Logical hard drives are checked for availability, sufficient free space, and integrity of the NTFS partition.
Network: Network adapters are checked for connection health, name and IP address conflicts.
Performance
Processor: System processor(s) performance is checked system-wide. Processors can optionally be monitored on a per processor basis.
Memory: Memory consisting of physical memory and virtual memory (also known as page files) is monitored using the following performance indicators:
Available memory (in MB)
Pages per second
Page file percent usage
Disks and Partitions: Logical disks/partitions and physical disks are monitored, and performance data is collected for average disk seconds per read, disk seconds per write, and disk seconds per transfer. Monitoring is also provided for fragmentation of logical disks. Depending on which version of the operating system is being monitored, either logical or physical monitoring is enabled by default. Refer to the MP guide for more detail.
Network Adapter: Network adapters are monitored for the number of bytes received per second, the number of bytes sent per second, and the total bytes per second. In addition, the health state of the network adapter is evaluated and is set to Healthy if connected and Critical if disconnected.
Known Issue:
If the BPA monitor is enabled, then there will be an error in the PowerShell script which is a know issue in the Agent. This has been fixed in Operations Manager next update which is coming up.
Cloud and Datacenter Management Blog 