Powershell DSC (Desired State Configuration) Summary

Before writing about DSC, I want to recommend a video. Few days ago I saw this video about Visio Powershell, it is really cool how this guy uses Powershell to manage their Visio diagrams, it is a must watch.

Last month was the month of the DSC (Desired State Configuration), there are a lot of posts and discussions about this topic, especially after the Technet America 2014 and I am going to make a little selection of these posts and videos.

Monitoring memory and CPU based on process command line match

The title of this posts looks fairly uncommon, but sometimes it is necessary to monitor some system parameters based on the command's line, for example, it is useful to monitor IIS application pools.

Our client needed this type of monitoring to do reports based on this data, so we did these SCOM RULES based on scripts.

One little notice before we start with the scripts: some people ask us what "Call oAPI.LogScriptEvent" does. The answer is that this call writes an event with number 2000 in the agent machine and it is useful for debugging.

If you don´t know or you don´t remember how to associate a script to SCOM RULE here is an old post talking about this topic.

Here are the scripts, I hope they will be as useful to you as they were to us.

Windows 2012 R2 disk deduplication

Today we are going to talk about the file deduplication, a service which can achieve space savings of 60% into VDI infrastructures. 

There are some software requisites to setup before deduplication. To start the setup you have to add the following roles in to the server:

SCOM 2012 SP1 client-side event 34215

This is a short tip to solve the error event 34215, this event appears when client-side is trying to write an extra configuration into a IIS shared configuration and you don´t have enough permissions.

First thing, is understand how client-side monitoring is deployed. By default, client-side monitoring, tries to create the CSMCollector virtual directory and the OperationsManagerCsmCollector v.4.0 application pool when you execute the client-side wizard in the SCOM console.
The solution is easy, just give the computer permissions (web server) over the shared directory of IIS config.

After that you will get an event 34243 that means "The new client-side monitoring configuration has been successfully applied. No conflicts were detected."

SCOM 2012 check root login into CentOS system

Continuing the previous post, here is a recipe to rise an alert when root or privileged account has login into CentOS box via SSHD.

Obviously, for this recipe you need the Unix/Linux Management Packs applied and properly configured, here is an old post concerning this topic. 

There are at least two ways, via ACS or via Unix/Linux Log file monitoring to rise this type of alerts. 

The quickest and easiest way is with Log file monitoring, but it is less accurate than ACS, for example ACS has a set of reports to get detailed login statistics, but in some scenarios, it could be noisy and complex to manage.

SCOM 2012 - Create alert / monitor based on Windows event ( Administrator login alert )

Today, our customer asks us how we can know when the Administrator has logon via terminal server on Windows Server on their Domain.
The answer is with SCOM, using the event alert feature.
When you do a login in Windows 2008 or higher and the audit is running an event with id 4624  is created in the security log of the machine.
So first step to create the alert / monitor is to enable the audit.
You have to add new group policy with the audit enabled in the OU of the computers that you want to monitor, in this image you can see highlighted what you need.

Vmware Notes (I)

Recently, I have been reading a little bit about Vmware, usually, I am Hyper-V guy, but probably in a short time I am going to work with Vmware.
I have been doing a little bit of research about Vmware and here are some notes that I have taken/pasted about this topic.

This article, doesn't cover all topics regarding Vmware, probably I will write a second article where I will extend it.

I hope these notes will be useful to you.