Xplat Xperts

Microsoft working with Xandros to manage NATO's heterogeneous systems across a large distributed network environment

I find it kind of ironic that my first blog post will actually be about someone else's blog post.  Before I get into the details I will provide a brief introduction.  My name is Morgan Holm and I am the Senior Product Marketing Manager for BridgeWays.  Before joining Xandros I was a Senior Product Manager with NetPro Computing managing several management solutions for security and compliance such as NetPro Directory Analyzer, Directory Troubleshooter, GPOADmin, LogADmin, ReportADmin and SelfServiceADmin among others.

The blog post I'm referring to is by Claudio Caldato, a Senior Program Manager in the Interoperability Technical Strategy team at Microsoft.  His post found here, goes into the work that Xandros with BridgeWays Management Packs and Microsoft did together creating a "Multi-Platform Systems Management Lab" in response to some members of the Interoperability Executive Customer Council and in particular NATO.  This work has been documented at Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA) and there is a white paper that further discusses the architecture and scenarios.

Architecture Image from IVA website

I am very excited to see the positive response to the BridgeWays management packs and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager solution especially considering our MPs were only in beta at the time.  We have now released our first wave of BridgeWays Management Packs for VMware, Oracle Database, MySQL, JBoss AS and Apache HTTP.  We are working on our next round of MPs that we will announce at TechEd EMEA in Berlin this fall.

Thanks,

Morgan

Validating and Troubleshooting Unix/Linux Providers

After discovering a Unix/Linux server and pushing down the appropriate providers, it's pretty common that we want make sure the provider is working.  It can take a while for initial application discoveries to complete once a provider has been installed, so for this post I'm going to talk about how you can verify that the providers are working outside of OpsMgr and the Management Packs. This can be done from either side of the fence, from the Management Server or directly on the discovered Unix/Linux machine. 

Unix/Linux Server

Let's start on the server to be monitored because we need to go and see what kind of information is available to be queried in the first place.

Connect to the server and go to /var/opt/microsoft/scx/lib/repository

What this is showing us, are the various namespaces registered on the server.

Now we start to use scxcimcli.  This is a command line tool that will allow us to call the CIM server directly and query information, if the query succeeds, then Operations Manager should be able to access all the data and we can be confident things are working (at least on the managed server side).

The first thing to do is a query to enumerate all available classes (this can be done for any namespace, I'm going to validate one of the BridgeWays management packs for the examples):
/opt/microsoft/scx/bin/tools/scxcimcli nc -n root/xsm

Now we know what is available, so we can actually query a class and see if relevant data comes back:
/opt/microsoft/scx/bin/tools/scxcimcli ei -n root/xsm XSM_MySQLServer

Uh oh, we have a problem here... the server doesn't have one of the dependencies installed or configured right.  We're unable to find the MySQL client libraries that are used to connect to the database and gather data.

Now what do we do?  We need to resolve the dependency issue. 

1. Use ldd to see if there is a single dependency issue, or more than one.  
2. Use find to see if the library is on the system, but not properly linked on the library load path  
3. Create a symbolic link using ls -n in an existing library path or update the path to include the location of the missing module.  You update the path on Linux by editing (using vim) /etc/ld.so.conf to include the path to the libraries and on Solaris you use the command crle.
4. Install the missing package (pkg for Solaris, rpm for Linux, etc) to provide the missing dependency.   
5. Restart scx using svcadmin -restart all 

For my example I am running on Solaris, so I will update the path to include the MySQL client libraries which are part of the SUN WebStack install.

Now when we run our query, we should succeed.. let's see what happens:

There we go, things are working.

The same series of steps are used when troubleshooting the agent or providers and once we have things working from the monitored server side, we can do a quick check on the management server to see if it is able to communicate with the CIM server.

Management Server

From the MS, we use winrm to talk to the Unix/Linux server.  From the cmd prompt run

winrm e "http://schemas.xandros.com/wbem/wscim/1/cim-schema/2/XSM_MySQLServer?__cimnamespace=root/xsm" -r:https://[server FQDN or IP]:1270 -u:[user name] -p:[password] -auth:basic -skipcacheck -skipcncheck -encoding:utf-8

will allow you to query the provider and ensure the management server should be able to get data.  If this succeeds but nothing is showing up in Operations Manager take a look at the Alert view.  Chances are there's an issue with either the Unix Action profile RunAs account having invalid credentials set (or none at all) or the certificate is invalid (perhaps you recently changed the hostname).

OpsMgr and Cross Plat - Getting Started

Being my first post, it makes sense that I give a brief introduction.  My name is Michael Guthrie and I'm a recovering Spotlight user... actually user may be a bit of an undersell, I was the lead developer for Spotlight on Active Directory and Spotlight on Messaging - OCS Plug-in.  I left Quest to join a smaller company, Xandros who is working closely with Microsoft to bring a series of new products to market that leverage the new cross platform functionality available in Operations Manager R2.  Today I'm a Senior Program Manager with BridgeWays, a  division of Xandros, responsible for defining (and refining) the functionality that you can find in the management packs we write.

A common question I come across from OpsMgr administrators is "what do I need to know to start working with Unix/Linux machines?". For most, they've been working with Windows servers for years and know their way around OpsMgr but now that R2 is available they are being tasked with bringing the Unix/Linux servers into OpsMgr as well.  The purpose of this post is to pass on some tips that will help make that initial discovery of Unix/Linux systems go as smoothly as possible.

1. Resolving the Host name: You need to be able to resolve the hostname of the Unix/Linux server so that the certificate checks will pass.  There is a major gothcha when doing this, the names need to be exactly the same from your DNS (or Host file) lookup on the management server to the name reported when using the hostname command on the server to be monitored.  If they differ, for example you simply add a Linux server to your DNS server and the DNS entry is MyLinuxServer.corporate but the hostname command returns MyLinuxServer the certificate signing will fail because the common name will not match what the MS is looking for. To find the ipaddress for the Unix/Linux host use ifconfig -a
2. Update WinRM: Cross platform support requires that user accounts and passwords be passed from the MS to the monitored server.  In for this to work, you need to be able to use basic authentication with WinRM.  Have no fear, the data is transmitted securely, but the agents need to be able to access the username/password to create execution threads that will load the providers that collect the metrics.  To enable Basic Authentication you need to run the command winrm set winrm/config/client/auth @{Basic="true"} on the Management Server.
3. Super User password: To do the installation of the agent you can use a non-super user account, this is a common requirement because root is typically not given the rights to log in through SSH, but you will still have to provide a super user password.  During installation the scripts will execute an su - command for part of the install and they need an appropriate password.
4. Discover the server: You now have all the pieces you need to successfully discover a Unix/Linux server, so go ahead and do so.  You can use the IP address or the Host name to find the server, then install the agent and get the server into your Unix/Linux inventory.
5. Unix Action Account and Unix Privileged Account: Once discovery is done, you still have one more step to do.  It's not uncommon for people to discover a Unix/Linux server and patiently wait for the server to become "monitored" but it stays "unmonitored".  This is typically because they forgot to set up the Unix Action and/or Privileged Accounts.  To do this, you go to the authoring tab and double click the Unix Action Account, create a new RunAs account that will be used to gather the metrics, ensure it is created as a Basic Authentication account and then associate the account to the appropriate server.  Repeat this with a privileged account which is sometimes required by the MPs to access things like log files.

With that done, your Unix/Linux machine should now be monitored.

Welcome to the Xplat Xperts web blog

First - we should introduce ourselves. Xplat Xperts is authored by three members of the team at BridgeWays, a division of Xandros, Inc.

• Rob Doucette - Software Development Manager
• Morgan  Holm - Senior Product Marketing Manager
• Michael Guthrie  - Senior Program Manager

Over the past 2 years, we put together a team of developers and have been working with Microsoft to roll out a family of cross platform application based management packs for System Center Operations Manager.  Back when Microsoft was just getting underway with OpsMgr R2 they approached Xandros to be one of the partners who would build out application based management packs.  To date, we have built management packs for Oracle DB, MySQL DB, JBoss AS, Apache HTTP and VMware ESX that monitor the applications whether they run on Windows, Linux or UNIX.SLES, RHEL, Solaris, etc. 

We decided to start up this blog to share the information and knowledge we've collected over our time while working on our management packs.  We will be sharing information that is suitable for novices and experts alike, such as:

• What do you need to know to start working with cross plat MPs?
• How do you recover from discovery errors?
• How do you debug the MPs and cross plat agents?
• How do you customize MPs and what should you look out for when building your own MP?
• How can you get more out of the cross plat agents?

Our team has been working with R2 for quite a while, and we thought others would find it helpful for us to share the lessons we've learned with the community.  We hope that you can find some helpful information amongst the posts.

Regards,

Xplat Xperts