News on the forthcoming re-release of the Microsoft Availability Reporting Management Pack

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As we near a re-release of the Availability Reporting MP for MOM, I wanted to take this opportunity to discuss some of the fixes that have taken place, and unfortunately some that will not be addressed in this version. We are on currently on schedule for re-release of the MP on or before 31st of this month.

The forthcoming release will address:

  • Fix to prevent the ReliabilityAnalysisReporting (MRASLoader) executing at the same time as the SystemCenterDTSPackageTask. This was the cause of numerous PSS calls where the MRASLoader would never complete or took many hours/days to complete.
  • Fix to decrease MRASLoader processing time. This solves an issue where data awaiting processing after previous execution of the SystemCenterDTSPackage task could take an extended period of time and SQL Server CPU cycles.
  • Fix to correct event collection rule criteria as documented in https://support.microsoft.com/?id=918119 . This in conjunction with the above caused undue performance problems.
  • Incorrect documentation in the MP Guide as to the association of computer groups with the Availability MP rule groups as per https://support.microsoft.com/?id=914989. This was a major call generator early on simply because nothing was being collected and processed by the Availability MP back-end.
  • Fix for computer attributes used by the MP defined as Integer rather than string which cause the Web Console failure issue documented in https://support.microsoft.com/?id=913278
  • Fix for a reported problem where the Reliability and Analysis Service MMC snap-in would time out connecting to the MOM Reporting database server. This has been corrected by increasing the connectivity timeout value from 30 seconds to 2 minutes (additionally the administrator can further increase the value via a registry change which is documented in the MP guide)
  • Fix for a reported problem where Windows 2000 servers would fail to appear on reports. This has been corrected by implementing a synthetic mid-day up-time event since Windows 2000 cannot provide one natively.
  • Fix for installation on SQL Server 2005. The Availability MP reporting database components would not install on a SQL Server 2005 SystemCenterReporting database if the database compatibility level was set to 90 (default for a new installation of SQL Server 2005 rather than an upgrade from SQL Server 2000).
  • Fix for a reported problems where Windows Server 2003 computers would fail to appear on some reports. This fix has a dependency upon Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1. As such, the minimum requirement for Windows Server 2003 operating systems is Service Pack 1.

Unsupported in this release of the management pack:

  • Windows 2000 is only supported for the following reports: Operating System, SQL Server. It is anticipated that a future update to the management pack will provide support for Windows 2000 Domain Controllers in the Domain Controllers report. Although the previous MP Guide did state a requirement “Microsoft Active Directory service for Windows Server 2003 and higher” it was unclear whether Windows 2000 DC’s were supported, which they are not.
  • Although support has been added for installation of the SQL components on a SQL Server 2005 native database, support for reporting the SQL Server 2005 version on SQL Server reports is not available. This should not affect Availability and Reliability reporting of SQL Server only the failure to report the SQL version on reports.

Clive Eastwood, Supportability Program Manager, Microsoft Operations Manager.