Computer Attribute Discovery in MOM 2005

Just some trivial bits on computer attribute discovery from a recent experience. While it's probably not a news flash, MOM MP's are not necessarily designed for monitoring servers installed with MSDN media, although it generally still detects the installed components. This is not the case, however, with SQL 2005, as you'll see in this MS newsgroup thread. Attribute detection for software components is generally searching for the presence of certain combination of registry key (and sometimes lack thereof), and this users MSDN-installed SQL Servers didnt have the appropriate registry key. While this may not be ideal, the computer attribute discovery is flexible in that you can easily create attributes to identify anomalies in your environment. Case in point: We recently encountered some issues where it was discovered that production machines were installed with MSDN media. To identify said offenders enterprise wide, we created a computer group with the following formula to single these machines out. AttributeValue(Windows Server BuildLab)="3790.srv03_sp1_qfe(daisuken)" While this would indicate the presence of MSDN media, it might be safer to check for the lack of RTM media, like so: AttributeValue(Windows Current Version)="5.2"ANDAttributeValue(Service Pack Level)="Service Pack 1"AND AttributeValue(Windows Server BuildLab)<>"3790.srv03_sp1_rtm.050324-1447" These seemed to do the trick for this environment (results may vary I'm sure), but in any event, when you have machines where attribute discovery doesnt ID all the software you think it should, one way you can backtrack attribute discovery is to: 1. Check the formula on the Computer Group to see what computer attributes are referenced. 2. Check those attributes under Computer Atributes in the MOM Administrator Console. 3. Then check your target machine to see if the attributes are for some reason absent. What to do about it is a different story. In the case of the suffering SQL Servers, the user simply imported the registry key from an server installed with RTM media. Effective in his case, but I would suggest one tread carefully (and make sure I had good backups of my registry) when working around the problem in this way.