SCOM Trick 13 – SPN

Service Principal Names (SPN) are used to uniquely identify an instance of a service. SCOM Services are also registered and mostly everything will be just fine, but in some cases you might have issues with this.
My friend Walter Eikenboom has writte…

SCOM Trick 12 – Diagnostic logging

In some cases you might require a lot more info from SCOM about what is going on during troubleshooting. In that case you might want to have more diagnostic logging (more verbose). Here is how to use it.
How to use diagnostic tracing in System Center…

SCOM Trick 10 – SCOM console renew

Many times it can happen that you are looking at stale data in the SCOM console. For instance you click on an alert and it gives you an error, saying that it has already been closed (in more difficult terms). Sometimes you see an entry in a list that sh…

SCOM Trick 9 – Maintenance mode tooling

As I have said in SCOM Trick 7, the use of maintenance mode is important. But not always will somebody use the normal SCOM interface (or web interface) to start maintenance mode right before they start working on the machine. To be honest a lot of the t…

SCOM Trick 8 – Who enabled maintenance mode

One of the questions that get asked after people start using maintenance mode in SCOM, especially in bigger environments, is to provide an overview of who put something into maintenance mode.
Somebody wrote a management pack for this!
Maintenance Mo…

SCOM Trick 7 – Use Maintenance mode

One of the great features in SCOM is the ability to place a machine/device or part of it in maintenance mode whenever you are working on the machine and you do not want it to generate alerts while you are doing your stuff. For instance during a planned…

SCOM Trick 6 – VMware monitoring

A question that pops up a lot is if we can monitor VMware with SCOM. There are actually several options that deliver different levels of monitoring.
Veeam Nworks. A very complete third party SCOM add-on.
http://www.veeam.com/vmware-microsoft-esx-mon…

SCOM Trick 5 – SCOM Books

My opinion is still that books are a great resource to learn about a product. Also for SCOM there are a few around:
System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed
A very complete book about SCOM, written by MVP’s
System Center Operations Manag…

SCOM Trick 4 – Learning SCOM

What can you do when you want to learn about SCOM? Well there are a lot of possibilities.
Read books about SCOM (see SCOM Trick 5)
Read the product documentation (see SCOM Trick 1)
Watch webcasts about SCOM
Watch the SCOM superflow. For mo…