Initial Configuration

Overview

The Management Pack automatically discovers instances of SharePoint Office Service running within the Operations Manager 2007 management group, and deploys the SharePoint monitoring agent to those servers (aka Monitored Systems). Once the agents have been deployed, they automatically begin monitoring SharePoint applications for performance and exception issues.

The agent monitors for problems in the .NET elements of SharePoint applications, as indicated on the diagram by . With the AVIcode .NET MP also installed, you can monitor .NET Windows Services, Web Services and COM+ components that your SharePoint application communicates with, or any other ASP.NET application hosted under IIS.

Discovery

The management pack discovers MOSS servers and automatically starts monitoring Microsoft Office SharePoint Web applications, IIS Web Sites, Excel Calculation Services and Enterprise Search.

Once the Application Management Pack has been installed, it initiates a 4-level discovery process for SharePoint servers and components:

The first level performs discovery at 24 hour intervals for all SharePoint servers. This step must complete in order for the management pack to function correctly. The Operations Console 'AVIcode SharePoint Application Monitoring''SharePoint Server state' view will become populated with the SharePoint servers as they are discovered. The management pack will then automatically deploy and configure the agents to the discovered machines.
The second level performs discovery at 24 hour intervals SharePoint Excel Services and Enterprise Search.
The next level performs discovery at 24 hour intervals for SharePoint Web Applications
And the last level performs discovery at 24 hour intervals for SharePoint IIS Web Site and SharePoint Site Collections (this functionality is disabled by default)

Information about SharePoint web applications, IIS web sites and site collections is stored in the SharePoint database. In order for the discovery script to access this information, it must have access to the database server and the SharePoint database. Because the discovery script normally runs under the local system (action) account, it may not have the appropriate permissions to access the database, but can be granted access by correctly configuring the 'Run As' profile. If discovery does fail, correct the Run As account information, and force discovery to take place (see below for information on how to know when discovery has failed and about forcing discovery to take place).

.NET Enterprise Agent Deployment Group

The members of the .NET Enterprise Agent Deployment Group were selected when the Management Pack was installed. To modify the group membership:

Open the Operations Console
Go to the "Authoring View"
Navigate to "Groups"
Select ".NET Enterprise Agent Deployment Group"
Right-click and select 'Properties'

Explicit Members Tab

To add Explicit members to the group, select the Explicit Members tab.
Click Add/Remove Objects
Search for "Computer" objects.
Select desired computers from the list of the returned Computer objects and click Add.
Click OK to close the Object Selection window.

Dynamic Members Tab

To add Dynamic members to the group, select the Excluded Members tab.
Click Create/Edit
Specify a query for objects that will include desired computers.
Click OK to close the Query Builder window.

Excluded Members Tab

To Exclude members from the group, select the Dynamic Members tab.
Click Exclude Objects...
Search for objects to be excluded.
Select objects from the 'Available items' list and click Add to add them to the 'Selected objects' list.
Click OK to close the Object Exclusion window.
Click OK to close the Object Selection window.

Determining Discovery Success/Failure

You can determine whether discovery for some SharePoint components has failed if:

In the Operations Console, only the global 'SharePoint Server' object has been discovered
The alert “Cannot get SharePoint objects” is generated

Correcting the Discovery Account and Permissions

If discovery fails for SharePoint components, several methods can be used to correct the configuration of the discovery account. There are two methods for ensuring that there are sufficient permissions to complete the discovery process: Configure a run-as account, or add permissions to the local computer (action) account.

Configure a 'Run As' profile

You will need to use an account from either the SharePoint Operators Group or the SharePoint Administrators Group to configure as the 'Run As' profile for SharePoint discovery. You may: 1) select an existing domain account from one of the groups, or 2) create a new domain account and add it to one of the groups.

To configure the 'Run As' profile to use the selected account:

Open the Operations Manager 2007 Console.
Go to the "Administration" "Run As Configuration" "Profiles"
Select the 'Office SharePoint Server Discovery Account'
Right-click, and 'Properties'
Go to the 'Run As Accounts' tab
Click New... and select the new 'Run As' profile
Click OK
Click OK

Add permissions to the Action account

To add permissions to the action account, you can either make the action account a member of either the SharePoint Operators Group or the SharePoint Administrators Group, or give the action account permissions for the SharePoint management database.

If the action account is the Local System account, then use the computer account when adding permissions.

The required rights are:

Members of the "WSS_WPG" group on SharePoint server must have read access to the system resources used by Windows SharePoint Services, i.e. members of this group must have read rights to the services list.
Members of the "WSS_Content_Application_Pools" SQL role on the SQL server must have execute access to some of the SharePoint stored procedures.
The user should be a domain account. Configuring with a local user account fails when the connection is made to the SQL database.

To grant additional user rights:

Create/Select a domain user
Add this user into the SharePoint "Farm Administrators" group
Run the "Add user to WSS_WPG group" task for this user under Office SharePoint Server object.
Configure this user as a 'Run As Account' in Operations Manager

Forcing Discovery

If discovery for any SharePoint components fails, it will normally take 24 hours before a new discovery attempt takes place unless discovery is forced.

Forcing Discovery Method #1

Restart the Health Service This method is not recommended for production servers because it requires having to restart the OpsMgr main windows service.

Forcing Discovery Method #2

This method requires changing the discovery interval to 1 minute (for example), waiting for the next discovery, and then changing the discovery interval back to 24 hours. This method is much longer, but no any harmful operation is done during it.

Go to "Authoring""Management Pack Objects" "Object Discoveries"
Click Change Scope
Select the SharePoint Application MP objects that correspond to the SharePoint web applications, etc.
For every object, select 'Overrides' Override the Discovery'For all objects of type:<object type>'
Set the 'Interval Second' parameter value to 60 (1 minute)
Wait for the next discovery and ensure that it passes successfully (objects appear and no errors were raised)
Set the 'Interval Second' parameter value back to 86400(24 hours)

Enable Site Collection Discovery

Open the Operations Console
Go to the "Authoring View"
Navigate to “Management Pack Objects”"Object Discoveries".
Click to “Change Scope”,
Select “Microsoft Office SharePoint Web Site Collection”.
Click OK
Right click “Site Collection Discovery”“Override the Object Discovery”“Override for all objects of class : Microsoft SharePoint Web Application”
Change the parameter “Enabled” from “false” to “true”
Select the destination MP (you can use 'AVIcode .NET Enterprise Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 Overrides')
Click OK.

Initial Settings

Application health is measured by user-specified performance and exception thresholds that are configured during the monitoring activation process. By default, the Management Pack monitors SharePoint applications for Handled and Unhandled exceptions

The SLA threshold is set to a very high value out of the box to avoid the possibility of generating too many events when monitoring is automatically started. Read the following sections for instructions to fine tune data collection.

Failure monitoring for connectivity failures and security events is enabled
Failure monitoring for critical code failures, is disabled

Changing the Settings

The agents may be configured via the actions in the Operations Console.

If the actions are not visible, select 'View''Actions' in the Operations Console.

Selecting the Target

To select an object to apply an action to:

Open the Operations Manager 2007 Console.
Select the "Monitoring View"
Select "AVIcode SharePoint Application Monitoring"
Select one the following items:

"SharePoint Server State View"

"SharePoint IIS Web Sites State View"

Select a state item from the list on the right
Select an action from the list of applicable actions

SharePoint Servers and SharePoint IIS Web Sites are the only state objects with associated tasks because they are only physical (vs. logical) objects that actions can be applied against. Actions do not apply to SharePoint state items for Excel Services, Search Services, Web Application or Web Site Collection.

SharePoint Server Available Actions

Add user to WSS_WPG group

The 'Run As' profile must be configured as a domain account, and that domain account must belong to the 'WSS_WPG' group. 'Add user to WSS_WPG group' allows you to perform this task for all monitored servers in one action.

Pause [Resume] monitoring

This option is the equivalent of the 'Monitor All Web Applications by Default' option in the Intercept MMC. When this option 'resumes', all applications running under IIS will be monitored. When this option is 'paused', only specifically configured applications will be monitored.

Open the task
Click Override
Select whether or not to recycle IIS (recycling is required for the action to take effect, but recycling can happen at a later time)
Click Override
Click Run

Reset IIS

This action performs an IIS Reset command.

Open the task
Click Run

SharePoint IIS Web Sites Available Actions

Enable [Disable] Exception Diagnostic Data

This task enables/disables collecting exception diagnostic data in the monitored application. It adds All Namespaces into the list of monitored namespaces in order to collect functional parameters and member variables for custom namespaces in the exception event.

This action requires a service restart.

Open the task
Click Run

Enable [Disable] Performance Diagnostic Data

This task adds All Namespaces to collected information in the monitored application (or disables collecting performance diagnostic data in the monitored application). This option will cause the agent to start monitoring all functions except namespaces, classes and functions that are explicitly excluded from monitoring.

The '[All Namespaces]' item should be used judiciously as it will increase the amount of data collected.

Open the task
Click Run

Pause [Resume] Monitoring Application

This option starts/stops monitoring for a specific web site.

Open the task
Click Override
Select whether or not to recycle IIS (recycling is required for the action to take effect, but recycling can happen at a later time)
Click Override
Click Run

Set Alerting Threshold

An SLA threshold is used by the operations monitoring agent to define if an event needs to be reported. The operations monitor detects all requests that exceed this threshold and reports them. If the execution time for a request exceeds the alerting threshold, then the agent collects information about the request and reports it, otherwise the agent disposes the event data.

Open the task
Click Override
Set the threshold value
Click Override
Click Run

Set Sensitivity Threshold

The threshold for the execution time of a call to external resources (such as SQL queries or web service calls) is called the 'Sensitivity Threshold'. The sensitivity threshold for a resource call should never exceed the alerting threshold of the page or function it was called from. In a staging or test environment, setting the sensitivity threshold to zero will allow Intercept to report performance information on all resource calls, including those that took no time. In a production environment however, you should reduce overhead by eliminating the reporting of resource calls that took a negligible amount of time. This will help to eliminate extraneous information, which is of no interest in the alert.

Open the task
Click Override
Set the threshold value
Click Override
Click Run

Advanced Configuration

Additional configuration options are available through the Intercept Management Console and through the agent configuration files. Details are available in the "Intercept Studio User Manual" .

Last update: Thursday, December 09, 2010 02:05:11 PM