Russ Slaten is an MP authoring expert and that created a custom URL monitoring solution.  This is my favorite solution as it addresses one of the most common issues that I have often heard from customers.  “Don’t alert me if the website is down for only one second.  Alert me if the website had be down for say five minutes”.  The solution is a little more difficult to setup initially but once you have it working adding and removing website is as easy as updating an excel spreadsheet.  You can even have the spreadsheet sit on a common file server so that people who have no clue how SCOM works can setup URL monitors.

I recommend installing this in your test lab first to get familiar with how it works. 

So lets get started.  First I go to Russ’s blog and read the documentation and download the Management Pack.

Custom.Example.WebsiteWatcher.zip

I extract the files to see what’s in the zip file

There are two files in the zip package.  The first one is the management pack.  The second one is the CSV file for listing website to be monitored.

Now lets take a look at the management pack in MP Viewer

There are two classes.  The Website class and the Website Watcher Class

There are two discoveries.  One discovers which servers will be watcher nodes.  The other discovers what website to monitor.

There are three monitors. One “monitors whether a website is up or down”.  The second one “checks for a string in the response from an http request”.  The third one “Monitors the Performance of a Website”.  Seems easy enough

Also there is one relationship that ties the websites to the watcher nodes.

Let get this puppy installed.

I open the administration console and go Management Packs.  Right click and select Import Management Packs.

Then I go to Add and select Add from disk.  Click no to search for dependencies.

Now I browse to the folder that I extracted the files to and select the “Custom.Example.WebsiteWatcher.xml” file

I click Install,  and when its finished click Close

I have the Management Pack installed. Now I need to configure it for my environment. To keep it simple I am going to configure all my websites to be monitored from my RMS server.  This way I can avoid messing with run as accounts.

First I am going to copy the CSV file to a simple location on the RMS.  I created a folder on the RMS called c:\websitemonitoring and copied the “URLMonitoringList.csv” file there.

I open up the Operations Manager console and go to the Authoring Console and select Object Discoveries

Now I need to change my scope

I select Clear All at the bottom and then select View all targets.

Now I type in Website Watcher and click Select All then ok

As I seen before with the MP Viewer tool there are two discoveries in this management pack

I double click on the Discover Websites Discovery

I go to the configuration tab and I can see the discovery contains an interval on how often websites are discovered and a path to the file.

I click the edit button and copy and paste the location of my URLMonitoringList.csv which is “C:\websitemonitoring\URLMonitoringList.csv”

I am also going to change the interval to every 300 seconds for testing purposes.  Once I have my everything working I will change it back to one day or 86400 seconds

I click Ok and then Ok again.

Now I need to configure what server I will be monitoring the websites from.  In this case I will just be using the RMS.

I remote desktop into into the RMS and create a registry Key (not value) in HKLM\Software called “WebsiteWatcher”

I go the registry by typing regedit

Navigate to HKEY_LOCALMACHINE\Software

I right click and select New, Key

Then type in “WebsiteWatcher”

The discovery for this is set at once a day, while on the RMS I also cycled the System Center Management Services to speed up the discovery process. (I don’t recommend this in production)

Now I need to open the URLMonitoringList.csv and edit with excel. I set second column to my RMS server and save it.

Now I go to the Monitoring console and go to the Discovered Inventory view and select View All target and type in website.

I can see all the website have been discovered and are now being monitored.

The Bulk URL Editor was introduced in SCOM 2007 R2.  I don’t often see this tool used as most customers don’t even know it exists or don’t understand the benefits of it.  The first benefit of the Bulk URL editor is that it scales to thousand of URLs.  If you were to try to create hundreds of URLs with the Web Application Templates it won’t work.  I have tried this in the past and there are so many workflows running at the same time that the agent fails and you end of not monitoring anything.   The second benefit of the tool is that you can add a bunch of websites in a few minutes. 

The Bulk URL Editor is not very intuitive, but once you understand how to use it the process is pretty easy.  If you haven’t used the tool I highly recommend giving it a try.

TechNet has some good documentation here. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd788987.aspx

To use the Bulk URL Editor I copy the tool from the installation media.  The file is stored in the “SupportTools\AMD64” directory

On my computer that has the SCOM console installed, I copy the “BulkUrlManager.exe” file to “C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007” (If you copy it anywhere else it won’t work)

I double click on the “BulkUrlManager.exe” file.

On the Connect to Server dialog box I type in the name of my Root Management Server and click connect

I click the New Icon

I then type in a name of my website template.  I choose “Standard URL Monitoring”

Now I click Create a new Management Pack,

I then give the management pack the name. I choose “BUE Website Monitoring” and click OK

I click OK on the Add New Template Screen

On the next dialog box I click Yes, then OK

Under Templates I click the template I created called “Standard URL Monitoring”

Now I click Add

Now I simply add the URLs that I want to monitor (Note: You need to add http:// or https:// or it will fail)

I click OK and I see all of my URLs are attached to my Standard URL Monitoring Template

Now I simply hit save. I click yes to save the changes to the selected web template.

I am done in the Bulk URL Editor for now. But I am not finished setting up my URL monitoring.  I need to select where I want the URLs to be monitored from.

I launch the Operations Manager Console and go to the Authoring screen.

I expand out Web Application and right click to refresh the screen.

Now I see the website I created using the Bulk URL editor

Under the Actions pane, Custom Actions I click Edit web application settings

My website opens and all I see is a string of text that looks like a ugly variable.  (Don’t panic this is how it is supposed to look)

Now under the Actions Pane, under Web Application I click Configure settings

I click the Watcher Node tab and select the server I want to run the website monitoring.  I choose my RMS server.

I click OK and then click Apply at the bottom of the Web Application Editor screen

I then close the screen with the red X at the top right

Now I go back into the Bulk URL Editor.

I select the Template I have been working with and hit Synchronize

I click Yes,

I close the Bulk URL Editor as I am done with it.

Now I open the SCOM Monitoring Console and look for our Web Application, Standard URL Monitoring Instances.

I can see all my websites are now being monitored.

As you can see each website is its own object.  This I nice for putting them into maintenance mode putting them into groups.

I go to groups I can see that the Bulk URL editor also created a group.

This is the most common way to monitor URLs.  If you only have a few websites to monitor then this solution works fine. But most organizations have a ton of internal and external websites. I would say if you are monitoring over 25 websites I would look at using the Bulk URL Editor or the custom solution by Russ Slaten

TechNet has some good documentation here. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb381370.aspx

Lets setup a basic website monitor for my blog using the Web Application Management Pack Template.

In the Authoring console I expand Management Pack Templates. I right click on Web Application and click Add Monitoring Wizard

I select Web Application and then click next

For the name I like to give it a descriptive name like “Website – SCOM2K7”.  I like to put the “Website – “ in front of all my websites as it makes it easier later on.

Also I like to have at least one custom management pack to store all of my URL monitors in. If you are monitoring a lot of applications it will make sense to break them up into a few different management packs.

I click Next,

Now I type in the url of the website I want to monitor, in this case I type in “www.scom2k7.com” I click test to make sure that SCOM can access the URL I want to monitor. (Often times the test will timeout don’t worry if it does, just continue on as the test functionality doesn’t always seem to work.)

Now I need to pick my watcher node. This is where I want my website to be monitored from. If you are going to be monitoring a large number of websites, it is recommended to run these from a dedicated management server. The reason for this is that management servers write directly to the Ops DB. If you run all of your website monitoring from an agent, the agent has to monitor the website and then send the status to a management servers. Running the website monitoring directly from a management server avoids the middle man.

I also change the “Run this query” option to ten minutes. I think two minutes is too aggressive and causes excessive alerts. Most other URL monitoring tools I have seen use ten minutes as their default.

I click next and then click Create

I open the monitoring console and wait for it to show up under Web Application, Web Applications State

If I right click on my website and go to health explorer I can see that I am monitoring a lot more then just the website status.

Also if I go to groups I can see that the wizard automatically created a group called “Website – SCOM2K7 watcher computers group”

There are three different ways to monitor a website with operations manager in SCOM.  Each of the different ways has its own pros and cons.

1. Web Application Management Pack Template
2. Bulk URL Editor or BUE
3. Custom URL management pack by Russ Slaten

Web Application Management Pack Template

Pros:

• Ease of Use
• Integrated into the Console
• Supported by MS Support

Cons:

• Produces a lot of alerts
• Not very scalable
• Alerts are not very descriptive to what the actual issue is
• Creates too many groups
• Time consuming to setup a lot of websites

Bulk URL Editor

Pros:

• Scales to 3,000 websites per management servers and 12,000 per management group
• Saves time by importing a list of of multiple websites from a text file
• Each URL creates its own instance so putting individual URLs in maintenance mode is easier
• Less groups are created
• Supported by MS Support

Cons:

• Not Intuitive
• Not integrated and requires an extra console to be copied for tool to be run
• Produces a lot of alerts
• Alerts are not very descriptive to what the actual issue is

Custom URL management pack by Russ Slaten

Pros:

• Easy to add and remove websites
• Reduces number of alerts by consolidating them and only alerting if website is really down.
• Alerts are descriptive telling you exactly why the alert was created
• Doesn’t create any extra groups
• Doesn’t require extra console as everything is added and removed from an csv (Excel) document
• Seems to scale well
• Reduced administration as csv document can be modified by anyone with no knowledge of SCOM

Cons:

• Not integrated in console
• Initial setup of MP is more difficult
• Logging of performance data is not possible but could be added
• No MS Support if you have issues

In all actuality there is probably a ton of custom ways you can monitor a website with SCOM.  For simplicity I am just going to cover the three most common.

I recently ran into this error. “The report server has encountered a configuration error. Logon failed for the unattended execution account.” 

A couple weeks ago I changed the passwords on all my SCOM Service Accounts.  I didn’t run any reports since then, but when I finally ran one I got the above error.

So to fix it I logged into my SQL Server and looked at Reporting Services Configuration.  I initially thought it was the service account.

I changed the password and tried to run the reports but got the same error.

The looking a little further I realized the it was obviously the Execution Account as that is what was specified in the error.  

I then ran reports without any issues.

Here is the full text of the error

Date: 7/13/2011 10:10:35 AM
Application: System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2
Application Version: 6.1.7221.61
Severity: Error
Message: Cannot initialize report.

Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportServerException: The report server has encountered a configuration error. Logon failed for the unattended execution account. (rsServerConfigurationError) —> Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportServerException: Log on failed. Ensure the user name and password are correct. (rsLogonFailed) —> Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportServerException: For more information about this error navigate to the report server on the local server machine, or enable remote errors
   — End of inner exception stack trace —
   — End of inner exception stack trace —
   at Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ServerReport.GetExecutionInfo()
   at Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ServerReport.GetParameters()
   at Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Mom.Internal.UI.Reporting.Parameters.ReportParameterBlock.Initialize(ServerReport serverReport)
   at Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Mom.Internal.UI.Console.ReportForm.SetReportJob(Object sender, ConsoleJobEventArgs args)
Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportServerException: Log on failed. Ensure the user name and password are correct. (rsLogonFailed) —> Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportServerException: For more information about this error navigate to the report server on the local server machine, or enable remote errors
   — End of inner exception stack trace —
Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportServerException: For more information about this error navigate to the report server on the local server machine, or enable remote errors