OpsMgr 2007 R2 MP version 6.1.7599.0 is Released!

[System-Center-Team]

First published on TECHNET on Feb 19, 2010

The System Center Operations Manager team has released its second quarterly update of the OpsMgr 2007 R2 MP to the catalog.  You can download the MP from this page . This package (Version 6.1.7599.0) is specific to OpsMgr 2007 R2 and will not import on product versions prior to that.

We’ve packed a ton of new features into this release and a full change log is provided in the management pack guide.  At the bottom of this post is a quick run-down of the new features in this release.

Also, to help people get familiar with all of the new features and changes going into our MP, I’ll be posting a new article every couple of weeks to this blog.  Each post will highlight a specific feature added in the most recent release with the goal of giving every one of our readers insight into how we saw the feature being used.

Feedback or inquiries is welcome through our forums or our public Microsoft Connect site for OpsMgr.

Enjoy!
-Cory Delamarter

Identify data volume drivers: How often have you asked the question, “Where is all of this data coming from” and had to run SQL queries to figure it out?  This is an important question to be able to answer, especially when evaluating new MPs or troubleshooting environmental issues.  This release introduces the first set of reports designed specifically for management of Operations Manager and they are aimed at helping you answer that question.  The reports give you a simple way to review data volumes broken down by management pack, workflows and instances.  Use these reports to better understand the amount of data going through your infrastructure and identify places where tuning needs to be done.

Monitor agent processor time: The OpsMgr MP has provided monitoring for the memory utilization of the OpsMgr agent for some time now, and we even provided a significant update to that functionality in our last release .  With this release we have added a new rule, monitor, task and view all focused on monitoring and showing the total percentage of processor time our agent and its child processes are using.

·         The monitor “Agent processor utilization” will detect if our agent and its child processes are taking up excessive CPU utilization over a number of consecutive samples.  The knowledge provides troubleshooting steps and points out a number of patches which could be applied to address the problem.

·         The rule “Collect agent processor utilization” samples the agent processor utilization and stores it so that users can analyze utilization over time.  This fills a major gap in the OpsMgr troubleshooting toolkit.

·         The task “Get the agent processor utilization” uses the same logic as the monitor and collection rule to sample the agent processor utilization and reports back the average, maximum and minimum value sampled over a number of samples.

·         The view “Agent Processor Utilization” view within the new “Agent Performance” view, allows you to review the performance data being collected so you can see what processor utilization has been over the span of the data available in your operational database.  Simply open the “Agent Performance” view, click on the “Agent Processor Utilization” tile in the view and then select the agents for which you want to see utilization.

Audit agent versions: The “Agent Version Monitor” runs on each agented system and checks the agent’s version against a “desired agent version”.  If the version is below the desired version then the agent’s configuration state will change to warning, allowing you to easily identify which agents in your environment need to be upgraded.  The desired agent version can be configured by override so that you can dictate which systems need to be running which agent version.

Detect agent architecture mismatch: 32bit agents which are installed on 64bit operating systems can result in a lot of problems and in some cases are unable to collect all of the monitoring data that they need to.  The new monitor “Agent and OS architecture are the same” detects if any of your 64bit systems have a 32bit agent installed on them so that you can easily identify those systems and reinstall the correct version of the agent.  If you have any systems where this configuration is required, you can disable this monitor via override.

Review OpsMgr performance data more easily:  The OpsMgr agent performance views have been consolidated into a single dashboard view, which includes a new view for the agent processor utilization.  This allows users to review all relevant performance data in one screen, and avoids the confusion from axis scaling, caused by having different data series shown on the same chart.

Improve your knowledge: We continue to invest in tons of new and improved knowledge.  In this release we’ve added up updated over 20 articles with more complete information on how to troubleshoot problems and the true impact of the issues.

Operations Data Reporting: The easiest way for you to give feedback on management packs is by enabling the Operational Data Reporting (ODR) capabilities built into OpsMgr 2007.  By doing this you send anonymous data about how MPs are behaving in your environment back to Microsoft.  We in turn summarize this into reports that we share with all teams that develop management packs so they can see which rules and monitor are driving our users' workloads.  In order to increase awareness, and to set the stage for future updates in this MP, we're including this MP in the OpsMgr MP package from this point forward.  If you're considering this but you're concerned about what data this would send to Microsoft, you can learn more in two ways.  First, you can import the ODR MP without enabling the feature and run the reports directly.  What you see in the reports is what would be sent.  Second, you can review the privacy statement .