Creating a New Management Pack for Customizations

Most vendor management packs are sealed so that you cannot change any of the original settings in the management pack file. However, you can create customizations, such as overrides or new monitoring objects, and save them to a different management pack. As a best practice, you should instead create a separate management pack for each sealed management pack that you want to customize.
Creating a new management pack for storing overrides has the following advantages:
It simplifies the process of exporting customizations that were created in your test and preproduction environments to your production environment. For example, instead of exporting a default management pack that contains customizations from multiple management packs, you can export just the management pack that contains customizations of a single management pack.
It allows you to delete the original management pack without first having to delete the default management pack. A management pack that contains customizations is dependent on the original management pack. This dependency requires you to delete the management pack with customizations before you can delete the original management pack. If you customized multiple management packs and saved the customizations in the default management pack, then you will lose the customizations for all of your management packs.
It simplifies the process of tracking and updating customizations to individual management packs.
For more information about sealed and unsealed management packs, see Sealed Management Pack Files (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/hh457596.aspx). For more information about management pack customizations and the default management pack, see Selecting a Management Pack File (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/hh457560.aspx).
Optional Configuration
Business Critical monitoring raises aggregated alerts when there is a substantial week-over-week increase in the number of problems detected. You can change the alerting levels for the management pack by overriding the alert rules. For more information and for instructions on how to override a rule, see How to Override a Rule or Monitor (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh212869.aspx).
The management pack does not raise alerts for minor degradations in the health of individual computers. To examine the health of individual computers, use the computer’s health explorer.
The reports use aggregations in the reporting server to optimize the reports rendering. For descriptions of the reports contained in this management pack, see Appendix: Reports.
In the Windows 8 management pack, the items in the following list are disabled by default. You can enable the items for an individual Windows 8 computer by adding the computer to All Business Critical Windows 8 Client group.
Performance data collection
Event collection
Alerts generated by rules
Alerts generated by monitors
Security Considerations
If you operate in a low-privilege computing environment, you might have to modify the level of permissions that are assigned to the accounts you use to run management pack rules, monitors, discoveries, recoveries, and diagnostic tasks. These accounts must have minimum permissions for management pack components in order to run properly.
Low-Privilege Environments Low-privilege Environments and the Agent Action Account
You can use a low-privilege account for the agent action account, although a number of rules and monitors require elevated privileges.
Discoveries and Monitors Configured to Use the Privileged Monitoring Account Run As Profile
The following table lists the object discoveries and monitors that are configured by default to use the Privileged Monitoring Account Run As profile, which defaults to Local System and does not require association with any Run As account or target computer. As a result, no user intervention is required for these object discoveries and monitors that must use a high-privilege account.
Note
You can change the default action account by changing the agent action account associated with Privileged Monitoring Account Run As profile.
If your requirements stipulate that only a low-privilege account should be used in your environment, use overrides to disable the monitor and object discoveries for the appropriate operating systems listed in the table.
For more information and for instructions about how to use overrides, see How to Override a Rule or Monitor (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh212869.aspx).
Operating System and Monitor Type
|
Discovery or Monitor
|
Windows 8
|
Discover Windows Physical Disks
|
Windows 8
|
Discover Windows Logical Disks
|
Windows 8
|
Logical Disk Availability Health
|
Windows 8
|
Computer Browser Service Health
|
Windows 8 Aggregate Client monitoring
|
Discover Windows Physical Disk
|
Windows 8 Aggregate Client monitoring
|
Discover Windows Computer
|
Windows 8 Aggregate Client monitoring
|
Discover Operating System
|
Windows 8 Aggregate Client monitoring
|
Discover Windows Logical Disk System Drive
|
Windows 8 Aggregate Client monitoring
|
Discover Windows Logical Disk
|
Windows 8 Aggregate Client monitoring
|
Discover Windows Physical DIMM Disk
|
Windows 8 Aggregate Client monitoring
|
Discover Windows Physical Disk
|
Windows 8 Aggregate Client monitoring
|
Rules that access the event log
|
Windows 8 Aggregate Client monitoring
|
All unit monitors
|
Using Roles
In order to use Aggregate Client monitoring to monitor Windows 8 Clients in your environment, you must be assigned the Operator role in the Operations Manager. You must be assigned the Administrator role in the Operations Manager in order to use Business Critical Client monitoring. For more information about the types of client monitoring available in the Operations Manager, see Understanding Management Pack Operations section of this guide.
Computer Groups
When imported, each individual client management pack creates a corresponding computer group. For example, when you install Windows 8 Operating Systems Management Pack, a Windows 8 computer group is created.
The following groups are defined in this management pack:
All Business Critical Windows 8 Client
Windows 8 Client Computer Group
Note
Computer groups are populated by discovery rules that are located in each client management pack. If you receive an error message when you try to view the properties of a computer group, ensure that you installed the management pack that contains the discovery rules for the computer group.
The following table lists the management packs that contains the discovery rules for each computer group.
Computer group
|
Management pack
|
All Business Critical Windows 8 Client
|
Microsoft.Windows.Client.Win8.mp
|
Windows 8 Client Computer Group
|
Microsoft.Windows.Client.Win8.mp
|
|