Synology; Dropbox and Azure

“It all comes together”

All of my favorites services are working together :-D.

Synchronize your Dropbox account on your Synology http://synobox.fr.nf/

Deploy your website from your Dropbox account to your Azure account; http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kaushal/archive/2013/04/19/publishing-from-dropbox-to-windows-azure-web-sites.aspx

Microsoft Monitoring Agent 2013

Microsoft Monitoring Agent monitors computer infrastructure and application health. It collects diagnostic data, such as performance metrics, event logs, and traces. Microsoft Monitoring Agent can be used as a standalone tool or together with System Center Operations Manager. When monitoring .NET applications, you can direct the agent to save application traces in an IntelliTrace log format.

Download http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40316&WT.mc_id=rss_alldownloads_all

Compatibility http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn465154.aspx

More Information http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn465153.aspx

This gives us a hint about the RTM status of System Center 2012 R2.

SCOM – Download All Microsoft Management Packs 2007, R2 and 2012 in Bulk

 

Today Stanislav Zhelyakov [http://cloudadministrator.wordpress.com] published v2 of his PowerShell Script.

In short the script grabs the names and the links for all management packs on the site. Than it goes trough every MP link. From every MP page gets the version of it and all download links (msi, guides and etc.). Than creates a directory for that MP and subdirectory with the version number and downloads all files in it.

With these improvements you can run the script with schedule task and configure SCOM to monitor the log that way you can get alerted when new MP is available. All thanks to Anthony Bailey.

You can find the PowerShell script here.

SCSM – Exchange Connector 3.0 RTM

Recently Microsoft released the System Center Service Manager Exchange Connector 3.0. This  release is compatible with and requires Service Manager 2012 SP1 Update Rollup 2 and later. It is fully supported by Microsoft. Exchange Connector 3.0 contains bug fixes and the initial set of features, which includes the following capabilities:

•    Create incidents and service requests from email.
•    Update incidents, problems, service-request action log from email.
•    Resolve or close incidents from email.
•    Approve or reject change requests from email.
•    Mark a manual activity as completed from email.
•    Add an email file attachment to a work item as an attachment.

Important Note – Remove every previous version of the Exchange Connector prior to the installation of this version

The Send Email solution is no longer included in the Exchange Connector package. Microsoft moved it to the TechNet Gallery.  Send Email solution is still not a supported solution. 

You can find the download location here. The guide walks through the details of deploying, configuring and using the connector.

MP Update: Exchange 2013 MP 15.00.0620.030

Last week Microsoft Exchange team released the Exchange 2013 Management Pack for compatible with SCOM 2007, and SCOM 2012.

The Management Pack contains about 75 monitors that cover Exchange component health (such as Hub Transport health), customer touch point health (such as “is OWA working”), clustered scenarios, as well as dependencies monitoring (“is Active Directory healthy”). Monitoring covers primarily availability and performance scenarios

If you look at the Management Pack in some tool like MP Viewer, you will discover that there are not 75 monitors in the Management Pack. This is because the Management Pack has logic to dynamically determine the set of monitors by communicating with the built-in monitoring features of Exchange.

PRO: The CE (Correlation Engine) is no longer among us!, each monitored Exchange server is responsible for monitoring its own health, and simply reports this via the Operations Manager agent.

CON: No Perfomance Collection [mailbox count, mailbox sizes], No Reports

You can find the TechNet blog post here, the Management Pack here and the guide here. The guide walks through the details of deploying, configuring and using the Management Pack.