BICTT

This morning I talked to my good friend and SCOM guru Marnix Wolf about the new Base OS management pack version 6.0.6956.0 that was just released a few days ago. Same as in his case I was writing up a blog post about the mp, when I started noticing some issues with it and when looking over at Kevin Holmans blog about the subject we could see the issues streaming in. Seems we were not the only ones!

Some of these issues are very easily fixed and should be fixed with lightning speed. One of those is a spelling mistake in the MP on a monitor that is very noisy and everybody has an override on it. And now because of the spelling mistake everybody needs to dive into the XML and try to manually fix things. And possibly at the next update to the MP do the same again!

So first of all we want to call in your help to get a quick fix to the issues in this MP. The basis of the updates to the MP are great and the thoughts behind it are great! However these issues need to be fixed, because a lot of people will be hurt by it.

So friends from the product team, please work together and bring out a quick new version of this MP!

Please join the community in voting on the bug that was opened on Connect over here.

Find the blog posts relating to the subject here:

Post from Marnix Wolf
More Than One: Let’s ask for a new improved Server OS MP! Yes We Can!

Post from Kevin Holman
OpsMgr: MP Update: New Base OS MP 6.0.6957.0 adds Cluster Shared Volume monitoring, BPA, new reports, and many other changes

And again please help by voting on the bug report on Connect
https://connect.microsoft.com/OpsMgr/feedback/details/692944/new-server-os-mp-version-6-0-6956-0-has-some-bad-bugs

Again, this is not a flame or something like that, just an initiative to get a fixed and working MP very soon with all the great new stuff that was added and without at least most of the issues! This is to make the acceptance and workings of the product and the benefits people have from it maximized!

Yes we can!!

Edit 5 October:

I am writing an addition here, because some people seemed to have misinterpreted my comments. Our posts are not about bashing a product team. Certainly not. This product team has actually made an updated management pack (which is great), and has done a lot of good work on it and they have taken into account a lot of community feedback. However there a re a number of issues we are seeing now that should be fixed on short notice, so as not to discredit the great work they did. That is why we identify the issues and bring the to attention, with the strong request to make a minor bug fix update to the management pack and release that one to the public.

So some of the things that have been seen and my remarks:

• Due to a spelling mistake in a disk monitor there are many problems with the import due to people having previous overrides on it (I am betting a high percentage for this specific monitor). This is a very simple edit to change back to the right value.
• Report execution might fail because of lacking proper security settings on a Stored Procedure. This should also be fixed as having people edit rights inside of the databases is not a good thing.
• Knowledge is out of date for the new default values in the free space monitors. A few simple edits and this is done. Not a biggie, but just a finishing touch. Dont forget this is one of the monitors that at least I get the most customer questions about on settings and default values.
• The BPA monitors can be noisy for Server 2008R2 systems. This has two reasons in my opinion, with only one actionable by this management pack. FIrst of all, I would request these to be disabled by default and have written in the MP guide how to enable them if needed, as it feels like the disk fragmented monitor all over again (which caused a lot of noise and angry comments from customers). Second there is an external cause (which is not the fault of this product team, they are just reporting on issues seen by BPA), and that seems to be at least from the WSUS BPA. This WSUS BPA and possibly a few others has a bug in it, that causes it to whish you had a WSUS server installed on every server you have and complains if you don't . This is something to be adjusted by the BPA or WSUS team and others involved.
• The ‘performance by utilization’ report section dealing with Logical Disk % Idle time is upside down: the lowest idle time values are on top (100% Idle time is the lowest) and the highest idle time (anything close to 10% or even less) are on the bottom. Well, this is easy to see and evaluate and change in the report by the product team and post the next version in the mp.
• Heard some issues with the reports failing to run or failing to load into the reportserver. I guess this is a matter of getting it replicated in a test environment and finding the possible issues and seeing if this needs to be fixed in the mp or with a workaround somehow. However there are a good number of people seeming to have issues with this and even after doing the rights change on the stored procedures (workaround of one of the other issues above) they still have the issue.
• Some other things I have heard I deem not yet confirmed, perhaps these belong to the mention in mp guide story later or perhaps these are on-offs.

As you see a few items that are easy to fix and a few things that require a bit of SQL (the rights on the SP and deploying report). I would strongly suggest that it would not be needed to wait for 6 to 12 months for a next version to fix the issues (and probably give need to workaround issue number 1 in the list above again!).

This way everybody will be able to enjoy the new and great features of this mp (added CSV monitoring, added BPA support (if needed!), added very nice/fancy and above all very usefull reports. And a lot less noise and performance collection (while having the option to enable those again if you need it). Now thats great!

So it is meant as a help from the community to the MS product group(s) to get the maximum value out of these MP's and to help and support frequent releases of updates to management packs for the products that give more value, without making customers complain. And this is especially the case for product groups who are actually bringing (new) versions of management packs for their products with a certain frequency.

Hope this clears up my point.

Bob Cornelissen