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!

And a new project, still unfinished – SystemCenterSearch.com. Hoping to make it a very basic ‘portal’ for all things system center – but mainly centered on the most recent issues, most common problems and solutions, and a simple search that looks through all of the system center websites for your query.

And for you Redditors out there I’ve made two new sub-reddits. /r/SystemCenter – dedicated to all things System Center related and /r/SCOM – dedicated to just OpsMgr stuff (Of which we know I’m kind of partial to).

So just a quick note to let you know what I’m working on. Now, I’m back to working on website front-ends and building a web service using a 5 year old book from MS Press heh.

This site will no longer be solely dedicated to Operations Manager. Instead, it will be focusing on automation & process improvement items – things to make our lives easier.

I’ll no longer be writing as the ‘elitist’ Senior OpsMgr Consultant which was my role for so many years – I’m now Joe SysAdmin. And as such, I’ll be tackling problems in that manner.

So except fewer Opsmgr posts, and more about dealing with opsmgr in the way most companies do; they pick Random System Admin guy, point a magic wand and say “You’re the OpsMgr Guy now”.

And this is how we’ll be solving problems from here on out.

Real, every day problems. A lot of them will clearly be hacks, but some of them will be quite wonderful.

On that note – if you’re a C# developer and would like to collaborate with me to get the OpsMgr Web Service to a state I feel is acceptable to distribute, please email me and lets start a dialog about all this.

Jeremy

So I’ve been playing with this web service I’m writing for OpsMgr. I was doing a bunch of practical things with it, that you’d normally want to do with it – but then I thought screw that, let’s do something fun with it.

I like to play Team Fortress 2. I like to monitor things. Why not put them together?

Well friends, once you’ve made a web service that talks to the system, it’s fairly trivial to write something to take that information and put it somewhere else.

Let me demonstrate (And yes, you probably do want to click and view the larger version of this)

Stay Tuned…. Video coming soon.

Just as well though.

I could go on a slight diatribe about it all, but I’ll just keep it bottled in.

Until then, let me tell you, writing a web service is a lot harder than I thought – I might be eliciting the help of the community at some point. And yes, I am still slowly trudging along with it. It’s mainly been redesign redesign redesign. Though I’m hoping to have something ‘soon’.

So a couple of weeks ago on the MVP mailing list someone asked the question on how to best integrate SiteScope with OpsMgr. Ever the SDK/Powershell lover I immediately replied that “Hey, there’s some code in the SDK about making a webservice, we’ll just do that and then you can write a script to talk to opsmgr”.¹

Well, lo and behold I was wrong. It wasn’t actually sample code for a web service, but the code to talk to one you wrote.

So I started writing one.

Since I’ve started working again I haven’t had a whole lot of time to work on code – so I’ve been messing with this for about 30 mins or so a day. Right now it doesn’t really work very well, creating an XML web service is all new to me. But if you read my last post, you know that once this is finished you’ll have a system that you’ll be able to manipulate from any system that can talk to it, which is almost anything – Linux, Unix, Mac, etc.

So I’m going to keep at this, and hopefully have something to release to you guys eventually. I’ll start small, just a few functions, then slowly add to it over time.

So while it doesn’t even really work yet, I just couldn’t help but show you guys. I’m pretty exited about this!

1. Yes, I know, there already exists a connector, but it’s old and isn’t optimal

Why is that cool? Because now you can get PoSh 2 officially deployed to all your servers. And you get to “officially” use the coolest CmdLet in the bunch: New-WebServiceProxy

Now, if you were to just read the help about it, it doesn’t really seem all that interesting:

Creates a Web service proxy object that lets you use and manage the Web service in Windows PowerShell.

But I’m going to give you an awesome secret. There’s a webservice out there unlike any other. If you want to sell PoSh to your coworkers, this is the way to do it.

What is it?

WebServiceX.Net provides On Demand XML Web Services for Financial,Distribution, Retail, Health Care, Manufacturing, Telecom, Government and Educational Industry.

So, what’s the mean to us?

Well using our shiny new cmdLet and a few lines of code we can instantly access data for over 70 different services. So really it comes down to “What do you want to do?”

Get the weather? No problem.

BAM. Done.

Oh, you don’t live in the US? No worries either.

Lets see how the weather of a certain favorite MS employee is.

Wow, Stefan better grab a coat, it’s chilly there.

Ok, those were interesting in an ‘yeah, I’ve seen that before’ way – but what else?

A simple-as-pie domain whois? You know it’s there.

BAM!

Next?

How about searching Lloyd’s for the risk code for a given item. Sure, we got it.

BAM!

Apparently it’s risk code is 6T. No idea what that all means.

I could go on all day – there is so much information out there. From Acceleration Unit Converters, Sunset and Sunrise times, RSS Readers, Translation services, Barcode generation, Text to Braille – hell, it’ll even let you send Free SMS messages and Faxes to anyone!

As you can tell, it’s a pretty expansive list, with many options and a whole ton of data. Not always what you want when you’re trying to do a little Posh-Fu. So that’s why I’m working on a little script for you to dot source, one that “PoShifies” these various services and gives you a lot more options on the command line – look for that soon!

Oh, and before I forget – be sure to check out the PowerScripting Podcast tomorrow night because you’re in for a treat! Me, Marco Shaw, Marcus Oh and Scott Moss will be giving a little panel discussion about PowerShell in OpsMgr – the Command Shell as we’ve come to call it. So come listen in, ask some questions, and maybe win some sweet sweet schwag!