Dieter Gasser's blog

Excluding disabled users from AD Connector

Dieter Gasser — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:26:10 +0000

We have had many customers demanding that disabled Active Directory user accounts are not imported into the SCSM CMDB through the Active Directory Connector. This can be achieved pretty easily with the introduction of LDAP filters in SCSM 2012. This post demonstrates how you can establish such a connector.

In my current test environment, I have an AD Connector set up to import all users and groups without any LDAP filter. With this setup, all users (and groups) from AD will be imported, also disabled accounts. As an example, see the imported Guest account in the below screenshot:

So let us delete this AD Connector and create a new one. The important configuration is found in the wizard step Select objects. Choose the option Provide LDAP query filters for computers, printers, users, or user groups (advanced), and then click the checkbox next to Users or User Groups. Enter the following LDAP filter in the textbox:

(!(userAccountControl:1.2.840.113556.1.4.803:=2))

Click Test Queries to validate the query.

Now, complete the wizard, save the connector and wait for it to finish synchronizing. Now, let us check the CMDB again:

The Guest account is no longer here. Cool!

The field where the information about disabled accounts is stored in Active Directory is named userAccountControl. This is a bitmask property, hence the LDAP query we entered in the connector configuration is using bitwise filters. You can read more about bitwise filters here.

SCSM Clone User Role Console Task

Dieter Gasser — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 16:51:49 +0000

Creating user roles in SCSM can be quite cumbersome, especially when you have to scroll through the long lists of tasks, views and templates over and over again. Wouldn’t it be helpful to be able to start from a user role template with the most common selections already made? Read more to find out about my solution to easily clone any custom user role created in SCSM.

I have created a management pack which includes a task that allows you to clone any user role that you have created in Service Manager. All settings will be copied to the new user role.

Features

Clone any custom user role (built-in user roles are not supported)
Optionally override the profile for the cloned copy
Optionally copy the members as well

You can download the management pack and instructions on how to use the task from the TechNet Gallery:

http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/SCSM-Clone-User-Role-Task-8ba8ac58

Have fun

System Center 2012 Service Manager Cookbook

Dieter Gasser — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 23:20:00 +0000

After great efforts of writing and coordinating with my friends and the publisher, we finally made it: I am glad to announce the publication of the Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager Cookbook!

I would like to thank all co-authors for the great cooperation on this project:

Samuel Erskine
Steve Beaumont
Anders Asp
Andreas Baumgarten
and myself

Special thanks go to the publisher Packt and Sam Erskine for making this happen!

The book is available from the Packt website and Amazon:

Microsoft System Center Service Manager (SCSM) offers enterprises a complete, integrated platform for automating and adapting IT Service Management best practices to your organization’s requirements.

"Microsoft System Center Service Manager Cookbook" provides you with real-world, immediately usable recipes which will show you how to configure and administer System Center Service Manager 2012 and understand how to solve particular problems and scenarios to take this tool further..

In Microsoft System Center Service Manager Cookbook, you will get to grips with practical recipes which will show you how to configure and administer System Center Service Manager 2012. This cookbook features distinct recipes on the practical implementation of ITSM Frameworks and Processes, Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager Administration, how to configure Service Level Agreements (SLAs). It will also cover incident and problem management, the design of change and release management as well as implementing and editing security roles.

What you will learn from this book

The practical implementation of the ITSM Framework and Processes
How to Personalize SCSM 2012 Administration
Configuration of Service Level Agreements
How to build the Configuration Management Database
Change and Release Management Design
Advanced Personalization of SCSM
Automation of Service Manager 2012
Implementation of Security Roles

Approach

This book is written in practical cookbook style with plenty of vivid, practical recipes to help you master Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager. Each chapter contains step-by-step instructions about everything necessary to execute a particular task. The book is designed so that you can read it from start to end for beginners; or just open up any chapter and start following the recipes as a reference for advanced users.

Who this book is written for

This book will be useful to IT professionals including System Center Service Manager administrators who want to configure and administer System Center Service Manager 2012 and understand how to solve specific problems and scenarios that arise while using System Center Service Manager. It will also be useful to users of 2010 in learning new features and capabilities.

Moving the Resolve task out of the “Change Incident Status” group

Dieter Gasser — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 23:52:28 +0000

SCSM 2012 brought a lot of great new features, but there are some minor changes which I find annoying. One of these changes is the “Change Incident Status” task group which includes the “Resolve” task. I (and most of my customers) prefer this task to be in the root task list, as it used to be in SCSM 2010. Read this blog post to bring this task back to where it belongs.

In SCSM 2012, the “Resolve” task has been moved to the newly introduced “Change Incident Status” task group.

Following the procedures in this blog post to create a custom management pack allows you to also display this task in the root task list, where it used to be in SCSM 2010.

Just create a new XML file named “SIS.Incident.Resolve.Task.xml” and paste the below code in the file. Save it, and then import it into Service Manager. After restarting the console, you will find the “Resolve” task added to the root task list when one or multiple incidents are selected.

Management Pack XML:

http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" ContentReadable="true" SchemaVersion="2.0" OriginalSchemaVersion="1.1">


      SIS.Incident.Resolve.Task
      1.0.0.0

    SIS Incident Resolve Task


        System.Library
        7.5.8501.0
        31bf3856ad364e35


        Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.UI.Console
        7.5.1561.0
        31bf3856ad364e35


        System.WorkItem.Incident.Library
        7.5.1561.0
        31bf3856ad364e35


        ServiceManager.IncidentManagement.Library
        7.5.1561.0
        31bf3856ad364e35




      SIS.Incident.Resolve.Task
      1.0.0.0





        Console!SdkDataAccessAssembly
        Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.UI.SdkDataAccess.ConsoleTaskHandler

          Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.Incident.TaskHandlers
          Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.Incident.TaskHandlers.ResolveIncidentCommand










          SIS Incident Resolve Task


          Resolve
          Resolve the incident

Have fun!

Low Disk Space Incident Workflow

Dieter Gasser — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 22:50:00 +0000

The local C: partition running out of free space is a very common incident that Service Desk teams have to deal with. In this article, I am going to show you how you can use SCSM together with the SCCM connector to build a workflow which will automatically raise new incidents when the free space on the C: drive on any client computer in your CMDB goes below a certain capacity.

Let me start with a disclaimer: I know that the monitoring guys out there might laugh at this post, claiming that this is a job for a monitoring tool such as SCOM. However, I am writing this post as there are customers out there who do not have a monitoring solution in place for clients. If you have SCOM plus the necessary SCOM Client CALs, you are certainly better off implementing the actual monitoring with SCOM and then using the SCOM alert connector to SCSM to raise the incidents.

Prerequisites: You must have a working SCCM connector running in your environment. Furthermore, the SMLets must be installed on the SCSM Management Server (SCSM PowerShell Cmdlets).

Part of the hardware inventory in SCCM is the information about your computers’ disks, their capacity and the free space. This information is imported into the SCSM CMDB to the Logical Disk class, which is related to the computers. You can find this information under “Logical hard drives” on the “Hardware” tab of the Computer form.

Let us build a workflow which raises a new incident whenever the free space on any C: drive goes below 1GB.

Open the Authoring Tool and create a new Management Pack.
Add a workflow to the Management Pack and give it a name.
Choose “Run only when a database object meets specified conditions” as the trigger condition.
Choose “Logical Disk (concrete)” as the class, and “When an object of the selected class is updated” as the change event.
Under “Additional Criteria”, set Changed From to “Free Space is greater than or equal to 1000”, and set Changed To to “Free Space less than 1000” AND “Device Name equals C:”
Drag a “Windows PowerShell Script” Activity to the workflow and give it a name.
In the Details window, click “Script Body” to edit the PowerShell script.
First of all, we are going to need the ID of the logical disk which triggered the workflow as a parameter. So go to “Script Properties” and add a parameter called ID pointing to the “ID (Internal)” property.
Now, let us add the PowerShell script to the “Script Body”. You can copy the PowerShell code from further below in this post.
Save the Management Pack.
In the directory where you stored your Management Pack, locate the [WorkflowName].dll DLL file. Copy this file to the Service Manager program directory (normally C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012\Service Manager).
Now, import the Management Pack into SCSM and have fun with the workflow

PowerShell script:

set-executionpolicy -executionPolicy ByPass -force
$a = (get-module|%{$_.name}) -join " "
if(!$a.Contains("SMLets")){Import-Module SMLets -ErrorVariable err -force}

$class = Get-SCSMClass Microsoft.Windows.Computer$
$disk = Get-SCSMClass Microsoft.Windows.Peripheral.LogicalDisk$

$p = Get-SCSMObject -class $disk -filter "Id -eq $ID" | select principalname
$hostname = $p.principalname
$computer = Get-SCSMObject -class $class -filter "PrincipalName -eq $hostname"

New-SCSMIncident -Title "Low free disk space on C:" -Description "Drive C: of computer $hostname is running low on free disk space." -Impact Low -Urgency Low -Classification "Hardware" -AffectedCIs $computer

Remove-Module SMLets -Force

Authoring Management Packs using the System Center 2012 Visual Studio Authoring Extensions

Dieter Gasser — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 20:06:36 +0000

For those of you who often work with management pack XML code, the Visual Studio Authoring Extensions (VSAE) might be a useful solution. The following features are a selection of what VSAE adds to Visual Studio:

Management Pack project templates for SCSM and SCOM
Support for XML fragments containing different management pack elements
True XSD validation with IntelliSense
Automatic sealing and MP bundling as part of the build process
Automatic deployment of MPs to your management group

The Visual Studio Authoring Extensions for System Center 2012 can be downloaded from the following URL: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30169. As a prerequisite, you need Visual Studio 2010 Professional or higher installed on your computer.

Once VSAE has been installed, you will notice that new project templates are available in Visual Studio under the “Management Pack” node. We will start with creating a new solution named “Custom.SCSM.CI.Classes”.

I will now add a management pack fragment which defines a new class named “Custom.CI.PeripheralDevice”. Right-click the project in Solution Explorer, and select “Add” – “New Item”. We are going to use the “Class” fragment template for this task.

Visual Studio will now load a template which already contains a sample class definition and some comments. You will now need to adjust the code to define your class. Notice how Visual Studio automatically validates the schema and also supports IntelliSense.

Please make sure to also include the DisplayStrings for your class and the properties. My code looks something like this:

http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

Peripheral Device

ID

Type

Device Name

Description

Serial Number

Asset Number

Next, I am going to add another management pack fragment which defines an enumeration type for the “Type” property of my class. Right-click the project in Solution Explorer, and select “Add” – “New Item”. We are going to use the “Class” fragment template for this fragment as well.

Add the code to hold your enumeration type definition and the required DisplayStrings, such as the following:

http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

Peripheral Device Type

Monitor

Scanner

Before we build the solution, let’s take a look at the project properties and build options we have. Right-click the project in Solution Explorer, and click “Properties”.

Let’s first define the build options. I want my management pack to be sealed automatically as part of the build process, so let’s specify the corresponding options.

Also, I want Visual Studio to automatically deploy my management pack to Service Manager, so let’s add the Management Group Connection to the project and configure deployment options.

Now, let’s build our solution by pressing F6. When the management pack was built successfully, you can find your management pack in the “\bin\Debug” folder of your project. The management pack will be saved in XML, as a sealed management pack (.MP), and as a management pack bundle (.MPB).

Notice that VSAE also verifies your management pack as part of the build process. If an error is detected, the build process will be aborted, and you no longer have to import your management pack into Service Manager first before you find out that you made a typo.

Now, of course we do not want to manually import the management pack into Service Manager. We have configured deployment options, remember?

So let’s go back to Visual Studio and press F5.

Now, let us check the result in the Service Manager Console.

This is proof that the deployment process finished successfully… cool!

I hope that this example gave you an overview of how VSAE can be used to support your MP authoring process. Download and install the add-on today to discover its features and benefits!

Changing the default language of the SCSM 2012 Portal

Dieter Gasser — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 12:31:57 +0000

As you might be aware of, the SCSM 2012 Self-Service Portal is multi-language capable. However, although you can add languages to the portal, I haven’t found any documented steps as to how to change the default language (which is always set to English).

This blog post will walk you through the necessary steps to change the default language of the SCSM 2012 Self-Service Portal.

These instructions assume that you have already added additional languages to your portal by following Travis’ blog post:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2012/02/14/how-to-select-the-portal-language-in-scsm-2012.aspx

At the end of the blog post you will read: ”The default portal language will always be English, but users can still change the language to whatever language they want so long as the administrator has enabled it on the site”

By following the below instructions, you can change the default language to any other language, provided the corresponding SharePoint Language Pack has been installed.

DISCLAIMER: This articles contains instructions to modify the database. Please be aware that modifying the database is not supported by Microsoft.

First of all, go to Site Settings – Language Settings and ensure that no alternate languages are selected.

Now we will have to do some SQL magic to change the language. If you are running SharePoint on SQL Express, you might want to install SQL Server Management Studio Express from here.

Now, connect to your SharePoint content database. If you are using SQL Express and you didn’t make any changes during the installation of SharePoint, you should be able to connect to the SQL instance by using .\SHAREPOINT as the server name. The name of the content database will be Sharepoint_SMPortalContent, unless you defined it differently during setup.

Now, run the following query:

SELECT Id, FullUrl, [Language] FROM Webs

Note that the row which has a value in the FullUrl column (the value will be SMPortal unless you changed it during the installation) has the language set to 1033 which is the LCID for English (US).

Now do the following:

- Take the Id value of the row which has a value for the FullUrl column.
- Identify the LCID of the language you would like to set the portal’s default language to. You can find the LCID of the language you are looking for here.

Then run the following query against the database:

UPDATE Webs SET [Language] = [LCID] WHERE Id = ‘[ID]‘

Replace the highlighted placeholders with the corresponding values prior to executing the query.

In my scenario I wanted to change the language to German, so I ran the following query:

UPDATE Webs SET [Language] = 1031 WHERE Id = ’50FB47F8-CDC5-4AF6-B233-D28B9989FBE0′

The default language will now have changed. You can now go back to Site Settings – Language Settings and enable alternate languages if you want your users to be able to manually switch between languages.

Note: I have noticed that the System Account will always have the new default language, regardless of the selection in the menu. But for regular end users it works.

SCSM 2012 Upgrade: “[Group] is not a valid Active Directory group or user”

Dieter Gasser — Wed, 30 May 2012 13:18:00 +0000

Today I encountered a problem when I tried to upgrade one of my customer’s SCSM 2010 SP1 environment to SCSM 2012 RTM. The setup was aborted with the error message “[Group] is not a valid Active Directory group or user”. It took me quite a while to find the root cause of this problem, so I thought I will share it for those of you who run into the same issue.

Following the Microsoft documentation on TechNet I prepared the environment for being upgraded and then launched the Setup program on the Data Warehouse Management Server.

Before the setup menu was display, the process was aborted and the following error message was displayed:

I browsed the customer’s Active Directory and indeed didn’t find such a group. Talking to the system administrator, he told me that this group, which is actually the SCSM Management Group Administrators group, had been renamed.

So I browsed the whole registry and databases on the SM Management Servers and finally found the culprit. SCSM stores the Management Group Administrator group in the __MOMManagementGroupInfo__ table of the DWStagingAndConfig and ServiceManager databases.

So just edit this record and change the value of the MOMAdminGroup field to the new name of the Active Directory group in the following format: [Domain]\[Group]

Just right-click the table and choose Edit Top 200 Rows, then overwrite the old value with the new value.

After this change, I was able to upgrade the SCSM Data Warehouse Management Server.

Note: Don’t forget to also check the same table in the ServiceManager database and make the required changes before you do the upgrade of the SCSM Management Server.

I hope this is of any help for you out there