I have been seeing a number of questions where people want to know how to set the agent proxy default setting in SCOM 2012 to enabled.
For instance for SCOM 2007 I had a post which contained a command near the bottom of the post with a simple command to change the default setting to enabled, so any newly installed agent would also get proxying enabled.
Well, I have not been able to find this default setting or the command on how to get there in 2012.
One thing you could do is run a command which takes the currently installed agents and checks if any of them do not have proxying enabled and if so, change that setting for those agents. If you run it regularly you should be OK. The following command will do that.
Get-SCOMAgent | where {$_.ProxyingEnabled.Value -eq $False} | Enable-SCOMAgentProxy
Note 1: My friend Kevin Greene does a trick when installing a new environment as shown in this blog post. Whenever he starts clean, he first installs agents to any machines where he knows agent proxying is needed, and then runs a script which enables agent proxying for all those current agents. Afterwards he installs the rest of the agents which do not need agent proxying. This makes for a good start in new deployments.
Note 2: Remember that enabling of agent proxy contains an inherent risk in it, as somebody could try to insert false data into those machines and it could forward that data to the SCOM database, thus causing denial of service and false data in reports and such. I have never heard of any occurance of this situation though.
Another reason why I am not very afraid of this is because there are a lot of roles which require this agent proxy setting, and those are generally the most important machines (AD, DNS, SQL, Exchange, ISA, TMG, SCCM, and so on and so on). So if anybody tries to hack machines in order to exploit whatever they would probably go for those important servers anyway. Next to having proxying enabled on those which contains that risk mentioned before, those boxes contain much more interesting data than a SCOM agent I am sure 🙂
Enjoy your proxying agents!
Bob Cornelissen
