OpsMgr: DHCP management pack for Windows Server 2012 is available

You can download it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39062

This article is based on version 6.0.7033.0 of the MP.

What's new?

• All workflows are implemented using PowerShell to improve overall functionality for this Management Pack.
• Failover Relationships are now a supported configuration that is being discovered and monitored by the new 2012 Management Pack.
• Discovery and Monitoring of a DHCP Cluster installation.
• Scopes, super scopes utilization is being monitored based on events that provide 80% and 100% usage.
• Utilization of scopes based on policies, client packet drop and residual IP addresses range monitoring.

The guide is very simple and straightforward.  It also lists out the rules and monitors, and discoveries in the MP with a good description of each.

What's in the MP?

This MP targets the Windows Server version 2012 DHCP servers ONLY (Microsoft.Windows.DHCPServer.2012.mp).  It does not replace the previous MP versions… so you will have to consider multiple MP’s if you run DHCP on multiple OS versions.  With all the huge improvements and benefits of DHCP on Windows Server 2012, it would make sense to rapidly shift all DHCP to WS2012 servers in your environment.

There are 20 monitors in the DHCP 2012 MP.  The bummer is that a LOT of these are manual reset monitors.  Manual reset monitors have to be reset, well, manually and my experience has been that the majority of customers do not like these as they do not live in the OpsMgr console.  In the past, whenever we shipped a management pack with manual reset monitors, we would include disabled rules that used the same data source, however this MP does not include those.  Keep this in mind as you deploy this MP.

There are only 4 rules in this MP.  All 4 are performance collection to show scope address utilization.

In the Library MP Microsoft.Windows.DHCPServer.Library.mp, there are many rules and monitors, however, most of these are carry-overs from an older MP version.  That said – they still do focus on the health monitoring of the DHCP server, such as the DHCP service, DHCP database, and many DHCP events.  The event monitors again are mostly manual reset monitors, so keep that in mind.

Key Monitoring Scenarios:

Known issues:

There are some challenges with this MP.  For instance – all scopes are discovered and monitored as a single object.  If a scope fills up – this will turn the monitor to an unhealthy state, and generate an alert.  If a subsequent scope fills up – you will NOT get another alert as the monitor is already unhealthy, and since it is a manual reset monitor… it is highly likely it will stay in this state unless someone resets it after resolving the issue.

One option for this – is to rebuild these scope-full monitors as rules – and simply allow them to create a new alert for each event, so you wont miss any scopes that are full.  The downside is you will see multiple events/alerts as the DHCP service logs these events on a regular basis (once per hour)