System Center Operations Manager Assessment on Operations Management Suite – Public Preview!

Are you worried about the health of your Operations Manager environment? Looking for a tool that can help keep Operations Manager up-to-date and run efficiently?

We present you the System Center Operations Manager Assessment solution that assesses the risk and health of your System Center Operations Manager Server environments. This solution is available to all 2012 SP1 and 2012 R2 Operations Manager users on Operations Management Suite (OMS) for free!

Solution Description

System Center Operations Manager Assessment solution on OMS assesses your Operations Manager environment against best practices that were collected over the years from Microsoft Knowledge Base articles and field engineers across multiple environments, industries and scenarios. This solution provides a health check and risk assessment of the Operations Manager environment and recommendations to fix the issues identified.

Installing and Configuring the solution

Use the following information to install and configure the solution

• Before you can use an assessment solution in OMS, you must have the solution installed. To read more about installing solutions, see Add Log Analytics solutions from the Solutions Gallery.
• Configure the System Center Operations Manager Assessment rule
• Set the Run As account for System Center Operations Manager Assessment

Configure the System Center Operations Manager Assessment rule

System Center Operations Manager Assessment Solution’s Management Pack consists of a rule by name “Microsoft System Center Advisor SCOM Assessment Run Assessment Rule”. This rule is responsible for the run of the assessment. To enable the rule and configure the frequency, follow the steps below.

Enable the assessment to run

By default, “Microsoft System Center Advisor SCOM Assessment Run Assessment Rule” rule is in disabled state. To run the assessment, this rule has to be enabled against a Management Server. To do this, follow the steps below:

• Enable the rule for a specific Management Server
  • In the Authoring workspace of the Ops Manager console, search for the Rule “Microsoft System Center Advisor SCOM Assessment Run Assessment Rule” in Rules pane
  • From the search results appeared, select the one with “Type: Management Server”
  • Right click on the above selected rule and click on Overrides  For a specific object of class: Management Server
  • Select the Management Server that this rule should execute on from the available Management servers
  • Make sure to change the property value of Enable to “True” as in the screenshot shown below:

While still in this window, to configure the frequency of the run, follow the steps below

Configure the frequency of the run

The assessment is configured to run 10080 minutes (or 7 days), the default interval. This interval can be overridden to a value of at least 1440 minutes (or 1 day). This value represents the minimum time gap required between successive assessment runs. To override the interval, follow the steps below:

• Override the interval of the assessment run
  • In the Authoring workspace of the Ops Manager console, search for the Rule “Microsoft System Center Advisor SCOM Assessment Run Assessment Rule” in Rules pane
  • From the search results appeared, select the one with “Type: Management Server”
  • Right click on the above selected rule and click on “Override the Rule  For all objects of class: Management Server”
  • Change the parameter value of Interval to the desired interval value.
    In the screenshot below, this value is set to 1440 minutes i.e. 1 day
    
  • Note that if the value is set to less than 1440 minutes, then the rule runs at a one day interval i.e. the rule ignores this interval value and runs at a frequency of 1 day

Set the Run As account for System Center Operations Manager Assessment

OMS builds upon management packs for workloads to provide value-add services. Each workload requires workload-specific privileges to run management packs in a different security context, such as a domain account. You need to provide credential information by configuring an Operations Manager Run As account.

Use the following information to set the Operations Manager run-as account for System Center Operations Manager Assessment.

• In the Operations Manager Console, go to the Administrations tab
• Under the Run As Configuration, click Accounts
• Create the Run As Account, following through the Wizard, creating a Windows account. The account to be used is the one identified and having all the prerequisites below
  • A domain account member of the local Administrators group on all servers in the environment (All Operations Manager Roles – Management Server, OpsMgr Database, Data Warehouse, Reporting, Web Console, Gateway)
  • Operation Manager Administrator Role for the management group being assessed
  • Execute the script to grant granular permissions to the account on SQL instance used by Operations Manager.
    Note: If this account has sysadmin rights already, then skip the script execution.
• Under Distribution Security, select More secure
• Specify the Management Server on which this account will be distributed
• Go back to the Run As Configuration and click Profiles
• Search for the System Center Operations Manager Assessment Profile
• The profile name should be, “Microsoft System Center Advisor SCOM Assessment Run As Profile”
• Right click and update its properties, and add the recently created Run As Account we just created in step 3

 SQL Script to grant granular permissions to the Run As account

Execute below script to grant required permissions to the Run As account on the SQL Instance used by Operations Manager

-- Replace <UserName> with the actual user name being used as Run As Account.
 USE master

-- Create login for the user, comment this line if login is already created.
 CREATE LOGIN [UserName] FROM WINDOWS

--GRANT permissions to user.
 GRANT VIEW SERVER STATE TO [UserName]
 GRANT VIEW ANY DEFINITION TO [UserName]
 GRANT VIEW ANY DATABASE TO [UserName]

-- Add database user for all the databases on SQL Server Instance, this is required for connecting to individual databases.
 -- NOTE: This command must be run anytime new databases are added to SQL Server instances.
 EXEC sp_msforeachdb N'USE [?]; CREATE USER [UserName] FOR LOGIN [UserName];'

Use msdb
 GRANT SELECT To [UserName]
 Go

--Give SELECT permission on all Operations Manager related Databases
 --Replace the Operations Manager database name with the one in your environment
 Use [OperationsManager];
 GRANT SELECT To [UserName]
 GO

--Replace the Operations Manager DatawareHouse database name with the one in your environment
 Use [OperationsManagerDW];
 GRANT SELECT To [UserName]
 GO

--Replace the Operations Manager Audit Collection database name with the one in your environment
 Use [OperationsManagerAC];
 GRANT SELECT To [UserName]
 GO

--Give db_owner on [OperationsManager] DB
 --Replace the Operations Manager database name with the one in your environment
 USE [OperationsManager]
 GO

ALTER ROLE [db_owner] ADD MEMBER [UserName]
 GO

Solution Details

After a successful assessment of the Operations Manager environment, recommendations are generated. Users can view these recommendations in their OMS workspace by clicking the System Center Operations Manager Assessment tile.

Each recommendation has a weightage assigned based on probability of occurrence, impact if occurred and effort required to fix. This will guide the user to prioritize the recommendations to act on.

Clicking on any of the recommendations, will open a new screen with details such as description of the issue, suggested actions, affected objects etc.

Next Steps

Try this solution today on your Operations Manager environment and we would love to hear your feedback on this.
Get started with Operations Management Suite and activate your free account

How to share feedback?

User Voice : To suggest any improvements/ideas on this solution, visit the SCOM UserVoice page
Email: Tell us at scompm@microsoft.com
OMS Forums: Good general discussion of OMS.  Visit the OMS Forums.