I had some problems with a State view in SCOM for a certain class, which used to work and now produced an error saying:
Object reference not set to an instance of an object
So I opened up the Discovered Inventory view and selected the appropriate class and waited for the screen to populate.
The same error appeared.
Just for fun I thought I would pick up the instances of the class with powershell by using the get-scomclass and get-scomclassinstance combination to get a table of all objects of the class and that did turn out a list of data.
So I suspected a faulty entry somewhere in the database for one of the discovered objects. Actually I had 1 top level class created and 3 child classes and this happened to two of the child classes.
Updating the pack to a newer version did not work and it was confirmed in the test environment that the pack should not be the problem.
I created a state view of the not monitored top level class and added columns for the other classes to it and that one looked fine.
So I wanted the discovered objects to be all gone from SCOM
The way you usually speed up the process is by setting overrides to the discovery rules for these classes and disabling them for all objects.
Next you run the command remove-scomdisabledclassinstance
And wait for it to remove all the entries.
But while running this command I got an error (see below in text and picture form):
PS C:> remove-scomdisabledclassinstance
**WARNING** This operation WILL result in class instances and relationships being permanently deleted. This operation i
s irreversible and will likely result in a significant amount of activity in the operational database. Are you sure you
want to do this? [Y/N]
y
Started. This operation may take a very long time to complete.
remove-scomdisabledclassinstance : Discovery data has been received from a rule targeted at a non-existent object ID.
Object ID: 8375a67f-5750-53e1-bd9f-7468152934b0
Rule ID: 3147a861-3d91-74a6-675e-e41be8f92658
At line:1 char:1
+ remove-scomdisabledclassinstance
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (Microsoft.Syste…nstancesCommand:RemoveSCDisabledClassInstancesComma
nd) [Remove-SCOMDisabledClassInstance], DiscoveryDataFromRuleTargetedToDeletedObjectException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : ExecutionError,Microsoft.SystemCenter.OperationsManagerV10.Commands.RemoveSCDisabledClas
sInstancesCommand
If you get that error the best you can first do is in SCOM open up a Discovered Inventory view and check how many objects are still there (if it does not throw the same exception as the one I started with!).
Check the number of entries there.
Now run the remove-scomdisabledclassinstance command again.
If it throws the error refresh the screen to check if discovered inventory shows a lower number of discovered instances.
Keep doing that until it finishes. Took me 25 times :>
Next I waited for a grooming interval and let it populate the classes again one by one by turning the discoveries back on.
Bob Cornelissen
