Now, in theory, this sounds pretty nice, right? We don’t have to try to decipher exactly what people want, nor do we have to take up our valuable time by working on a complicated automation. Now, I run into two issues with this. One being that although runbooks are easier than coding up a solution, it’s still not easy enough for the average end user. So we’ll still end up doing it – but hey, at least it’ll be quicker, right? Maybe. And two – this is just yet another automation tool in the System Center family – one that’s fairly ripe with it, considering that every System Center tool offers some kind of automation already builtin.

So what’s it good for then?

Good question. And I’ve think I’ve found a few traditional solutions for it – the largest being that it can act as a mediator in between different systems, especially those that are on different platforms. So it will make a nice middleware piece to quickly integrate data retrieved from a Windows application into a Unix application. While everyone should be using web services these days for data transformation, it just doesn’t exist at the level I’d like to see. So this is a nice fix – not exactly a bandaid, but not the most robust solution ever, either.

However, Orchestrator is kind of awesome for doing crazy things with it. Which is what I’m going to show you. Read on to learn the scenario and what we’re going to do.

The local NPR affiliate, The Current, was running a contest awhile ago which made me think of a perfect, yet slightly crazy, use for Orchestrator. Basically, you won tickets to a show as well as some spending cash and a whole much of music swag. Not a bad deal at all really. How it worked is you went to a certain page on their site, and waited for an image to show up. This image could appear at any random time. Once it appeared, you had to be the first to call a special number they gave you and you won. Simple, right?

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t like sitting at my PC all day and all night hitting F5, waiting for a special image to appear. But you know who doesn’t mind? Orchestrator. It’ll happily do this all day every day for us. And that’s what I’ll show you. And not only that, but why not make it even easier – we’ll have Orchestrator call the station and bridge it to us, so really all we have to do is answer our cell phone. So, how will we do this?

Just like this:

1. We’ll setup Orchestrator to query the website for us, looking for that special image
2. When it’s found, Orchestrator will run a Python script that uses Google Voice to call the station and us
3. When the call has gone through, update SCO, so it stops running for the rest of the day
4. Sit back, relax, and enjoy your new swag!

Curious? Stick around – a video will be coming soon

One of the reasons I reduced the amount of posting I did was I had already done all of the cool stuff you could do with SCOM. The regular day-to-day BS maintenance stuff is not fun for me. Nor is reposting every single press release Microsoft releases like a lot of my brethren. So I didn’t post much, just did my own thing.

But now with the upcoming release of Operations Manager 2012 there will be so many new, cool things to do with it! Not to mention I’ve extended my System Center fun to the other members of the family, and we should see some cool stuff happening.

To kick things off I’ve cleaned up and added to my Useful SCOM SQL Queries list. I’ve also uploaded it as both a PDF and as a .SQL file. So you can play with that for the time being while I finish up a few other things I’m working on.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! Today is the last day you can sign up for MMS 2011 at the special “early bird” pricing! Either you – or more preferably your company – can save $275! Tomorrow they move to the standard pricing, so register now and be sure to say hi to me and pick up some random Pavleck.net schwag!

Curious as to what I’m interested in this year? No worries, here’s my .ics for it. If we’ll be at the same place at the same time let me know.

I’m curious as to why it’s only available as a 13 part RAR file, and doesn’t use the typical MS File Transfer Manager like we get on MSDN to download it one big bundle – or at least the option to get it that way. It’s a little odd.

Also, I’ve been messing around with a VM of Operations Manager 2012, now at CTP3. My initial thoughts? It looks a lot like 2007, which isn’t bad.

The best part? It actually tells you when it’s “thinking”. No more does it just lock up with the old green revolving bar at some random point while it’s collecting it’s thoughts – it actually tells you what it is doing!

More thoughts as I play with it!

It’s been quite some time since I’ve really gotten to roll up my sleeves and get dirty with SCOM. And that’s about to change. I’ve recently accepted a position at Certified Security Solutions as a Senior Consultant. My role? To do the same Operations Manager stuff I haven’t been able to do for the past couple of years. 2011 is starting to look good!

I start this Monday, the 10th, where I’ll be flying out to Cleveland for a week to do the usual meet & greets as well as get a big picture on what they’re looking to do.

So, with any luck, you’ll see a new flurry of activity here on my humble blog as I return to my usual self; finding new and innovative ways to use, and abuse, OpsMgr and now the whole System Center family!

I can’t wait!

In short: No.

In long: Yes, but no, well sort of.

So I had a lot of bad things that went down in my personal life. I was laid off, the wife and I separated, etc etc. So mentally I was able to devote as much time as I had hoped to this endeavor – though I do have a decent ground work laid for it.

But there’s another problem  now.

Being unemployed for as long as I was, I had to sacrifice some things to get by. I had to sell the servers I used for my virtual SCOM infrastructure. So now I don’t really have a machine capable of running OpsMgr + all the additional VMs I need to setup all of the various environments to testing and deployments to.

Did you want to help? I’d love it if you could!

What I need right now to finish all of this:

A proper server. If anyone has one for sale, or to loan to me for awhile (1 year or so), I can get this whole thing back up and running.

I’m looking for something like a Dell Poweredge T610 – a dual processor capable machine with plenty of ram and disk. It doesn’t have to have the extra proc (Though that would be awesome) or be fully populated with ram and drives – but it would be helpful.

If you have one for sale or loan, and would like to be my very best friend, please send me an email to jpavleck.servers@gmail.com – I’ll get back to you ASAP and be sure to credit you with saving these 2 projects. And, as a special gift, when I release the “pro” version of the Web Service Connector, you and your company will receive a free license to it – as well as support – for free! This will easily be a $5,000 value!

So lets see if the community out there can rally around and help me get this done!

Oh, and likewise, if you’d rather send me $2,500 so I can just buy the server, well I can do that too. Send an email to the same place.

I’m fairly certain nothing will come from this post, but I’m putting it out there just in case there’s some kind soul who can help me out.

Thanks,

Jeremy

If you’re looking for a reason to roll out Visio 2010, have I got a doozie for you!

Using the new Visio 2010 add-in for OpsMgr 2007 R2 and the SharePoint 2010 Visio Services Data Provider, you’ll be able to create a visio-based view of a web application, a service, or even an infrastructure (Or even import one with the OpsMgr add-in for Visio 2007) then publish it to SharePoint 2010 as a web drawing.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll get a ‘live’ view of what your environment looks like – in the way you want to see it. Perfect for a big board application in a NOC!

And there’s some even neater things coming down the pipe. Check out this MMS 2010 keynote to see this and more in action!

And go pick up the downloads from Visio Toolbox while you’re at it!

Hopefully I’ll have a nice little tutorial about how to set all of this up, as I need to rebuild my OpsMgr environment several times over the next 30 days to ensure I’m ready to go for my next assignment! Can never have too much practice, right?

But what there isn’t in OpsMgr is a quick, easy, and simple way to find out just what’s running on that server – until now.

Silect is announcing the Agent Explorer feature of the next version of MP Studio.
With Agent Explorer you’ll be able see exactly what rules, monitors, discoveries and management packs are running on a given server.

Interested? View the 5 min screencap and then email Randy R and tell him you want to try this out!