Hi,
Mark Manty Premier Field Engineer with Microsoft here with another example for System Center Operations Manager.
You might recall the previous example command line tool that would set maintenance mode for a list of servers in a text file. Today I have an updated example that built upon the existing tool.
You may find that you have many requests for scheduling down time for servers and would rather enable your customers to set their own maintenance mode times without logging into SCOM servers. With this new example you can provide customers with access to copy text file to a share with their list of servers and maintenance mode configuration to allow them to perform this on their own.
I ran this in a test environment and it does not have to run on a RMS or MS to work. It must meet the below requirements in order to run successfully:
- .NET 3.5 Framework
- SCOM R2 Console (User Interface installed) or SCOM 2012 Console (tested with SCOM 2012 SP1)
- Run under an account that has administrative rights to the SCOM Management Group
Extract the file MaintenanceModeListSched.exe from MaintenanceModeListSchedExample_V1.zip to a directory of your choice.
Open Administrative command prompt and edit a text file with the systems you want to put in maintenance mode.
Here I am typing out the text of three example files used to set maintenance mode for. Note the first line is date time in military time. 2nd line is ON or OFF indicating to turn on or off maintenance mode. 3rd line is number of minutes. 4th line is the maintenance mode reason. 5th through last line is the list of servers you want to set maintenance mode on.
Example1.mm is set to run at 4:00 pm or later. Example2.mm is set to run at
6:23 pm. And ExampleFail.mm has a miss-formatted date time field.
Run the maintenancemodelistsched.exe with no parameters to see what the command line tool expects for parameters.
Now run command passing in your RMS name, directory where maintenance mode text files will reside, and wildcard to the file names to process.
Example:
MaintenanceModeList.exe
SCOMRMS c:\Maintmodelistschedule *.txt
Note only the servers in example1 file were set, however the Management servers were not placed in maintenance mode by design.
See folders and results.txt file contents. Results are appended to this file every time it sets maintenance mode on servers specified in the files.
Screen shot below:
If a file is miss formatted it is moved to the Failed folder for your review.
Note that the file that was processed is moved to the Completed folder and renamed to add date time to ensure unique and allow you to know when this file was processed.
Event log error is created in the event of a date time parsing error. See event below:
Event log success informational event is raised for every file it processes successfully.
Event 100 is logged every time the tool is run. This could be used to monitor for missed event and alert to notify you when the scheduled task may be failing to execute the tool.
You can create scheduled tasks to run every 5, 10, or 15 minutes to set maintenance mode on the files in a folder of your choice. Then ensure you share out that folder to customers that will be using this process to schedule maintenance mode for their servers. As mentioned earlier you can monitor for events in the event log to alert you when issues occur.
This is an example tool that will enable your customers to schedule maintenance mode on servers without having to understand how to navigate SCOM and also without having to provide access to the SCOM console.
Disclaimer:
This example is provided “AS IS” with no warranty expressed or implied. Run
at your own risk. The opinions and views expressed in this blog are those of
the author and do not necessarily state or reflect those of Microsoft.