On the 2nd day of Christmas...MOM Alert Notification Drama

On the 2nd day of Christmas, my True Love scolded me.... "Perhaps thou doth think me unduly vexed by the sorrowful state of thine MOM infrastructure? MOM has sent nary a e-mail notification in 3 days!" Were it a punishable offense for neglecting thine monitoring infrastructure, thou would hang from the tallest tree as penance for thy shameful ways! Get to thine work, damnable man - and quickly, before thine engineering staff raise their collective fists in a spirit borne both of rage and indignation and strike thee down in defense of their maternal benefactor!" She was clearly a drama major... However, she makes a valid point that in replacing native MOM notification mechanisms with Notification Workflow Solution Accelerator, the added flexibility in alert notification also increases the complexity of your Ops Manager 2005 infrastructure. To that end, I took a group Notification Workflow monitoring rules handed to me by an engineer some months ago (Justin Harter), and expanded it into a complete MOM Notification Workflow Managment Pack designed to ensure your Notification Workflow is healthy and functional, with virtually no manual configuration required. Here's a rundown of how it works: When you import the MP, the rule group is associated with a formula-driven computer group (Microsoft Notification Workflow Server) that will be auto-populated with the server where NWSA is installed. In State View in your Operator Console, you'll see a new category group 'MOM NW' There are several Event Rules to detect common errors raised by SQL Notification Services...the service on which Notification Workflow is based. To this end, there are several Performance Rules that will raise alerts should the the NWSA event rules fail to fire, or if the service falls a few polling cycles (called Quanta in SQL Notification Services-speak) behind. There are two rules in particular designed to make sure notifications are actually flowing: Notification Workflow Notification Check - This script calls into the NotificationWorkflowNotificationWorkflowApp database to check the time of the most recent notification fired by Notification Workflow. If it has been 6 or more hours since the last alert was sent, it raises an alert. I updated the SQL connection in this script to use integrated security and localhost to make this a no-configuration script. Notification Workflow Notification Successful Test - This is simply a modified version of the end-to-end monitoring test script (fired by the task of the same name) with the event ID changed by 1 digit. This script is associated with a rule on a timed event provider that fires every 24 hrs at 8am by default. If you dont see your morning successful test in the Alerts View in the MOM Ops Console, you know you have a problem. There are performance and alert views to display key aspects recent errors and performance data (check the 'Notification Workflow SA' folder) Finally, it would of course be ridiculous to assume a failing Notification Workflow installation would alert you of problems, and to that I created alert rules that fire e-mail notifications to the 'Operations Manager Administrators' notification group using the native MOM notification facilities in the event of any problems. Their is one configuration item required...create yourself an Operator in the Admin Console and add it to this notification group. Of course, make sure you have an SMTP server specified in Global Settings. And that's it. Get the Notification Workflow MP here: http://www.momresources.org/mommps/nwsa.zip If any technical difficulties with download or installation, send comments, questions, corrections and other correspondence to: mailto:administrator@momresources.orgor mailto:pete.zerger@gmail.com