SCOM Trick 23 – Edit company knowledge

One of the features that I think does not get a lot of attention is the Company Knowledge tab available for alerts on monitors or rules. Even the product knowledge is not always used as it should be. In many cases an IT environment has been customized or spread across many systems and locations. In general you will tune some of the management packs to use different thresholds that reflect your situation a bit better than the best practices values which are mostly included in the management packs provided. But there are also cases where an alert is raised and the Product Knowledge in the alert states a few possibilities (in some cases it doesn’t state anything or an external link) and you find that in your specific case this is (almost) always related to one specific issue with one specific action to be done (inform somebody, follow a procedure, restart something). In that case it is best if you add this Company Knowledge to the alert, so colleagues can check it and immediately go for the right solutions. You can hopefully see why this is a good thing. So if you open any alert you will see a tab for Company Knowledge. And there is an Edit too. If you click it you most likely get an error stating you are missing something.
Well here are some links to how to setup your machine to do the editing of company knowledge:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2008/03/31/edit-company-knowledge-prerequisites.aspx
http://philipflint.com/2011/01/16/adding-company-knowledge-in-scom-2007-r2/
http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/2011/02/unable-to-edit-company-knowledge.html
(if you run CU4 and still get errors)
http://www.opsmode.com/2010/05/edit-company-knowledge/
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2458608
Now you can customize some of the alerts and add this knowledge or add a link to a procedure on a SharePoint site for instance.

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