Last week I installed a SCOM agent on a Windows 2008 R2 print server, only to discover that the SCOM agent went wild and kept crashing. Furthermore I found out it was generating a lot of data (about 18 millions entries in a few hours). So what had happened? Well the reason I found in this blog post from Daniel Mueller dating from April 2013.
In short the Printer Server 2008 mp (version 6.0.7004.0) has a mistake in a few performance collection rules. They are targeted at “Printer” in stead of print server role. Because it collects data from all instances, this meant in my case it saw about 500 printer queues and multiplied that by 500 times, because every printer queue monitored all instances of all other printer queues as well. As you can see with a high number of printer queues this thing will go wild.
The Printer Server 2008 management pack dates from December 2012 and it looks like even after the blog post from Daniel nothing has happened with it. So I decided a few days ago that I will post a hotfix management pack which will disable the original faulty collection rules and create new rules with the same settings but correct targeting.
The “Hotfix Management Pack: Print Server 2008” can be found in the GitHub now.
It is specifically to override the 6.0.7004.0 version of the Print Server 2008 management pack from Microsoft, so you do not run into the performance and agent issues.
And thanks to Daniel Mueller for recognizing this issue in the first place.
Bob Cornelissen
