Updates from July, 2008

  • Getting the 100 biggest Agent Queues out of your Operations Manager Database

    Mirco 16:00 on Tuesday, 22. July 2008 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , center, database, datawarehouse, , , , , , query, queue, , , , systemcenter, usage

    Getting a decent overview of you Operations Manager Agents sometimes is a bit hard. There’s a nice graph to display the “Send Queue % Usage” but you have to click through every agent status to find the interesting ones. Most likely the ones with a high percentage status.

    Another way, although with less current data would be to query your Data Warehouse with the following statement

    SELECT     TOP (100) vManagedEntity.Path,
                         vPerformanceRule.CounterName,
                         Perf.vPerfHourly.DateTime,
                         Perf.vPerfHourly.AverageValue AS Avg,
                         Perf.vPerfHourly.MinValue AS Min,
                         Perf.vPerfHourly.MaxValue AS Max
    FROM       Perf.vPerfHourly
    INNER JOIN vManagedEntity ON Perf.vPerfHourly.ManagedEntityRowId = vManagedEntity.ManagedEntityRowId
    INNER JOIN vPerformanceRuleInstance ON Perf.vPerfHourly.PerformanceRuleInstanceRowId = vPerformanceRuleInstance.PerformanceRuleInstanceRowId
    INNER JOIN vPerformanceRule ON vPerformanceRuleInstance.RuleRowId = vPerformanceRule.RuleRowId
    WHERE      (vPerformanceRule.CounterName LIKE N'%send queue % used')
    ORDER BY   Perf.vPerfHourly.DateTime DESC,
               Avg DESC

    This query returns the 100 Queue with the highest fill rate. Note, that data in the Data Warehouse DB can be several hours behind the Operations Database.

     
  • How to restore a Domain Controller you cannot logon to

    Mirco 6:54 on Wednesday, 16. July 2008 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags: account, active, active directory, adsi, controller, dc, dcpromo, directory, , edit, kerberos, login, logon, , ntdsutil, registry, restore,

    For some reason we had multiple Domain Controllers that refused any logon attempt in the last few weeks.

    After getting a closer look at the event logs we found pages full of Kerberos errors. Somehow the machine account expired and wasn’t renewed, so the controller could no longer replicate and thou refused our logon attempts.

    I tried to fix the Kerberos issue, but nothing I found was helping the situation. But how do I restore a Domain Controller I cannot logon to, without reinstalling the server?

    After a quick search I found this: Microsoft Article KB332199, which had a useful subsection on the “If the domain controller cannot start in normal mode” issue.

    First restart the Domain Controller in Directory Services Restore Mode (using F8) and open REGEDIT. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ProductOptions and Edit the value of ProductType from “NavmanNT” to “ServerNT”. Be careful to spell this correctly! This will tell the server that it is only a member server in the domain, and you can use a local logon account.

    Restart the system and logon using the Administrator account with the restore password. Open REGEDIT again and this time browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NTDS\Parameters. Find the Src Root Domain Srv Entry and delete it. This way the server will believe it’s the last Domain Controller in the current domain.

    Start DCPROMO and create a new temporary domain. Yes, create. No need to delete anything yet. This will overwrite any Active Directory values stored on your local server. After it’s done restart and run DCPROMO again. This time we will shut down the temporary domain and remove all Domain Controller traces from the harddrive.

    That’s it. All you need to do now is remove the Active Directory objects related to the original Domain Controller (KB216498) from the directory, wait for the replication to finish and run DCPROMO to add this server as Domain Controller of your domain.

     
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