Section 3.8. Tools

3.8. Tools

The MOM 2005 Resource Kit has two tools that are particularly helpful in dealing with agents: the Resultant Set of Rules (RSOR) tool and the Agent Helper tool. These tools are located in the Tools directory of the Resource Kit, which is downloadable from http://www.microsoft.com/mom. These tools will help you obtain special detailed information about a required agent when troubleshooting agent issues.

Figure 3-42. The 21240 event indicates that the agent successfully received a configuration update from its management server

Because these tools are Resource Kit utilities, Microsoft does not support them via the regular support channels.

3.8.1. Resultant Set of Rules Tool

The RSOR queries the MOM 2005 operational database for all of the rules in a management group that are applied to an agent. Although this is a command-line tool, it is similar to the Resultant Set of Policy query in the AD group policy management console. It lets you know exactly which processing rules an agent is executing. You can run this tool from any machine that can access the operations database server. It accesses the data via the ActiveX Data Object (ADO) model. To start the tool, use a command similar to this:

 C:\Rsor.exe HOMESQLSERVER Avalon 

This will query homesqulserver for all the rules that apply to the agent on computer avalon. The RSOR tool creates a directory on the root of the drive that it is run from, called ResultantSetOfRules. On this drive the output file is automatically named, in this case AVALON RSOR 2005-2-10 001220.log. The file contents look like the following (many lines were deleted because they weren't necessary, but the file ends up with a total count of the rules applied):

 Microsoft Operations Manager - Resultant Set of Rules 1.1 Exporting rules applied to managed node AVALON Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Agents (Enabled) -------------------------------------------------- (Level1) Agent (Enabled) ------------------------ 1. PMC Measure - Performance Measuring MOM Agent Alert Incoming Rate (Enabled) 2. PMC Measure - Performance Measuring MOM Agent Data Incoming Rate (Enabled) 3. PMC Measure - Performance Measuring MOM Agent Raw Bytes Received (Enabled) 4. PMC Measure - Performance Measuring MOM Agent Raw Bytes Transmitted (Enabled) 5. PMC Measure - Performance Measuring MOM Host - %Processor Time (Enabled) 6. PMC Measure - Performance Measuring MOM Host - Handle Count (Disabled) 7. PMC Measure - Performance Measuring MOM Host - Private Bytes (Disabled) (Level1) Agents on all MOM roles (Enabled) ------------------------------------------ 1. Event - A management pack script was unable to complete successfully (Enabled) 2. Event - A script failed (Enabled) 3. Event - A script failed to get or set a varset (Enabled) 7. Event - Agent communication failure troubleshooting events (Disabled) The total number of rules exported was: 112 

This tool is useful to see if a rule was applied but isn't showing up, or if the wrong rule was applied. You would then compare the output of the RSOR tool to the rule groups in that computer by virtue of computer group membership and look for discrepancies. You would do this in a situation where an override to a processing rule has been configured for a particular computer and you want see if the override has been applied properly. See the "Overrides" section in Chapter 4.

3.8.2. Agent Helper

The Agent Helper is actually a management pack; for more about management packs see Chapter 4. When an agent fails to return a heartbeat, this tool will execute a managed code response (.NET code) against the managed computer. It does this from the management server, so it is called a server-side response. To use this tool, you must import the management pack in the Administrator console and copy the AgentHelper.dll into the installation directory, which is usually C:\Program Files\Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 on the management servers. Note that while you only need to import the management pack once into the management group, you need to copy the AgentHelper.dll into the installation directory on each management server in the management group because the responses could run from any of them.

When a failed heartbeat is detected, the responses will be one of three actions depending on the situation. The rule could attempt to restart the agent, reinstall the agent if it is missing, update the agent's settings and thereby force a re-establishment of communications between the agent and the management server.