Recently I was working in an environment where the root management server for the Forefront environment would regularly restart the health service. At first I figured it was one of the RMS thresholds (private bytes or some such thing – see the end of this article for great link from Kevin Holman).
However, this debug took a new direction when I looked in add/remove programs and saw that this system had both the Operations Manager RMS installed, and had the Operations Manager R2 Agent installed on it. We figured out that when the private bytes counter went too high, it restarted the "client" which is ALSO the Health service for the OpsMgr RMS – Ouch. I ended doing a workaround for this by removing one of the management groups which was assigned to this server (the RMS was actually reporting to three different management groups, but only one of them was really functional).
After I tracked this down and was preparing to write this up, I ran across Walter Eikenboom’s article which addresses this specific issue in his “How to monitor another management groups OpsMgr infrastructure” article. Walter summarizes the issue I ran well as follows:
“When the monitoring opsmgr looks at the health service of the RMS or MS from another management group it thinks its just an agent and is not aware that’s a health service of another opsmgr infrastructure.”
So when a health service goes higher than the threshold for an agent, it automatically restarts the agent which in this case is the RMS’s Health Service. Which is what we were seeing here.
So, if you have both Forefront an an Operations Manager environment which is monitoring the Forefront RMS make sure that you check out Walter’s blog available at:
http://weblogwally.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!A913F865098E0556!1574.entry
Additional solid reading material related to how the health service restarts is available at:
Can you just installed the OpsMgr R2 agent from the RMS if you don’t the server to be monitored by OpsMgr?
I also curious what would happen if you have an environment like this (RMS with agent installed) and you decided to uninstall the Operations Manager R2 agent… My uncertainty came from the fact that both the RMS server and the Agent both run the same service name (System Center Management in R2, OpsMgr Health Service in RTM/SP1). I was wondering if the uninstallation of the agent could result in the destruction of the RMS as an unfortunate side-effect.
To test this configuration I took an RMS which I have in a lab environment and I installed the OpsMgr R2 agent on it. Next I uninstalled the OpsMgr R2 agent from the RMS, and it uninstalled without an issue and didn’t cause a problem for my RMS. [This was just my lab environment, don’t try this in production without a solid backup methodology in place just in the off-chance my lab didn’t reflect real-world production environments!]