Add Email as a delivery method for SCOM Scheduled Reports

Ever noticed that when setting up a scheduled report in System Center Operations Manager that E-mail is not available as a delivery method?  The only options I had in my environment by default were “Null Delivery Provider” and “Windows File Share.”  After searching the options in SCOM, and digging through my copy of “Systems Center Operations Manager Unleashed”, I discovered that this is intentional.  Since SCOM relies on Microsoft SQL Reporting for reports, this is actually an option that has to be configured on the SQL server.

Our environment uses SQL 2008 for the database server.  We run both the Operations Manager DB and the Data Warehouse DB on this server, in addition to the SQL Reporting Services.  If you want to configure E-mail as an option for SCOM scheduled reports delivery, log on to your SCOM database server, and go to Start, All Programs, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Configuration Tools, Reporting Services Configuration Manager.  Connect to your server and server instance, then go to E-mail Settings on the left and enter your Sender Address and SMTP server name.  It should look something like this in SQL 2008:

Now you should have E-mail listed as a Delivery Method in SCOM for a scheduled report.

Outlook Rules and Email Aliases

At my company we recently switched from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook 2010 with Microsoft Exchange 2010 running on the back end.  The transition was very smooth thanks to the knowledge and skill of our Email Systems Administrator, however there was a new “feature” of Outlook/Exchange that posed a problem concerning some rules.

Our SCOM 2007 installation is setup to send notification emails with the address SCOM_Admin@ourcompanydomain.com.  This SMTP email address is configured as an alias for my mailbox, although it is only a secondary address, not the primary.  So, when I send an email, the Internet header shows that the message was sent from my public email address.  Several people on my team, who are configured to receive email notifications from SCOM, have a rule setup (that was also configured in Lotus Notes) to move messages received from the SCOM_Admin address to another folder.  This worked fine in Lotus Notes, but Outlook and Exchange like to resolve this address in the rule to a specific recipient in the Exchange Global Address List.  The result is that whenever I send an email to anyone with this rule in place, my email messages are routed into the SCOM folder instead of arriving in their inbox.

The easiest way to fix this was to use the rule condition “with specific words in the message header” instead of the “from people or public group” condition in Outlook.  For the specific words, I put in the email address for my secondary SCOM_Admin address, and it works.  The rule should look something like this:

Troubleshooting IIS Server Discovery in SCOM 2007

I am currently in the process of deploying Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2 in our environment to monitor all of our servers.  During the deployment process, I noticed that several of our servers that run IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003 to host an internal web-based application were not being discovered in SCOM as IIS servers.  I contacted Microsoft Premier Support about this and was able to get some assistance.

The first thing they had me try was to reinstall the agent, doing a reboot in between the uninstall and reinstall.  Doing this didn’t fix the problem.  The second thing they had me do was to check the IIS Admin service startup type, and make sure it was set to “Automatic”.  It turns out that all of the servers in question had their IIS Admin service startup type set to “Manual”.  I changed the IIS Admin service’s startup type to “Automatic” on all of the servers in question, then restarted the System Center Management (Health Service) service.  I waited a few minutes, then refreshed the IIS Computer Role view in the SCOM console, and viola!  The missing servers showed up, problem solved.

So if you have any IIS servers not being discovered properly in SCOM, you should make sure the IIS Admin service startup type is set to “Automatic”, restart the Health Service, wait 5 minutes and check again.