My concept of a weekly edition of having fun with Operations Manager and Windows Media Center ended up going far longer than I had expected it would. The blog posts and their summaries are below:
In the first part of this series we discussed why it is beneficial to create your own class structure.
In the second part of this series we discussed a wizard driven method to create your own class structure and discovery.
In the third part of this series we showed how the health model works in Operations Manager and a processes to gather information which you will need to effectively monitor your application.
In the fourth part of this series we discussed addition of rules and monitors to our custom management pack.
In the fifth part of this series we created views and customized subscriptions for our custom management pack.
This blog post will specifically cover next steps for the management pack and will provide a download for the management pack sample which was built in this series.
Next steps for the management pack:
If you have been following my blog (or this blog series) you know that this has been under development for close to a year now. The major reason is that I was caught up with how to make the management pack as useful as possible and as complete as possible. With Microsoft’s announcement that Windows Media Center would not be supported in Windows 10 (see http://www.technobuffalo.com/2015/05/04/windows-10-wont-include-windows-media-center/) it caused me to just focus on getting this available before it was no longer relevant.
MP Cleanup: This management pack was written through a variety of methods including some authoring in the Operations Manager console. The results of this type of authoring is UIName references and MomUIGenerated items in the XML which are non-intuitive. A next step would be to edit the XML and clean these up by replacing them with readable names.
MP Sealing: This is currently an unsealed management pack. For production usage this would most likely need to be sealed so that its functionality can only be changed via overrides. See https://www.catapultsystems.com/cfuller/archive/2014/04/21/my-company-has-written-custom-sealed-mps-but-the-key-is-lost/ for an example of how to use fastseal.
Targeting: The target for this management pack should be altered to only check on client Operating Systems to eliminate discovery on server systems.
Sample management pack download:
This sample management pack is available for download at: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/for-Windows-Media-Center-d83d1b32
Summary: This blog has shown the process to create your own management pack using a class structure, shown how to use the Operations Manager health model, created rules/monitors/views and subscriptions. This approach can be used to design your own management packs regardless of the function which you want to monitor. Finally, this management pack can provide the community with an approach to notify you of key events which occur on your Windows Media Center.