Grouping issue or not?

[apsanixay]

Hi,

I'm fairly new to MOM but am a veteran of monitoring applciations so I'm kind of perplexed at the situation that I've run into. Here's the issue, I have a MOM server with 117 managed agents... now it is my understanding of previous tools that those managed agents need to be grouped and then have alert rules applied to those groups for proper alerting. What I am finding is that only 7 of those managed agents are actually grouped (Windows 2003 Servers and the Windows Server 2003 Domain Controlers group) but all 117 are still alerting... does MOM have the capability to apply rules directly to agents or is my system just screwed up? Talking to my other admins they're under the impression that all of the managed agents were previously grouped but have somehow dropped from the groups and are still reporting for some reason.

 

[nedmega]

I'm pretty sure that your agents are subscribed to some sort of group if they are alerting.

What exactly are they alerting on? Is it base OS stuff or specific alerts from another MP?

It can be confusing in MOM to tell whether or not a computer group has any agents subscribed because often it is calculated using formulas and does not seem immediately apparent by looking at the Computer Group in the admin console.

If you want to find out if an agent is subscribed to anything you can go in the Admin Console under Administration-->Computers. From there choose an agent that you suspect is not monitored and right-click and go to properties. There is a Computer Groups tab which should show you all the groups the agent belongs to.

If you want to find out whether a computer group has any members then I always go to the Computers view in the Ops console and choose that group in the drop down list. It should show you all of the computers that belong to that group.

Hope this helps

 

[apsanixay]

Thanks for the response... looking back through from the Admin Console > Computers > Agent Managed Computers I can see the list of managed agents and when I right-click > Properties > Computer Groups I can see that the agents belong to a group, but when I go to Management Packs > Computer Groups then directly to a specific group that the agent belongs to it is not listed under "Included Computers".. is this an issue? Shouldnt I be able to view the group info from both places?

 

[nedmega]

I think the Included Computers group only shows computers that have been specifically included by the Administrator (ie. not automatically detected by any formula).

I personally agree that there should be some sort of tab under the Computer Group properties to show all subscribers and I'm not sure if that was the original intent for the Included Computers tab but it definitely doesn't work that way in reality.

There might be an easier method but I always check under the Operators Console to see what computers are currently subscribed to a group because I've learned not to trust the properties of the Computer group itself.

 

[MadGeni]

Welcome to the wonderful world of MOM 2005!
As Nedmega says, a quick way is to check via the operator console..
And just to make things more confusing, it's all going to change in MOMv3 (Operations Manager 2007)..however at least in there you can search against a specific object (i.e Exchange/AD/SQL) for the monitoring applied to it.

Just work on the assumption that if the server has a specific app/service, MOM will be monitoring it unless explicitly told not to (in the Excluded computer tab).

Have fun!