The Watchanator is a tool that was developed to populate your dynamic computer groups in System Center Operations Manager 2007 with the associated Health Service (Agent) watchers.

The reason you would want to populate your groups with the Health Service (Agent) watchers is to receive heartbeat (up/down) alerts for your servers.

Setup of the Watchanator.

• Import the All Watcher Management Pack “All Watchers.mp” .

• Any groups that you want the Watchanator to populate. Rename them to start with and underscore. For example if I wanted the Watchanator to populate the “Tim Servers” group I would rename the group to be called “_Tim Servers” (The Watchanator will only populate servers that start with an underscore)

• Explicitly include one Health Service (Agent) watcher in the group. To do this Open the group you want to populate and choose the tab Explicit Members. Click Add/Remove Objects. Leave the Search for on Entity. In Filter by part of name: type the server name of one of the servers in your dynamic group. Click on the watcher for that server and click add. The watcher is the one that looks like eyeglasses.

 
• Run the Watchanator. The Watchanator will now populate all groups that start with and underscore; with the health watchers for that particular group. *The Watchanator must be run on the RMS Server.

Run the Watchanator on a scheduled task on the RMS server daily. Now any changes that happen to groups that start with and underscore; watchers for those groups will be automatically updated.

Watchenator Download Link http://www.scom2k7.com/downloads/Watchanator2.zip

There is a lot confusion on how SCOM heartbeats work so I am going to try to explain. First In SCOM there are really only two important pieces or entities.

This first is the Windows Server entity which encompasses everything about a server except heartbeat.

The windows server entity looks like this

The second important entity is the Heartbeat.

The heartbeat or agent watcher entity looks like this.

So when you are creating a group of servers that you want to monitor you would search for Entity and then you would include both Windows Server and the Heartbeat entity (AKA Agent Watcher).

Click Add to add the Windows Server and the Agent Watcher to the group

Now when you create a subscription to this group you will get alerts for everything related to the server and the hearbeats.

Microsoft Windows Server 2000/2003 Operating System Updated Management Pack

QFE Fixes:

1. Network Adapter Connection Health Monitor is now functional for long descriptions, multiple network adapters with the same description, and enhanced monitoring of network adapters

2. Localization Issues of script of executable failing to run on agent machines in Hungarian and French local versions are fixed

Version: 6.0.5000.25