SCOM Alerts in Citrix Director

With Director 7.7, you can view the alerts from SCOM server for various management packs on director. This will help the XenDesktop admins to manage the infrastructure on which the XenDesktop is built upon without needing to go to another console like operations manager console.

This post will help you in understanding how you can visualize the infrastructure alerts obtained from SCOM server, analyze their details and fix them from a single Director console.

Infrastructure Management from Director Console

SCOM, as it’s a widely popular cross-platform data center management system, would be an ideal choice for the IT to monitor and manage large infrastructure deployments. For an infrastructure that uses XenDesktop and XenApp 7.7 for the desktop virtualization, the XenDesktop admins would likely prefer to manage their infrastructure along with the monitoring of XenDesktop and XenApp 7.7 at one place.

Director 7.7 comes in handy for such a requirement with this new feature which adds the capability to view the Alerts from SCOM on the Citrix Director console.

Requirements

The integration supports SCOM 2012 R2 only. The software and hardware configuration could be as specified for SCOM 2012 R2 and XenDesktop. However, the recommended software configuration could be as below

• Windows Server 2012 R2
• SCOM 2012 R2
• PowerShell 3.0 or higher. Director and SCOM Server should have the same version of PowerShell.
• Quad Core CPU with 16 GB RAM
• Platinum License for XenDesktop.
• XenDesktop Controller Version should be 7.7 or higher.

The notification tip and slide bar

The Director admins can get the notifications of the SCOM alerts via the notification tip. The alerts can be of type critical or warning. This notification tip is available on all pages except the user details page.

The notification tip gives the total number of active alerts. It includes the active alerts from SCOM server and also the proactive notification and alerts from XenDesktop.

The slide bar opens when you click on the notification tip. There are two tabs in the slide bar.

Director Alerts

The director tab gives the active alerts generated by XenDesktop based on the user configuration. Refer Configuring and Managing alerts and notifications on director for more details on this feature.

SCOM Alerts

SCOM Alerts are shown on the tab on the right. The slide bar shows the list of all the active alerts at that particular instant of time. For each alert the following properties will be displayed:

Clicking on the active alerts on the slide bar navigates the user to the SCOM alerts details page which gives detailed information about the alert.

SCOM Alerts Section

SCOM Alerts section is available as a separate tab under the Alerts. It provides a historical list of the alerts generated on the SCOM and can be filtered as per the user choice with many filters available.

We can filter these alerts as follows:

Management Pack Name: The management packs can be searched by typing in the name of the management pack. The admin should know the part or full name of the management pack. We can then filter the historical alerts based on the management pack we select from the list of results returned from the management pack search.

Source: Similar to the above search, the source machine which led to the alerts can be searched and selected to filter the list of historical results shown on this page

Severity: The alerts can be filtered by severity. It can be either Critical or Warning or All (both critical and warning).

Time Period: The SCOM alerts can be filtered to show the alerts which occurred within certain time period from the current time instance. Director shows SCOM alerts with option to filter for last 24 hours or last 7 days or last month. Historical SCOM Alerts greater than a month time are not shown on director.

The following information is displayed in the list of alerts shown:

Note: The list of alerts can be sorted by clicking on the column name. Default list will be sorted according to time with the latest alerts shown on top.

SCOM Web Console

SCOM Web Console can be launched from director by clicking on the ‘Launch SCOM Web Console’ hyperlink available on the SCOM Alerts page.

Clicking on the hyperlink launches the SCOM Web Console in a new tab on the same browser.

Export SCOM Alerts

SCOM Alerts can be exported to be viewed later or for creating reports using exported data. The list of alerts can be exported in 3 different formats.

1. PDF
2. CSV
3. Excel

The SCOM alert details page gives a detailed view of the SCOM alert which contains the below information:

Configuration

The following needs to be done to configure SCOM Integration feature:

On Director Server

1. Enable Powershell Remoting

2. Add SCOM Management Server to TrustedHosts List

From an elevated Powershell CLI execute the following command(s):

a) Get the current list of TrustedHosts

Get-Item WSMAN:\localhost\Client\TrustedHosts

b)Add FQDN of SCOM Management Server to the list of TrustedHosts

Set-Item WSMAN:\localhost\Client\TrustedHosts –Value “<FQDN SCOM Management Server>,<Old Values>”

<Old Values> represent the existing set of entries returned from Get-Item cmdlet.

3. Configure SCOM Using DirectorConfig Tool

On SCOM Management Server

1. Assign Director Administrators to an appropriate SCOM Administrator role

a)Open SCOM Management console and navigate to Administration => Security => User Roles

b) Here, you can create a new User Role or modify an existing one. There are four (4) categories of SCOM Operators and these roles define the nature of access to SCOM data. For example: A read-only SCOM operator will not see the Administration pane, cannot discover or manage rules, machines or accounts, while the SCOM Operator role is a Full Administrator role.

c) From the Director Integration perspective, if a Director administrator is assigned to non-operator role the following operations will not be available to the Director administrator.

• If there are multiple management servers configured and, in the event of primary management server not being available, the Director administrator will not be able to connect to secondary management server.

Note: Here, the primary management server is the one configured in the Director web.config file i.e. the one specified while configuring using the DirectorConfig tool. The secondary management servers are peer management servers of the primary.

• While filtering alerts, the Director administrator will not be able to search for alert Source, as that requires an operator level permission.

d) To modify any User Role, right click on the role and then click Properties, this displays the User Role Properties dialog.

Here you can add/remove Director Administrators from the specified user role.

2. Add Director Administrators to “Remote Management Users” group on SCOM Management server. This allows the Director administrators to establish remote powershell connection.

3. Enable Powershell Remoting

4. Set WS-Management properties limits

a) Modify MaxConcurrentUsers:

In CLI: winrm set winrm/config/winrs @{MaxConcurrentUsers = “20”}
In PowerShell: Set-Item WSMan:\localhost\Shell\MaxConcurrentUsers 20

b) Modify MaxShellsPerUser:

In CLI: winrm set winrm/config/winrs @{MaxShellsPerUser=”20″}
In PowerShell: Set-Item WSMan:\localhost\Shell\MaxShellsPerUser 20

c) Modify MaxMemoryPerShellMB:

In CLI: winrm set winrm/config/winrs @{MaxMemoryPerShellMB=”1024″}
In PowerShell: Set-Item WSMan:\localhost\Shell\MaxMemoryPerShellMB 1024

5. In order to ensure integration works in mixed domain envirenments set the following registry entry.

Path: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
Key: LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy
Type: DWord
Value: 1

Note: This feature requires both the XD/XA and director versions to be 7.7 or above