MP Release Management and Customization
Controlling change is something that IT groups deal with on a daily basis. Change continues to be one of the top reasons for IT service disruptions and changes to tools like System Center Operations Manager are no different. A bad Management Pack can trigger an alert storm creating unnecessary work for many and possibly creating a situation there a truly critical alert gets missed. A poorly written MP can discover many more system than it was designed to or collect far more data than necessary bogging down agents, networks and data warehouses.
Silect MP Studio provides the necessary tools and infrastructure to manage changes to Management Packs whether its a new MP being deployed, a new release of an existing MP or customizations to an MP in the form of overrides.
For new MPs that are being deployed, MP Studio provides a complete analysis and reporting environment to ensure you know everything you need to know about the MP. A version control database allows you to setup an initial baseline of the MP to which all changes and updates will be tracked and audited. The MP Studio test feature let’s you run the MP on an ad hoc basis against systems within your environment to simulate the implementation of the MP. You can see what gets discovered, the data that gets collected and what alerts are generated.
Here’s an example of using MP Studio’s group and filter capabilities to analyze an MP:
Click here to learn more about MP Studio’s analysis and reporting features.
If an MP gets updated MP Studio let’s you see all the changes between the old MP and the new MP. The comparison report will show you the differences between 2 MPs:
A Group Compare feature is also available which compares installed MPs running in Management Groups to copies of the MP in the MP Studio Store database.
Customizing an existing MP typically involves the creation of overrides. MP Studio makes it easy to create overrides for a single MP or a group of MPs. The Group Override Generator finds common overridable parameters and let’s you apply override values to them all in one easy step:
