Occasionally I’ll get some interesting requests from clients. One of those requests happened recently.

My client wanted to be able to see all of the servers that a certain process was running on. It was a ‘roaming’ process, and could be on any number of servers at any given time.  That’s easily solved with a dynamic group, a WMI query, and a custom attribute. In this example, I’ll be using the ubiqutous Notepad.exe

1. First, start the console, open the Authoring pane, then right click on attributes and select “Create New Attribute“.
2. Give your attribute a name - I used “Notepad Running” - and a nice description, then hit next.
   

   SCOM - Create Attribute Wizard - General Properties Page

3. Under “Discovery Type” select WMI Query and select your target and management pack. Windows Server_Extended is a good choice for something as open ended as our particular request is, but you can narrow it down if you’d like.
   Then hit next.
   

   SCOM - Create Attribute Wizard - Discovery Method

4. Under WMI Configuration we will build our query. Enter root\cimv2 for the namespace and for the query we’ll be using “Select * FROM WIN32_Process where Name = “notepad.exe”. The Property Name field is the most important part, and one not a lot of people understand right away. The “Property Name” field is what SCOM pays attention to, and what you use when you build groups and rules. In this example, I only want processes with notepad.exe to be returned, so I specify that in my query. For the Property name, I’m using Handle, which will always return something, but I could have used almost anything - such as ProcessID.
   

   SCOM - Create Attribute Wizard - WMI Configuration

   If I wanted to create a more generic attribute, I could have used the query “Select * FROM WIN32_Process”, with a property name of “Name”. Then I could create groups with attributes of <Attribute> equals <Process Name>. If you’d like to learn more about the various fields available to you, open CIM Studio, part of the WMI Administrative Tools bundle. When you execute a query, the column names are what we’re talking about here.

   

   CIM Studio - Results of WMI Query

5. After you’re done, hit finish and we’ll be back at the attributes pane. Do a quick search to make sure it was added, and we’re done here.
   

   SCOM - Search Results for custom attribute

6. Now right-click on groups and select “Create a new group”
   Give it a nice friendly name & description and for the management pack choose the same one you used when creating your attribute! That’s important, as dynamic inclusion rules only scope to what is available in the current management pack (And any dependent ones), so you’d be going crazy wondering where your attribute is if you used a different one. Then hit Next>
   

   SCOM - Create Attribute - Create Group Wizard

7. Under “Explicit Members” hit next, we don’t want to put anything in here.
8. Under “Dynamic Members” click on Create/Edit Rules. From the drop down, select the class your attribute was added to (In this case, it’s Windows Server_Extended) and hit add to insert a line. Click on the drop down for Property, and you should see the one we created called “Notepad Running”.
   

   SCOM - Create Attribute - Dynamic Group Query Builder 2

9. Select it, then finish up the formula. In this particular case we’re using “Greater than or equal to” as the operator and “1″ as the value.
   

   SCOM - Create Attribute - Dynamic Group Formula

   To be perfectly honest, you should consider this more of a ‘hack’. What happens is the agent runs “Select * FROM WIN32_Process where Name = ‘notepad.exe’” and returns the Handle property back to the server. The Handle property will never be 0 (Except for the System Idle Process). So if notepad.exe is running on a particular server, it will always return a Handle greater than or equal to 1. If notepad.exe isn’t running on a server, this query returns $null for the handle, which evaluates to FALSE in out Greater than or equal to formula.

10. Click on OK, then Next. Hit next on Subgroups and again on Excluded Members, then hit ‘Create’.

You’re finished. Wait some time for the new discovery to propogate fully, then right click on your newly created group and then “View Group Members”. And now you can interact with this group just like you’ve always been. Have fun!

I haven’t seen this solution offered as a way to send more customized alerts, and am fairly excited about it. With some of the previous solutions, they involve using the command shell to create an alert notification. This is fine, except if you open the subscription in the GUI - once you’ve done that, you’ve essentially undid all that work and created a ‘catch all’ that sends an alert on any event. Why? Well, the GUI itself isn’t designed for the custom settings that can be done in Powershell. This makes it fairly difficult to add people or change the alert - not acceptable to me.

After messing around with authoring console and creating classes based on event viewer errors and other equally exotic methods I came upon something that works wonderfully. The catch? You can only create 254 rules this way.

What am I talking about? Some powershell scripts and the alert resolution states!

By default, there are only 2 states defined - 0 for New, and 255 for Closed. They are always there, and can not be deleted. This leaves 1 - 254 as user definable states. We can use these to make one-to-one events.

Let me start off that this isn’t an ideal solution, but it is the most readable and elegant solution for this particular problem. You probably shouldn’t do this on a single rule basis, but target it more at a wildcard match. You do have a naming convention for your rules and monitors, right? If not, this is the perfect reason to get one. I’ll typically use a convention of <Product Type>-<Product>-<Version (If multiple)-<Rule>. So if I had a rule targeted at exchange, I’d have a rule similar to “EMAIL - Exchange - Exchange 2007 - Search for ‘Jeremy is fired’ in execs mail”. Then when I’m using an exotic config to send an alert, such as this one, I can better fine tune alerts.

Remember, the more you move away from the  “Out of box” yfunctionality with OpsMgr, the more you should be documenting. Or even better, a wiki. Just make a reference to the wiki in the description, and people will know exactly what you’re trying to do - that’s for another post though.

Let’s get on with it, shall we?

I’m going to create a situation. I have a custom application which logs to the Application log. There’s one particular event that only one group in the organization cares about - all they want is a notification of this one single event and nothing else. How do we do it?

The Cliff’s Notes version of what we’ll be accomplishing today:

• Create a custom Resolution State
• Define a new rule
• Deploy a PowerShell script to the RMS to update the resolution state of matching alerts
• Create a notification subscription which responds to our particular state

Now, for the complete steps

1. First go to Authoring > Management Pack Objects > Rules - Right click and “Create new rule”
2. Under rule type, select Alert Generating, Event Based, NT Event Log (Alert) and select a management pack to use.
   
3. Enter a rule name that is distinctive enough that no other rules will have that same name.  Then enter a description, rule category and choose a target. You can go with the shotgun approach and pick “All Computers” here if you’d like.
   
   
4. Now walk through the rest of the wizard and configure your event log settings - for this test I’m using the Application log, Event ID of 926 and event source of “Pavleck.NET Test”. But you can put whatever you want here ace, it’s up to you.
5. Configure your alert. It should automatically copy over the rule name as the alert name. The alert name is what we’ll actually be alerting on, so it’s important that you remember what it is, and ensure it’s distinctive enough to not match something that already exists.
   
6. Now we can work on the other parts of this while our rule is propagating across the environment.
7. Go to Administration > Settings > Alerts - this is where we’ll define a new Alert Resolution State to use. Click on “New…” and name your state and choose an ID for it, I used 10 in this example.
   
8. Click Apply, then Ok and now we’re done with part 2.
9. Let’s go ahead and test and see if our rule works, just open a command window and use some EventCreate.exe magic.
   
10. Open up the alert console for whatever machine you ran that on and you should see our new alert in there - yay, we did something!
    
11. Now we’ll add the magic that changes the alert resolution state. It’s a fairly simple script, and it’s meant to be that way. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll be running this script as a timed response from the RMS. Depending on how your particular environment is setup, you could also run it inside of the rule itself, as an additional response to “Create Alert”. But that only works well if you only plan on doinbg this sparingly, otherwise it makes more sense to run this from the RMS and add onto the script as needed.
    First, download SCOM-UpdateResolution.ps1 here (Or view it after the jump) and edit the alert name, resolution state and RMS to what matches your environment.
12. Now we’ll need to go and create a new rule. Rule type is Timed Commands > Execute a command. Give it a name and description. I’ve set the rule category to “Maintenance” as that makes the most sense to me.
    
13. For the schedule, I’ve set mine to run every 2 minutes. This means there will be a delay of that much between alerts and notifications, but that’s acceptable to me. Then hit next.
14. Configure the command line execution settings as shown - remembering to use “&” instead of “&”. I’ve set the timeout to 45 seconds.
    
15. Hit create and that’s almost all of it - all we need to do now is to create the alert subscription. Go to administration, right click on Subscriptions and choose “Create new notification subscription”
16. Step through it like normal, choosing all groups, all classes. When you get to the Alert Criteria page, uncheck “New” and “Closed” and check our new resolution state. If you keep ‘closed’ in there, it will pertain to all alerts that close. That’s one drawback to this method, you won’t get closed alerts.
    
17. Finish it up as you normally would, then lets test it! Create a few more test events, and lets see if it works.

That’s all there is to it. This works, reliably and 100% of the time. It’s extremely flexible and easy to follow for someone just walking into your environment.

By using a single PowerShell script, and targeting the RMS computer group you’ll be making sure that you have only a single simple script to edit and by mirroring the files and directory paths to any other management servers in your environment you maintain this method if you ever need to promote one to an RMS.

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