In this blog we are going to discuss how you can use Cookdown’s PowerShell MP to create SCOM tasks written in PowerShell and how you can visualise the output of your tasks in a much more efficient and user-readable format – using SquaredUp.

We are delighted to welcome guest blogger Brian Wren of Microsoft. Brian is something of a superstar in the SCOM world – and you will see why when you check out his technical guides on TechNet or Microsoft Learn. His series on Management Pack Authoring for SCOM is a definitive guide that has helped many of us get started with a difficult topic. It is fair to say that when Brian works his magic, he makes the complicated perfectly understandable.

The filter navigator sites in the top left modestly heading up the table of options. Until recently I’ve been using it to just filter the list below, then, someone introduced me to a couple of other cool commands you can run. The below six functions are all run against a table, for my examples I’ve uses sys_user, but any table can be used. I was able to find the New York documentation for this functionality here if you’d like more details.

I can’t remember the exact reason I created this script include, but after finding it figured I’d draft up a couple quick examples as the logic could be expanded to other checks, plus, I might need it again one day so its good to have on hand. The script include detailed below creates a new class type in ServiceNow that can be used both from the client-side with Ajax, and from the server-side as a simple object call.

Sometimes a case comes up where you need to lookup further information on the active record, via is referenced records. ServiceNow makes it pretty painless with the g_form.getReference method, which uses a callback to keep from blocking the rest of your script. The example I have below, and on our GitHub repo, uses getReference in a Client Script as a way to notify uses if they are setting the owner of a CI as an inactive user.

Hybrid monitoring has increasingly become a priority in the SCOM community. A growing number of enterprises are running workloads both on-prem and in the cloud, with some of us creating new workloads in the cloud, and others engaging in a gradual migration to the cloud – a process that often takes place over a number of years. How can we deliver a complete monitoring strategy for our hybrid environments via SCOM?

Most of us SCOM users have our servers and infrastructure pieces monitored – but more often than not, the hypervisor remains a big black box where there is no level of monitoring whatsoever. Any kind of outages that come from that lack of monitoring blindside our administrators, and people eventually grow to lose confidence in the platform itself.

When doing testing and development I frequently want to clean up all of the records between releases to give myself a fresh start. Using the list view is helpful, but can be slow if you have more than 100 or so records to delete. The below script is run via the Scripts – Background view to take the results of your list view and delete the records, logging if they are successfully deleted or not with each one.