So what would be the first thing you do after installing SCOM or when you find a new management pack? For most that would be to load the management pack and see what happens. This is usually followed with a lot of alerts coming in and trying to find out what happened or you find out that you do not see any health state of the application you are monitoring with that management pack.
So the first thing you should do when you start with a management pack is to read the management pack guide. It usually tells you some specific points to watch out for before, during and after loading the management pack. This is also true for community packs and software vendor management packs. Usually these have to do with runas accounts and profiles and overrides and enabling discoveries and monitors or disabling them.
Where can you find management packs?
- When you download a management pack usually there is a second download link for the guide.
- In some cases the management pack guide is included in the downloaded msi and when you extract it during installation the guide gets located at the location of extraction.
- On TechNet the online management pack guides: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd347500.aspx
- Through the SCOM console.
Go to scom console – Administration – management packs. Select download management packs. Next search for a product like “Active Directory”. Open the list below and find the product you are looking for (in the example “Active Directory Server 2008”). On that line move your mouse to the right to the column of Information. Just click in that empty space and it will give you the possibility to download the MP guide.