Sunday, September 30, 2012

OM12 Update Alert Connector (UAC) Is Available Now

For a few days now the UAC for OM12 is made publicly available. UAC is a tool mainly used in large enterprises and – as the related websites states – ‘…can modify alert custom fields with additional information useful for situations like controlling alert forwarding to incident management systems and help reduce noise in the incident creation process…’

In other words, it helps you to integrate OM12 with ticketing, alert or incident management systems.

Kevin has written a good posting all about UAC for OM12, including a manual how to install it, to be found here UAC itself can be downloaded from here.

Orchestrator?
IMHO, UAC is a nice tool (implemented it once for a customer running SCOM R2) but nowadays much of its functionality can be replaced by Orchestrator. With System Center 2012 it comes for the same price so no questions there. Today I would look into the possibilities to replace UAC with Orchestrator.

Another piece of advice, taken directly from Kevin’s blog posting: ‘…I don't recommend that customers deploy the AUC unless you have a good business need for it.  It becomes a link in the chain of events to get in your incident management system, and could be one more thing to break…’ and I totally agree with him on that one.

Want to know more? First of all READ Kevin’s posting since it contains tons of good information you should know BEFORE you start using this Connector. UAC itself can be downloaded from here. It’s a single MSI file which also contains a guide (AlertUpdateConnector.rtf) about this Connector. READ it as well please before installing it so you know what you’re doing.

One more thing
Since this tool is similar to a Resource Kit Tool, it isn’t directly supported by Microsoft.

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