Monday, December 6, 2010

Supplemental MP for monitoring individual printers

Personally I am not a real fan of the Print Server MP.

Why?

For one thing, it does not monitor the individual printers. Secondly, it’s a converted MOM 2005 MP. When SCOM 2007 just hit RTM many MPs were like that. But hey, we are now at the end of 2010 and therefore I do not see any reason why this particular MP is still a converted one. In order to unleash the real power of SCOM a MP requires to be fully native. The ‘latest’ version comes from the 25th of August 2008…
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So this MP lacks much functionality like for instance monitoring Print Servers based on Windows Server 2008 R2. Gladly Kevin Holman has solved it by writing (and sharing) an addendum MP, which discovers those instances and monitors them as well. Addendum MP to be found here.

Another thing which this MP misses out on is the monitoring of individual printers. Gladly Steve Rachui has written a MP which does just that. This MP doesn’t really need the Printer Server MP. The MP Steve has made shows this View in the SCOM Console:
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This is really more like it! Because it is a native SCOM MP, its built in 2010 AND it monitors individual printers! Wh00t!

MP to be downloaded from here.

Thanks Steve for your efforts AND sharing it! Much appreciated.

One thing keeps on nagging me in the back of my mind: When does the Print Server Team pick up the efforts from Steve and Kevin, ditch the old MP and bring out a NEW NATIVE MP? But perhaps I am asking too much now….

1 comment:

None said...

My major problem with MS/SCOM is the very poor track record in releasing updated, native, and bug-free MPs. Your printing MP is a perfect example of MS completely dropping the ball. MS's track record is so poor that I am looking at other solutions that the vendor more actively supports. Get with the program MS!