Tool: OpsMgr 2007 - RuntimeHealthExplorer

Did you ever wonder what is the state of the instance as known to the runtime (health service) monitoring it? Did you believe that some state changes are unaccounted for? Did you see discrepancy in Health Explorer?

I believe many of you may answer yes to one of these questions.

Right now, there really is not a good guidance on how to troubleshoot state change problems, but since OpsMgr 2007 SP1 release, there was a way to at least display states of the monitors targeting the instance as recorded by runtime during state calculation. This led me to creation of the tool returning those states from runtime. It also provides visual comparison against “real” Health Explorer (states are returned from Ops DB) while integrated with OpsMgr console thru console task. This task targets instance of “HealthService” managed entity type. Tool uses Health Explorer like view of monitors for each active instance monitored by specific runtime. Following is a snapshot of the tool executed against my Root Management Server. Please observe that I created view listing all health service instances as well as console task associated with this type and accessible thru “Actions” pane.

There still may be a long way for us to recognize all the issues and take corrective actions automatically. That is the reason why this tool provides at least a manual way to synchronize states of the monitors associated with instance into operational DB – right click anywhere in tree control and select “Synchronize to DB”. Unfortunately, such corrective action is unable to synchronize state of the dependency rollup monitor, but I will try to find the way to achieve this although plumbing is not present in current implementation of the runtime yet!

Honestly, I’m not expecting big download count. But it is possible this tool helps someone with investigation of health state issues and that is the main reason why I do this post anyway. Tool works for OpsMgr2007 SP1 and R2!

Based on the feedback (if any) I may try to extend feature set in future versions too (permitting my bandwidth).

DISCLAIMER :

Please evaluate in your test environment first! As expected, this solution is provided AS-IS, with no warranties and confers no rights. Use is subject to the terms specified at Microsoft.

Link to x86 installation package

Link to x64 installation package

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 04, 2009
  I just learned that runtime "refuses" to return and recognize "healthy to healthy" state change (which may occur when resetting the state of the monitor while it was healthy). This will cause such monitor become temporarily hiddent from this tool. It will remain in such state until next "real" state change and significantly affects the usability of this tool - SORRY!

• Anonymous
  June 04, 2009
  Hi Marius, I like this tool already. My installation of this tool first failed. See eventlog entry below. It seems that you have to run the installation with a user that has a scom administrator role. Because the MP that you are importing during the installation. Maybe something to notice. Michel Kamp Product: System Center Operations Manager 2007 Runtime Health Explorer Tool -- Error 1722. There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected. Contact your support personnel or package vendor.  Action _AC84155F_436B_469F_9EC5_291E1034A61A, location: C:Program FilesSystem Center Operations Manager 2007RuntimeHealthExplorer.SetupAction.exe, command: /import "C:Program FilesSystem Center Operations Manager 2007Microsoft.SystemCenter.Community.RuntimeHealthExplorer.Internal.mp"