Thursday, April 16, 2009

Maintenance Mode - Top 3 of questions I get the most

Eventhough I blogged earlier about it, (found here) customers of mine ask many questions about it. So with this blogposting I hope to answer the top 3 of them.

Question 1
Suppose one puts a server into MM. During this time the server will be brought down. SCOM will still Alert on it. Why?

The answer is simple. Eventhough the server isn’t monitored during MM, the SCOM Agent on this server still is. So when a server will be brought down for maintenance and one doesn’t want to get any alerts for it, one has to put these three objects into MM:

- Server
- Health Service
- Health Service Watcher

Microsoft even wrote a KB article about it. To be found here.

A good script to put all these three objects into MM can be found here. It works fast and like a charm. With using the schedulerservice on the RMS (for instance) one can easily plan MM in advance.

Question 2
Tim McFadden has made a very good tool, called Maintenance Mode Scheduler 2.0. It can be found here.

Eventhough it works like a charm, many questions arise. The question I do get the most is why it doesn’t run always on Groups. Whenever I get this question I ask what the group is made off, or better, what kind of objects are populating this group?

This really matters since the underlying scripts only work for Computerobjects. So when a group is being populated with non-computerobjects like Health Service of particular servers or Distributed Applications, they will not be put into MM.

So this tool only works for Computerobjects. When one bears this in mind, no problems will arise.

Question 3
Can I put other objects into MM as well? For instance a WebApplication?

Yes, you can. There is a very nice script which just does that. This script can be scheduled as well, so it can be planned in advance. That script can be found here.

This script has been made by Tim McFadden as well. So all the credits go to him, not to me. All I have done is grouped some information about MM logically together. That’s all.

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