Taking the mystery out of SCOM 2007 Discoveries

  • Article

Some of the most common questions we get in the Operations Manager 2007 authoring world are about discovery.  Given the different kinds of discoveries available, the specific requirements you need to adhere to in configuring the discovery data, and the fact that the discovery process spans the agent to the management server to the database, there are a significant number of details to consider.

To help with this situation, I just put a sample management pack with a variety of different types of discovery samples in our OpsManJam MP library.  This includes the following sample discoveries:

  • Registry discovery
  • WMI discovery
  • Script discovery
  • Script discovery for unhosted object that includes managing the object on the agent instead of the RMS
  • Script discovery for containment relationship
  • Registry discovery for containment relationship
  • Group population for a group
  • Group population for a computer group
  • Group population for a distributed application

Unlike the other sample management packs that we have in the library, I’m planning on possibly updating this one as we come up with new discovery samples.  Please let us know at mpauthor@microsoft.com if there are other scenarios that you would like to see covered.

To support these concepts, I’ll be creating a series of videos on discovery in the System Center Library videos.  These will use the discoveries in the sample management pack walking through their creation and covering background concepts.  The current titles I have planned for this series are as follows.  It will take some time to get these all built, but I’ll put each out as it is completed.

  • How discovery works
  • Registry discoveries
  • WMI discoveries
  • Discovery scripts
  • Discovering relationships
  • Discovering unhosted objects