Operations Manager Debugging Part II: Workflows

Workflows are the fundamental mechanism by which Operations Manager gets things done. Workflows, in essence, are individual pieces of code (modules) that are chained together. For a primer on workflows and modules, I recommend the AuthorMPs site. Workflows remind me of Powershell pipelines or to a lesser extent, linux command piping. Individual commandlets (the equivalent of OpsMgr modules) can be mixed together in different ways to accomplish a more complex task (the equivalent of an OpsMgr workflow) by piping output from one to another. As long as the output from one commandlet can be processed by the next commandlet in...

Operations Manager Debugging Part I: Top 10 Tools for Developing and Debugging Management Packs

During that last year and a half that I’ve been on the F5 Management Pack team, we’ve had to do quite a bit of Systems Center Operations Manager debugging. I think it is certainly possible to develop management packs without needing to delve into Operations Manager internals at all, but much of what our pack does is outside the norm. For example: We have a custom-built agent on the Big-IP LTM box that our management pack talks to using a proprietary protocol We’ve built custom OpsMgr workflow modules in order to meet...