September 24, 2026
October 24, 2025
A primer on setting up the simplest possible Postfix relay on Red Hat Linux, including adding a custom mail header to every message that traverses the relay.
October 9, 2025
This beginner-friendly tutorial guides you through building a local Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system without writing code. You’ll learn to set up your own AI assistant that can answer questions based on your documents, running entirely on your own hardware for complete privacy and control.
August 18, 2022
If a computer has a GPO or a local security policy that defines windows firewall rules, AND there are also local firewall rules, it is difficult to discern between them unless you open each rule. The below PowerShell script will only retrieve rules that were…
August 16, 2022
A small PowerShell script to parse the windows firewall log into an array.
October 15, 2021
Here are some notes from my recent experience preparing AD for Exchange 2019 and the commands I used.
May 11, 2021
If WSUS keeps timing out, you may need to update the timeout on the IIS Site to something longer.
March 17, 2021
If you are using SQL Express with WSUS, you may want to limit the amount of memory that it uses. Most likely you don’t have any SQL tools installed, and there is no reason to install any tools because we can do it with PowerShell. This is just a simple script…
March 8, 2021
I created a Powershell command that will resolve SCOM Alerts in a “New” state (State 0) based on a list of alert names that you feed the script from a text file. I will put on Github soon, until there, here it is.
August 16, 2019
A code/script snippet with no accompanying prose - see the post for the full script.
August 1, 2019
My colleague Robert sent me this nice one-liner. It searches for a specific certificate across all servers in a specific OU.
July 29, 2019
This is from B.
July 12, 2019
Sometimes you need to uninstall one or more SCOM agents using PowerShell. This script does NOT require SCOM cmdlets or anything special and it can easily be incorporated into a larger script. It uses WMI to perform a clean uninstall.
June 27, 2019
Tired of constantly dragging windows to different monitors with your mouse? You can move the current active window to the left or light with hot keys.
June 25, 2019
Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com
June 14, 2019
A code/script snippet with no accompanying prose - see the post for the full script.
June 11, 2019
Quickly remove a specific email from multiple mailboxes.
June 11, 2019
Sometimes, for whatever reason, an MA never goes into “In Progress” in SCSM and may need a little help. Rather than using SMLETS or logging onto a SCSM machine, if you have the SCSM Console installed on your workstation, you can run it directly from there.
June 11, 2019
The normal command line is still great to use for deletions, and can be quicker than powershell
May 24, 2019
Recently, I spent some time troubleshooting a sign-in issue for one of our Skype for Business users. The account was a re-hire account, therefore it had previously existed and then had been deleted from Skype for Business. Once the person was rehired, the…
April 26, 2019
This is another quickie. It find all work items assigned to one ad group/user, and then assigns to another.
April 18, 2019
This script will search for active SRs and IRs with no affected user. It will then take the assigned user and copy it to the affected user. This is just a snippet and not a full production script. You will need to add your error checking and other wrappings.
April 17, 2019
A code/script snippet with no accompanying prose - see the post for the full script.
April 17, 2019
Start with the below query and turn it into a view, or simply add it as the sub query. It breaks the OU into rows.
April 17, 2019
A code/script snippet with no accompanying prose - see the post for the full script.
April 16, 2019
This post is updated as new scripts are added, so don’t let the original creation date fool you. Some scripts are snippets and others are full, completed scripts. As always, test and use at your own risk.
March 26, 2019
A code/script snippet with no accompanying prose - see the post for the full script.
December 27, 2018
I was asked to create a better way to check for workflow failures in Service Manager. If you use SCOM to monitor SCSM workflows, you know that there is one rule, and it throws an alert for every failure. I didn’t like this. Instead, this script will provide a…
December 27, 2018
I recently posted this to a MS forum:
December 27, 2018
Recently I performed some Service Manager notification subscription cleanup. Shortly after, I started receiving notifications from the Operations Manager event log stating the following:
February 23, 2018
Get-MoveRequestStatistics -MoveRequestQueue “mydbname” | ? {$_.Status.Value -ne ‘Completed’}
January 12, 2017
Install-WindowsFeature AS-HTTP-Activation, Desktop-Experience, NET-Framework-45-Features, RPC-over-HTTP-proxy, RSAT-Clustering, Web-Mgmt-Console, WAS-Process-Model, Web-Asp-Net45, Web-Basic-Auth, Web-Client-Auth, Web-Digest-Auth, Web-Dir-Browsing,…
November 9, 2016
I was recently troubleshooting the following issue: A user requested an application from the SCCM Application Catalog that required approval. However, AAW was not creating a request in SCSM. The application did not exist in SCSM. Everything was working…
November 2, 2016
If you need to process cubes manually directly from the SSAS server, you can use powershell. I pulled this script from here.
November 2, 2016
Recently, my DWASDataBase become corrupt and I have to rebuild the entire database and cubes from scratch. However, when Service Manager attempted to process the cubes, it was throwing 2 different errors, depending on which provider I used in the DWDataMart…
February 19, 2015
I don’t see a lot about this out here, so I am posting.
February 5, 2015
I needed to provide data about SCOM notification subscriptions via SQL Reporting Services. I was hoping to find a simple answer, so I went to searching online. It seemed that no one had posted anything related to querying notifications from the…
September 3, 2014
Stop manually approving each test review activity. Service Manager implementations usually include immense amounts of testing. If you are testing Service Requests or Change Requests, you probably have tons of review activities to approve. It can be time…
August 1, 2014
- Talk about the misrepresentation of Orchestrator.
April 22, 2014
I find myself listing out all of the enumerations for lists in Service Manager quite a bit. Rather than spending time doing this over and over, I wrote a query that retrieves all of the enumeration items from Service Manager. I tried to keep it simple so…
February 13, 2014
This is more of a note for myself. For an activity, this will get the affected user of the parent work item.
November 13, 2013
Microsoft Monitoring Agent is a new agent that replaces the Operations Manager Agent and combines .NET Application Performance Monitoring (APM) in System Center with the full functionality of IntelliTrace Collector in the Microsoft Visual Studio development…
September 3, 2013
The is a great solution and worthy of a repost.
July 23, 2013
Problem: One common issue I have ran into with writing workflows for Service Manager is the powershell sessions seem to be shared. When I call a set of cmdlets, such as the Active Directory cmdlets, they do not always load/unload properly, causing issues…
July 19, 2013
I didn’t write the blog post, but I did experience the issue, and it is worth repeating. It seems this is going to affect anyone upgrading from SCOM 2012 to SP1 who uses ACS. The issue is that the schema doesn’t get updated, causing crashes to ADTServer. If…
May 3, 2013
Update: *As you read through below, you will notice that Microsoft has been *nice enough to use some of the IDs I was using with the release of SP1. (This post was pre SP1) You will have to make small modifications to your script and Ids but the below…
February 27, 2013
I have seen numerous posts floating around regarding the SCOM Availability Reports showing “Monitoring Unavailable” even though the objects were healthy for the time period. For example, I can run the SCOM Availability Report, select “Exchange 2007 Service”,…
February 22, 2013
*I know this is a short post, but the idea is simplicity. Sometimes, we make things unnecessarily too complicated, and native functionality is sometimes overlooked. As a consultant, I strive to keep solutions for my customers as simple as possible while…
January 17, 2013
Quest software has a nice online website that allows easy searching or browsing of events. While it contains almost all windows events, it also contains events from VMWare and Juniper. I thought this would be a nice little utility to have in a SCOM view, so I…
January 15, 2013
I just wanted to share some notes regarding the Service Manager 2012 SP1 Upgrade, that might not be obvious unless you thoroughly read the documentation. I hope these notes help prevent some problems.
January 15, 2013
System Center 2012 – Operations Manager
January 8, 2013
A code/script snippet with no accompanying prose - see the post for the full script.
December 31, 2012
I have seen a lot of posts regarding the “All Management Servers Resource Pool Unavailable” error since SCOM 2012 RC, and I am still seeing numerous posts. I have also not seen anything in SP1 regarding fixing this error. The “All Management Servers Resource…
December 18, 2012
I have an answer coming soon :)
November 16, 2012
Note that if you are using System Center 2012: Service Manager, you will not be able to install Operations Manager 2012 agents on the machines. You must use agentless management; this is fine because the Service Manager 2012 Management Pack accounts for…
July 11, 2012
If you are using the Service Manager DW and cubes, you may have ran into some issues with the cubes not processing, failing, data issue, or something else. I have provided a couple of resources to help with troubleshooting at the bottom of my post, but I want…
April 20, 2012
March 27, 2012
In Service Manager, we are allowed to have activities in service requests, just like Changes and Incidents. However, don’t enter a single activity which is also a review activity. It will not move to “In Progress.”
February 14, 2012
I don’t know if many people have noticed this, because I sure didn’t. Maybe I am not the most observant person. On the incident form, you see “Affected user CIs:”. I have always seen it, but nothing ever “clicked.” When you enter an affected user, it gives…
February 2, 2012
I was recently editing a notification mangement pack and needed to find the GUID for a relationship between two instance so I could send an email to the correct user. IN SCSM 2012 there is a cmdlet that can be used to find the name if a relationship called…
January 27, 2012
Notifications not working in SCOM 2012: “Notifications not working in SCOM 2012”
January 27, 2012
As you may know by now, the Operations Manager 2012 console has a memory leak. Microsoft has acknowledged the issue, and put it into the release notes for RC. It isn’t that big of a deal. Just close the console and reopen it, if it begins taking too much…
January 17, 2012
I recently deployed System Center 2012: Operations Manager in a development environment. I don’t mean a small virtual lab. I mean a real environment with multiple devices that can be monitored via SNMP.
October 25, 2011
The Authoring Tool workflow has an option of “relative” when using date fields. However, when you check the checkbox and enter a relative token such as [now] the authoring console doesn’t like it and will not save. I haven’t seen anyone else complain about…
October 25, 2011
[me] [mygroups]
October 24, 2011
When installing anything in Operations Manager 2012, .NET 4 must be installed before IIS. Otherwise, certain steps will have to be taken to resolve the issue.
October 24, 2011
Many organizations still use Windows XP. Windows XP is not supported for the console. It must be vista or higher.
October 24, 2011
Minimum Software Requirements
October 24, 2011
Hi, my name is Brody Kilpatrick and I am the owner of this blog. It is dedicated to anything Operations Manager 2012. I created the blog to help others and remind myself how I did something. Some of my posts may be from other blogs. If so, I will link to…
October 10, 2011
[Suppressing Duplicate SCSM Workflow Monitoring Alerts/Health State Changes in SCOM - SCSM Engineering Team Blog - Site Home - TechNet…
October 10, 2011
October 10, 2011
Microsoft System Center Suite: List current values for a list enumeration in Service Manager:
September 12, 2011
I always assumed the SCSM management group name was in the title of the console until I actually needed one day, then I realized it wasn’t there. It seems like you would see the Management Group name every where, but it is not. Use the registry on a SCSM…
August 29, 2011
Create Announcements view from The CMDB
August 16, 2011
August 6, 2011
August 6, 2011
(Courtesy of my Co-worker and friend Thomas Bianco)
July 25, 2011
July 25, 2011
Extending Incident properties and forms - SCSM Engineering Team Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs
July 20, 2011
When accessing the Self-Service Portal, typing https://servername/enduser into the browser address isn’t acceptable for most organizations. This blog posts addresses 4 concerns of the self-service portal and how to resolve them. The information may be common…
July 18, 2011
[Showing the Correct Display Name for Related Objects in View Columns - SCSM Engineering Team Blog - Site Home - TechNet…
July 11, 2011
Great article on changing the SCSM portal Address http://memoexp.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/changing-scsm-portal-address/
July 8, 2011
http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2011/07/07/disabling-workflows-with-overrides.aspx
July 8, 2011
June 28, 2011
I have been having some concerns for the lack of failover options and documentation for the Service Manager data warehouse. I created a forum post which can be seen at…
June 27, 2011
I am not sure if many people realize this until SCSM is actually installed. But the SCSM out-of-the-box email solution will automatically attach pictures in the body of an email to an incident. I have had people ask me in the past if this is possible, and I…
June 14, 2011
June 13, 2011
I came across a problem attempting to install the SCSM prerequisite “Authorization Manager Hotfix” when installing SCSM on Server 2008 R2 with SP1. It said that it is not applicable, but it still shows a warning. IT IS NOT NEEDED. What is my source? Well,…
June 12, 2011
The below post isn’t real new, but it is highly informational. A lot of questions tend to arise around security scoping, and I found a great post, which I wanted to duplicate. The below text was taken from…
May 27, 2011
I just created the coolest thing at the request of a client. To make things a little easier for some end users, they wanted to be able to save the last set of parameters a user enters. This way, when they open the report, it always contains the most recent…
May 26, 2011
gridpro has created a web front end for Service Manager. It is set to be released May 2011. Check it out.
May 26, 2011
May 25, 2011
System Center Service Manager 2010 is available for pre-order on Amazon. Get it now!
May 20, 2011
May 20, 2011
May 7, 2011
2010-10-16 16:30:00Stefan Allansson
April 11, 2011
March 30, 2011
Posted Wednesday, October 18, 2006 9:46 PM by CumpsD
March 18, 2011
March 18, 2011
March 17, 2011
http://www.windows-noob.com/forums/index.php?/topic/446-how-can-i-setup-wds-in-windows-server-2008/
March 17, 2011
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic568045-149-1.aspx#bm568665
March 14, 2011
March 12, 2011
FROM: http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/2010/04/enterprise-ca-how-to-create-scom.html
March 1, 2011
February 15, 2011
http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/applications/search?q=%22configuration%20pack%22
February 13, 2011
I sometimes find strange issues with the SCSM management server. For example, my connectors have not synchronized in several days. Performing a manual synchronization does nothing. When I look in the event log, there are no errors, but there is a sync…
February 11, 2011
February 10, 2011
February 8, 2011
February 6, 2011
http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2009/12/08/incident-resolution-satisfaction-surveys-on-sharepoint.aspx
February 6, 2011
I got some more information from one of our devs today. Try this:
February 2, 2011
February 2, 2011
February 2, 2011
Incident Resolution Satisfaction Surveys on SharePoint [Automatically Sending Notifications to…
January 31, 2011
January 20, 2011
January 20, 2011
get-agentpendingaction | where-object {$_.AgentName -eq “server1.that.I.amtryingtomanage.com”} | approve-agentpendingaction
January 14, 2011
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=c06b8369-60dd-4b64-a44b-84b371ede16d&displaylang=en http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sqldataaccess/thread/4887d91f-6ac7-40c0-9fc8-5cdd0634e603
January 8, 2011
January 7, 2011
Have you changed Data Warehouse Action Account just before these events showed up? If so, you also need to change the ‘WriterLoginName’ field in the dbo.ManagementGroup table in the DW to match your new DW Action Account…
January 2, 2011
Create a CSV with comma delimited information as below CN,SN,GivenName,Name,Title,Description,PostalCode,TelephoneNumber,Department,Company,StreetAddress,Countrycode Use this script and modify the obvious stuff…
January 2, 2011
January 2, 2011
To configure internet access: Create a new external network in Hyper v and bind it with a physical NIC that has internet access. On the Host, go to network connections. Then bridge the new network with the physical adapter After bridging, check to see if the…
January 2, 2011
- Add the internal network connection to the VM - This Network will allow communication between he host and VM - Go to the Hyper v HOST - Network Connections - Find the connection with the same name that you gave the internal network you just created -…
January 2, 2011
A code/script snippet with no accompanying prose - see the post for the full script.
December 30, 2010
A code/script snippet with no accompanying prose - see the post for the full script.
December 29, 2010
Excerpt from the MS website: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff461124.aspx Updated: December 1, 2010 Applies To: System Center Service Manager 2010
December 29, 2010
Workflows are automatic processes that occur and include sending e-mail notifications, the next step of a change request activating, and automatically applying a template.
December 15, 2010
December 15, 2010
December 6, 2010
Very Useful Time saver for Analysts
December 6, 2010
Problem: When trying the “Request Software” link on the end user portal, you get the message “Unable to load portal ActiveX Control.”
November 29, 2010
Unlike Operations Manager and Exchange 2010, the Service Manager command shell is not simply a shortcut. However, you can add the Service Manager command shell to PowerShell. The below is a clip taken from a [TechNet…
November 29, 2010
Many people have requested incident surveys. Here is a potential solution.
November 24, 2010
If you have updated to Service Manager CU3, you will notice warnings in the event logs that show management pack mismatches between. *.0 and *.216. This is a bug, and it will be fixed in the next release. However, if you are working in the Authoring…
November 22, 2010
In Service Manager, there have been times where the OpsMgr Alert connector would stop forwarding alerts. I would troubleshoot for hours to no end. I tried just about everything short of uninstalling the software. Finally, I found what seems like a tried and…
November 22, 2010
I have recently been required to learn, demo and deploy Service Manager to various customers. I have created this blog to help you and me in our journey with System Center Service Manager. Feel free to comment on posts, as I will probably need help along the…