Book Image

Getting Started with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager

By : Kevin Greene
Book Image

Getting Started with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager

By: Kevin Greene

Overview of this book

Most modern IT environments comprise a heterogeneous mixture of servers, network devices, virtual hypervisors, storage solutions, cross-platform operating systems and applications. All this complexity brings a requirement to deliver a centralized monitoring and reporting solution that can help IT administrators quickly identify where the problems are and how best to resolve them. Using System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr), administrators get a full monitoring overview of the IT services they have responsibility for across the organization - along with some useful management capabilities to help them remediate any issues they've been alerted to. This book begins with an introduction to OpsMgr and its core concepts and then walks you through designing and deploying the various roles. After a chapter on exploring the consoles, you will learn how to deploy agents, work with management packs, configure network monitoring and model your IT services using distributed applications. There’s a chapter dedicated to alert tuning and another that demonstrates how to visualize your IT using dashboards. The final chapters in the book discuss how to create alert subscriptions, manage reports, backup and recover OpsMgr, perform maintenance and troubleshoot common problems.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Getting Started with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using custom tasks to tune alerts


In Chapter 5, Working with Management Packs we discussed the different types of tasks available in OpsMgr and with the help of some customized console tasks, you will simplify your alert tuning process, quickly identify the root cause of problems and implement resolutions with ease.

Three custom tasks that I always deploy with OpsMgr are—Google It!, Run Remote Desktop, and Run PuTTY. Using these tasks (shown in Figure 8.30), I can lookup information about an alert on the Internet and then pivot to remotely log on to the computer or device to manage it and resolve the issue if required.

Figure 8.30: Custom console tasks for alert tuning

In the following sections, we'll walk you through creating these three custom console tasks and we'll save the tasks into a new unsealed management pack for easy management.

Creating the 'Google It!' task

This task gives us the ability to click on an alert from the console and then open a Google search with the display name of...