Enterprise-grade Management Pack Change and Version Management

I received an email a couple of days ago from Harold at Silect asking "What do you think of the new Management Pack Store?"

"I don't see any Management Pack Store" I reply

"Oh, you need to take a look at Silect 2.1. It's going live this week"

So I clicked the download link, and took the "Management Pack Store" for a test drive.

An hour later, I knew I had tell you about it.


Silect Studio MP Enterprise has always been a handy tool for a number of reasons, but I've always seen it as a nice-to-have, but I've gotten along fine without it. A walk through the new "Management Pack Store" in MP Studio 2.1 may have changed my mind on that. I threw together some thoughts and some screenshots in context to give you a quick look at what I see as a big step forward in manageability and recoverability for your Mgmt Packs in MOM 2005.

The old...

Silect MP Studio has always delivered several features you beyond what you get in any MOM Reskit Tool:

• Profiling MPs (what-if scenarios to gauge an MP's potential impact)
• Performing bulk edits (to Rule Enable / Rule Disable and Alert Severity)
• Running MP Comparisons with formatted output you can easily manipulate , and in the Enterprise Edition...
• Comparing management pack versions across multiple Management Groups (screenshot HERE)

The new...

But there's never been a good tool for tracking changes across versions. Sure, you can export an MP every time you make changes, you can make comparisons
with a couple of Reskit Tools, but it's a very manual process. And rollback? Hope you made a backup of that MP before you started tuning. No? That's okay, you can
just restore the Onepoint database. Boy that sucks...

Enter the "Management Pack Store". Think SourceSafe 2005 for Management Packs.

Launch the Silect console and add your management servers.
Right click the Management Pack Store and "Add a Project".
Right click your project folder and select "Check In". Select an management pack from a management server or from a file. (screenshot HERE)
Right click again. Click "Check Out" and make some changes. When you "Check In" again, the app bumps the "minor version" automatically saving a discreet version with each change. (screenshot HERE)
Right click again and select Document Project to create a neat table-based report of Rules, groups, providers, scripts, and computer attributes associated with the MP. (That's it in the right pane HERE)
 

And here's the best part. Need to rollback? Right click any version and save straight to an .akm file for import into MOM. SWEET!

In addition to version control, the product was very intuitive (I downloaded and evaluated this version in less than an hour) and offered flexibility
in managing, recording and reporting on changes in your MP code base over time. In a world where ISVs are focused on MOMv3, it's nice to see a vendor deliver compelling functionality this late in the product life cycle. And this feature will be available for Operations Manager 2007.

Sweet tool, but only available in the Enterprise Edition. Download your eval of Studio Enterprise HERE.