Boris’s OpsMgr Tools – Updated

Over the years, Boris has released a set of phenomenal tools, that saved lives of OpsMgr administrators quite some time in performing common OpsMgr tasks in OpsMgr 2007 and 2007 R2..

The sad news is that Boris has moved to another team within Microsoft. He has made a tremendous contribution over the years to the OpsMgr product, and I am sure he will rock on into his new role and team. At the same time he will be missed.

In order to not let those tools go to waste, since I know many people use them, I have asked him to give me the code of his tools and allow me to update and maintain those tools going forward. And so I did: I updated a couple of his tools to work with OpsMgr 2012. I made a few bug fixes and revisions while I was working on OpsMgr (and even afterwards) – below you can find links to the latest pre-compiled binaries; but eventually I got too busy with Operations Management Suite and don’t have a lot of time for those anymore. So therefore I decided to gift the source code on GitHub as sample that the community might be able to fork and improve upon – links to that also in the table below.

All the above tools require the Operations Manager Console being installed on the machine where you run them, as well as the .NET framework 4.0.

According to my information, the above four tools were the most used/useful. Feel free to comment if need any other one being updated and/or have bug reports or feature requests – albeit I don’t promise I will be able to fix or update everything

Disclaimer

Just like their predecessors, it is necessary to make clear that this posting and everything included (such as use of included utilities) is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Changelog / Updates

[Updated on March 8th 2012 with MPViewer 1.9.1 that contains a fix for the Excel export of some MPs]

[Updated on March 15th 2012 with MPViewer 2.0 that now allows you to Unseal/Unpack MPs and MPBundles]

[Updated on March 21st 2012 with OverrideExplorer 3.5 which now allows to export Overrides to Excel]

[Updated on July 19th 2012 with MPViewer 2.1 that now shows the PublicKeyToken for referernces/dependencies]

[Updated on August 29th 2012 with MPViewer 2.1.2 that contains fixes to show Perf Objects, Counters and Frequency for some more modules]

[Updated on September 29th 2012 with MPViewer 2.2 that contains cosmetic as well as reliability/responsiveness fixes]

[Updated on October 3rd 2012 with MPViewer 2.2.1 that contains a fix for a crash when opening Unsealed MPs]

[Updated on November 20th 2012 with OverrideExplorer 3.6 that contains a fix for the “change target” operation that was creating broken overrides when changing target from a group to another group]

[Updated on April 26th 2013 with MPViewer 2.2.2 that contains a fix for some rules in the IIS MP that were incorrectly being reported as not generating alerts, and another fix for the "unseal/unbundle" menu item that sometimes was not being enabled]

[Updated on May 9th 2013 with MPViewer 2.3 that now can also handle MP Bundles that contain multiple ManagementPacks in a single bundle]

[Updated on May 14th 2013 with OverrideCreator 1.5 – first working version for OpsMgr 2012]

[Updated on November 23rd 2013 with OverrideExplorer 3.7 - now includes Unix computers in the computers view]

[Updated on February 17th 2014 with MPViewer 2.3.2 - now shows (most) event ID's and Event Sources for Event Rules]

[Updated on March 21st 2014 with MPViewer 2.3.3 - now allows both HTML and XLS export in bulk thru command line - more info in the comment thread below]

[Updated on July 9th 2015 with link to OverrideExplorer’s and MPViewer’s source code now on GitHub]

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 26, 2012
  Thanks Daniele!!

• Anonymous
  March 07, 2012
  Daniele, just one thing: as in the previous version too, the new MPViewer is not able to export the recent Exchange 2010 MP to XLS. Any chance to fix this? Thanks, Patrick

• Anonymous
  March 08, 2012
  Patrick - I did not do extensive testing with all possible MPs out there, and I was not aware of this - I will take a look and try to reproduce it.

• Anonymous
  March 08, 2012
  Patrick, I did a quick fix and updated the tool to 1.9.1. Let me know if it does not work.

• Anonymous
  April 01, 2012
  Thanks for the updates Daniele..

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2012
  Does this require the 2012 console?  I am running them on a workstation with the 2007 R2 console and I get an exception: "System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager, Version=7.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified."

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2012
  Steve - yes it does. For 2007R2 you can keep using the old Boris's versions.

• Anonymous
  April 29, 2012
  Thanks for the new versions Daniele. Are you able to invetigate a bug that I have in OverrideExplorer 3.3 for SCOM 2007 R2 please? The program opens normally, the progress bar completes and then you can see the treeview start to populate for the type based view but then I get the following .NET error: ==== Unhandled exception has occurred in your application. If you click Continue, the application will ignore this error and attempt to continue. If you click Quit, the application will close immediately. Parameter is not valid. ==== There's a full debug included if I click the Details button. If I click Continue, the type based view works normally, but the computers based view is completely empty. I've tried this from a few different workstations and also directly from the SCOM Management/RMS servers - all give me the same error. Thanks for your help. Mark

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 06, 2012
  Good stuff

• Anonymous
  August 07, 2012
  Just another note of appreciation, Daniele.  Good work and many thanks.

• Anonymous
  August 07, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 28, 2012
  Fantastic!  Thanks for a timely update to mpviewer.  I saw this many months ago, but haven't needed it until now and I can say it works like a charm.

• Anonymous
  August 28, 2012
  Jonathan - I use MPViewer daily myself. I updated it because I needed it, and I think other people need it too. I hope you like the new features too :-)

• Anonymous
  August 28, 2012
  I'm a little bit sad that it doesn't work fully for network monitoring management packs.  Specifically, the performance monitors and collection rules will not extract counters and frequency.  Would this be difficult to add?

• Anonymous
  August 28, 2012
  Jonathan - network monitoring uses a whole lot of new (composite, and managed) modules that do calculations, aggregations, and other interesting things. MPViewer only extracts those values (thresholds etc) in well-known modules... I didn't (yet) change anything there, but it should be definitely possible to add some of those new types. It's good feedback. I'll give it a try.

• Anonymous
  August 29, 2012
  Jonathan - I added some of that, even if not all modules produce fake counters (some just pull individual OIDs, but don’t map them to Object/Counter, so I can’t consistently pull those out – only when they are mapped. I also did a fix to improve the “Frequency” and pull it also when it is called “Interval” (which seems to be the preferred name in more modern MPs, for some reason...), and I also added a set of modules that are used for XPlat rules/monitors while I was there. I updated the attachment with version 2.1.2 that contains these fixes.

• Anonymous
  September 04, 2012
  Thanks, Daniele. I should have been checking here more frequently. I will take a look today!

• Anonymous
  September 26, 2012
  Thanks for the updated tools. BTW. The new SCOM 2012 documentation points to Boris' blog. Someone should update the documentation to point here.

• Anonymous
  October 12, 2012
  Thank you Dan - I asked the right folks to update the link on technet.microsoft.com/.../hh212732.aspx

• Anonymous
  November 05, 2012
  The exception is: Error MPInfra_p_ManagementPackInstall. Error validation element OverrideForMonitor.... << Error de la base de datos. Error de MPInfra_p_ManagementPackInstall con la excepción: Error al validar el elemento: OverrideForMonitorMicrosoftWindowsServer2008OperatingSystemMemoryAvailableMBytesForContextMicrosoftWindowsOperatingSystem85cc77f60545466cb2d265f1b4a7ec14 >>

• Anonymous
  November 08, 2012
  I am Italian so I can understand some Spanish, but a full call stack would help, along with the precise steps to reproduce the error in a clean environment. Thanks,

• Anonymous
  December 28, 2012
  Danielle (or anyone), I am hopeful you can help me with this. I am wondering if this has to be ran from the Management Server, or if it can be run from a desktop with the console installed.  When I try to run from my workstation, and I connect to the management Server, I get a "Unhandled exception" error: "Unhandeld exception has occured in your application. If you click Continue, the application will ignore this error and attempt to continue. If you click Quit, the applciation will close immediately. Object reference not set to an instance of an object" When I click "continue", nothing happens, just an empty screen (it loads, nothing populates). I have a whole mess of info from the details area, it all looks like this, but with different assembly versions and "CodeBase: file:" lines:System.Xml    Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0    Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.5420 (Win7SP1.050727-5400)    CodeBase: file:///C:/WINDOWS/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Xml/2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.Xml.dll

• Anonymous
  December 29, 2012
  Vyndel, I assume this is Override Explorer? You can only use it from a machine that has the Operations Console installed - it does not have to be run on the server. The version of the console should be the same one you have on the server (i.e. cumulative updates, service packs...), anyhow - and this version only works with System Center 2012, not 2007R2.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2013
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 04, 2013
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 04, 2013
  Vyndel, I think that means that the worker thread was not able to retrieve the list of overrides, so it is returning a NULL object to the UI thread and therefore fails to populate the Tree View. It is possible, as you say, that this is a permission problem - but I have never tried this with restricted user roles so I don't know for sure - especially scoped down to specific groups... I'll see if I manage to reproduce this in my lab and debug this behavior - but I believe you would need to be able to enumerate ALL CLASSES/TARGETs, and their overrides, as well as the rules/monitors/discoveries that those overrides are applied to...

• Anonymous
  January 24, 2013
  Thank you so much Daniele and Boris for the tools, always a big help in accomplishing these time consuming tasks. A quick question- any plan on releasing Override Creator for SCOM 2012? Kapil Dham

• Anonymous
  January 24, 2013
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 21, 2013
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 21, 2013
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 14, 2013
  Ok, guys - I gave in to all the comments, and also posted OverrideCreator. Enjoy!

• Anonymous
  September 03, 2013
  Daniele - Boris originally documented a switch MPViewer.exe c:Microsoft.Windows.Server.2003.mp c:win2003.html AlertGeneratingWorkflowsOnly Do you have a list of all switches that are valid?

• Anonymous
  September 03, 2013
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 19, 2013
  thanks Daniele! these are great tools!

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2013
  Does Overrides Explorer 3.6 report on Linux servers?  I'm looking at it for the first time.  I see all the Windows servers in the Computers based view, but I don't see a single one of our Linux servers that are being monitored. Thanks.

• Anonymous
  November 23, 2013
  Cathy - OverrideExplorer currently it only looks at Windows computers in the "computer view". But it's good feedback about wanting to see the Unix computers too - I'll look into what it takes to enable that. For now you can find those overrides in the 'Type view' as opposed to the 'computer view'.

• Anonymous
  November 23, 2013
  @Cathy - it turns out it was a minor set of changes to enable Unix computers to show as well. I updated the post with version 3.7 which now does this. I have done very limited testing at this point, since I only have ONE Linux machine in my test environment, but it seems to work.

• Anonymous
  December 16, 2013
  MPviewer 1.7 and 2.3 unable to read xml mp (saved in scom2007health service statemanagement packs)... version 1.7 keeps refering to JIT... I am running scom 2007 on windows 2k8 std Any hint on why it is behaving like that ? Thanks

• Anonymous
  January 02, 2014
  @Marie-anne, from what you write, I see you are trying to read MPs from the health service temporary folder? Why? Those 'MPs' in the folder are not really 'human-friendly': those are supposed to be consumed by the AGENT runtime. MPViewer won't open THOSE because they are not meant to be read that way. Those MPs are not 'importable' at the SDK layer, and in those 'MPs' all sort of things are strange: a lot of IDs in those files have been changed and resolved/replaced with GUIDs; the MPs think they are 'sealed' but appear in XML/unsealed format, etc... MPViewer WILL only open MPs (both sealed and unsealed) that CAN be consumed by the SDK layer --> it will consume MPs that could be IMPORTED in the system. Those in the agent's temporary folder are not importable. Also note that I don't maintain MPViewer 1.7, just the 2.x version that works with 2012 - mostly to avoid myself the hurdle of having to have multiple environments to compile the tool against the 2007 OR the 2012 assemblies, and because some of the fixes I made later are not backwards-compatible. 2.x requires you to have .NET 4.0 or above and the OpsMgr 2012 Console installed.

• Anonymous
  February 11, 2014
  Great tools, thanks very much. For the latest MPViewer, I notice that it provides columns for Event ID.  The column populates when looking at any MP that I've created, but if I look, for example, at a Windows MP, the Event ID and Source columns remain blank for all rules whether the MP is sealed or not.  I know the Event IDs are there, and I can search the XML to find them, but I'm wondering why they don't show up in MPViewer.  Apologies if this is some basic thing I'm missing. Thanks again!

• Anonymous
  February 12, 2014
  John Austin - the complexity with MPs is that there isn't a SINGLE a definitive place where you can find all the thresholds.... MP elements are like LEGO bricks, and you can re-combine them in infinite ways. It's not rocket science... there's quite a lot of logic in MPViewer to deal specifically with the most common monitor types, but not all of them. The rules/monitors you are after, are probably using custom monitor/module types defined in the MP itself and the application doesn't know where to look in that XML, because they likely employ a combination of multiple data sources (i.e. events from multiple logs, repeated events, scripts, etc). If you can point me at a couple such examples (=exact MP, version and Rule Name) I can take a look.

• Anonymous
  February 12, 2014
  Thanks, Daniele.  Quick background: We've been provided a long list of event IDs to monitor for in Windows, and want to find out whether or not some of them already exist in the default MP. For example, the "NTFS - File System Corrupt Properties" rule in the Windows 2008 Monitoring MP is a fairly basic Event ID rule that looks for source "DISK" or "Ntfs" and ID 41 or 55.  I'm guessing that maybe the MPViewer can't show that info because it's got the ORs in there and the viewer only allows for a single ID and a single source?

• Anonymous
  February 12, 2014
  John Austin - I just took a quick look at the code, and you are right: even for EVENT Rules specifically, the current implementation is only meant to support the scenario where the workflow is looking at a single event ID from a particular source. In all other scenarios, the info will not be populated. I'd have to see if I can extend that, but I am not sure when I'll have time to try to do it.

• Anonymous
  February 12, 2014
  Geez, Daniele, what am I paying you for?  ;) I can use the xml to find what I'm looking for.  Thank you!

• Anonymous
  February 17, 2014
  John Austin - give it a try again - I refactored/rewrote some of those functions in 2.3.2 for RULEs (not monitors yet). It shows Event ID's in a crude form (semicolon;delimited if more than one, or the 'raw' regexp) but it's readable, I think.

• Anonymous
  February 21, 2014
  Excellent!  Exactly what was needed.  Definitely readable, and very useful.  Thank you!

• Anonymous
  February 26, 2014
  In the next revision can u make it so we can move columns?  Keep up the good work.  Love this tool -- use it almost everyday and it is the top tool I have my customers use.

• Anonymous
  February 27, 2014
  I am glad you love this tool and find it useful. Anyhow, allowing columns to move sounds like a MAJOR code change, to be honest, for how that grid is implemented today... so I am not promising anything :)

• Anonymous
  March 18, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 21, 2014
  Andrew - just posted MPViewer 2.3.3 where I enabled this. Syntax is just like before, just use .xls extension as opposed to .html for the output file, and the program will export as excel. The 'AlertGeneratingWorkflowsOnly' switch only works for HTML export and gets ignored for XLS. Syntax examples: MPViewer.exe c:Microsoft.Windows.Server.2003.mp c:win2003.html AlertGeneratingWorkflowsOnly MPViewer.exe c:Microsoft.Windows.Server.2003.mp c:win2003.html MPViewer.exe c:Microsoft.Windows.Server.2003.mp c:win2003.xls

• Anonymous
  April 11, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 11, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 15, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 16, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 22, 2014
  Hi Daniele, is there a way to help, or to create a debug log? I think, i cannot open an case :-D

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2014
  @c.heuff there isn't any logging in the tool right now, and adding that across the board would need some large work to do it properly. It might be possible to understand what's going on with a user-mode dump or IntelliTrace file, but neither is really easy to set up. I have a few ideas of a couple of places where this might be breaking, but I'd need more details from you to validate... if you ping me thru the contact form 'email blog author', you can specify your email in there and I can reach out to you. Yes, these are not supported nor official tools, I just maintain them in my free time.

• Anonymous
  May 07, 2014
  Hi Daniele,          thanks for updating the tools for SCOM 2012, we are reviewing the Thresholds for the management packs and it shows in the XML view of MPViewer, but when I export this column is not available? Is this by design or just missing in this release?

• Anonymous
  May 07, 2014
  @Rick, the excel export only considers what has been parsed out and displayed in the grid. The Raw XML view is there for convenience, because management packs don't have a FIXED 'PLACE' for thresholds (or anything other configuration parameter for that matter)... management pack authors create new modules, compose them, and those parameters are not always in the same spot... the tool has a (growing over time) coded list of some of the most common patterns and modules. Thresholds in particular don't have a generalized pattern... some monitors have one threshold and two states, some have the thresholds and three states, some have consecutive samples (where the threshold needs to be breached for multiple times in a row)... and in many of those cases, just a threshold might not explain enough... anyway, I will have to look what it would take to add some even very basic extraction of thresholds when I have some time.

• Anonymous
  June 03, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2014
  Very neat tools, thanks for keeping them alive and updated!

• Anonymous
  September 20, 2014
  Daniele - leave that update for an upcoming winter weekend :)

• Anonymous
  September 20, 2014
  Yeah @Jonathan I hear you... some weekend in the future ;-) I have been quite busy with Advisor!

• Anonymous
  November 11, 2014
  Daniele... Please add a means to view RunAS (secure reference) profiles in your next update... Awesome tool... recommend it all the time...  It is a must have for SCOM.

• Anonymous
  December 02, 2014
  Thanks Daniele for updating this great tool! Regards Jure

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2015
  Excellent tool. Any way to export to excel that will include the computer names. Like the Computer base view? thanks again Mike

• Anonymous
  April 22, 2015
  New Feature Request (2) (1)  Show RunAs Profiles (2) Azure Monitoring -- when Azure monitoring is created and then loaded in MPViewer -- we do not see the monitoring that was assigned

• Anonymous
  May 04, 2015
  Thanks, but the MP Viewer tool does not grab the counter, object and instance details of performance rules. Can you fix that?

• Anonymous
  May 11, 2015
  The tool MPviewer does't work on SCOM2012R2 console installed on Server 2012 R2. It works fine on Server 2008 R2. Are there planes updating it?

• Anonymous
  May 18, 2015
  Sorry guys, I just moderated the comments for the last few months - I have been really heads down with Azure Operational Insights (now a part of Operations Management Suite - learn more at http://microsoft.com/OMS ) for the last couple of yearss, and have not really been coding much with regards to these tools nor have I used OpsMgr per se much. I'll see what I can do...