SCOM 2007 Installation checklist

I finally got involved in my first SCOM project and realized that client’s IT environment might not be as ideally as how we want it to be, in terms of their IT security policy / GPO. However, below is a some checklist which i think it is handy before we proceed with SCOM installation without much hiccups.

• SCOM action account is created and granted with relevant permissions. Make sure that the SCOM action account is granted “log on as a service” and “log on as a batch job”. “Log on as a batch job” is required, especially if you are using SCOM action account to run the Service Level Dashboard. If not, the application pool for SLD in the IIS will be immediately stopped, once the SLD website is loaded.
• Check if “System cryptography: Use FIPS compliant algorithms for encryption, hashing and signing” is enabled and can be disabled if it is. If not, then you might need to apply kb911722 for the SCOM web console, if it is displaying "the implementation was not part of the windows platform FIPS validated cryptographic algorithms" at your browser.
• The rest will the same as my previous SCOM 101 post.

SQL 2008 R2 Reporting Services

Installing the SQL 2008 R2 reporting services is definitely a simple and straight forward step where you can just check to enable the option during the SQL 2008 R2 server installation. Often, it is the configuration part that gives you the headache.

When you try to access the SQL reporting or reportserver sites, you might encounter the following error message in the web browser, or the event logs below (screen captures). You might want to check the credentials used to run the SQL reporting service.

“The report server cannot decrypt the symmetric key that is used to access sensitive or encrypted data in a report server database. You must either restore a backup key or delete all encrypted content. (rsReportServerDisabled) Get Online Help

Bad Data. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80090005)”

 

Tried changing the account used to run the reporting service to use the SCOM admin account and it works !!!

Installing Service Level Dashboard

Had tried to install Service Level Dashboard and even though it was successful, the report does not seems to be appearing. Checked the logs, it says, “Message :System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Could not find stored procedure 'GetSLADetails'.” and tried re-installing for a few times but not successful.
The message above was all about “GetSLADetails” stored procedure was not found in the database. This stored procedure should be located in SCOM’s Data Warehouse database, which it did not happen to the be there . Checking the net, seems that it might be due to the stored proc. was not successfully created during the installation of the SCOM Service Level Dashboard MP, manually re-run the SQL script to create this stored proc. should do the trick (at least it worked for me !!)
Please refer to the page here for the stored procedure.

SCOM 101

Did my first lab on my own after a few days of introductory sessions to System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, which I will refer it as SCOM from now on.

Lesson 1 : Installation
Stuffs that you need

• server (yeah, of course you need at least one)
• SCOM installation DVD and some pre-requisite software / server feature/roles you need to install
• SQL server installation DVD
• A full list of requirements to run SCOM , can be located here

You can install all the stuffs in a single server. To make things a little bit more interesting, i had setup a 3 VMs (1 DC, 1 SQL server and 1 SCOM server, all running on Windows Server 2008 R2 sp1 Ent version.

Steps

1. install the .Net Framework, IIS service (SQL, SCOM Servers)
   install AJAX extension 1.0 (in the SCOM server, if you are separating the roles)
2. install the SQL server (I installed SQL server 2008 sp1) for this test
3. if the SQL server is installed in a separate server, then you will have to run the "DBCreateWizard.exe" file that comes with the SCOM installation DVD / CD. If you create an empty Database for SCOM manually, it might not work as you might encounter an error saying something like “invalid Microsoft Operations Manager database version” –> see below
   
   
4. if you are installing a separate SQL server, then there is a few extra steps you need to do. First, you should uncheck the database option, while install SCOM
   
   
5. Select the target SQL server where the “DBCreateWizard.exe” has setup the database for you before this. The SCOM database name will be using the default database name
   
   
6. One thing you need to make sure is that the firewall settings in your SQL server should allow the SQL traffic. This is because Windows server 2008 will be default, disallow all network traffic, except those required by the OS itself.
7. Once this is done, installation is pretty much straight forward where SCOM will prompt you for the type of features you want to install and the type of account to run those features.

Managed to install SCOM after a few trials and looking up the net for resources. Will be starting to explore more its functionality after this. Stay tuned.

do not mark as READ

Probably get used to marking emails as Read manually, there is an option in Outlook, which I normally change whenever get to use a new Outlook client.

What you need to do is to open up the Option -> Mail. There is a button named "Reading Pane". Uncheck the "Mark items as read....." and click OK to save the changes. (as below). Then off you go, your mails will never be marked as Read automatically when you change your selection in your mail folders (usually after 5 seconds)

Chapter 1 - Introduction

I had always wanted to create a blog of my own, but up till now, not even one, probably due to the laziness and always use "tomorrow" as an excuse to start one. Well, got one up and running after a few years of "delay" when i was "encouraged" to blog one for my work....

Must admit that i was a bit suprised to hear this, but guess it should serve as a reliable notepad of mine, since my handwriting had started to turn "doc styles" even i can't even understand sometimes... (you know lar, everything is keyboard now....)

OK, to cut it short, stay tuned with my upcoming posts :)