Inside Microsoft® Operations Manager

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by Randy Roffey

One of the big changes in Operations Manager 2007 is the introduction of a sealed Management Pack (MP). A sealed MP is a special MP that does not allow its contents to be modified or customized by the OpsMgr administrator. Instead certain objects within the MP can be customized by using a special OpsMgr object called an override.

Overrides are used to change various settings within a sealed MP. There are 2 types of overrides: property overrides and configuration overrides. Nothing special needs to be defined to allow the creation of a property override. All Rules have an Enabled property which can be overridden by a user to enable or disable the rule from being run for a specific target. Discoveries, Monitors and other MP elements also have an Enabled property. Monitors have an Enabled property, as well as other property overrides such as GenerateAlert, AlertPriority and AlertSeverity which control and affect the alerts generated by the monitor.

Configuration overrides on the other hand can only be made to items which the MP author has defined as being configurable or capable of being overridden. For example, an author can define a rule to sample the percentage of CPU utilization and make the sampling frequency for the rule an overrideable or configurable parameter. When they do this, they allow others to create an override to change the original frequency when the rule is run for them.
 

There are a number of benefits to this new override structure but also some considerations on how to properly manage overrides. Since MP customizations are now maintained separately from the base sealed MP, upgrading the base MP should be more straight forward and all customizations should be maintained. Since the contents of sealed MPs will not change, Microsoft has allowed sealed MP objects to be referenced by objects within other MPs. For example, a module defined in one MP can be referenced by a rule or monitor in another MP. This reference structure should reduce duplication of objects and libraries within the set of MPs in use within a Management Group.

Because of the importance of overrides, they will need to be managed in an appropriate way. By default, all overrides are stored in the Default Management Pack (Microsoft.SystemCenter.OperationsManager.DefaultUser) and determining which overrides apply to which target can be a challenge. An approach that is being used by some organizations is to store overrides for each sealed MP in a separate MP. For example, all overrides for the Microsoft Exchange MP would be stored in a Microsoft Exchange Override MP. Tracking the creation and editing of overrides is also important for compliance and audit tracking so proper change management principles should be applied. This should include a number of details about the change including who made the change, why it was made and the expected impact. Tuning an MP will also involve creating overrides so again it will be important to leverage change management principles.

Silect Software's MP Studio 2007 can help in  many areas of override management. MP Studio provides some great reports on overrides including which overrides have been created for an MP, a target or even for an entire Management Group. MP Studio also allows override creation, editing and deletion and when the capabilities are used in conjunction with the MP Studio version control database, details on all changes including who made the change and why can be captured and stored for future reference. To learn more about MP Studio attend one of my weekly web seminars and I can show you how to take advantage of the product's override management capabilities.