Simply put: Leverage the ‘DNS Addendum pack’. Why? DNS is a translation method to convert names to IP’s. Can you imagine if we wanted to connect to google via IP? The amount of workflows in the SCOM DNS pack (built by the DNS Product Group) makes for an astounding number of workflows running on your DC every minute. Forward and reverse lookups are a good check, verifying DNS is functioning. In a complex environment with 100’s of zones, SCOM becomes a utilization culprit for a DC’s primary missions – authenticate and resolve. This article will help you understand how the pack will add new capabilities and tune DNS monitoring to best practice.
QUICK DOWNLOAD(S)
2016+ https://github.com/theKevinJustin/DNSAddendumAgnostic
What capabilities does the ‘DNS Addendum pack’ provide?
Count logic monitors (i.e. x events in y time, and self heal)
Daily summary report of DNS alerts broken out
DNS service(s) recovery automation
Daily alert closure workflow to close out DNS rules/monitor
Synthetic internal/external nslookup monitor (scoped to PDC emulators versus ALL DNS servers
WMI validation alert recovery to prevent false positive alerts with weird one off scenarios – one example: Security tools randomly block WMI access.
Download the DNS Addendum on GitHub and the PDF install guide, to improve AD Integrated (ADI) DNS monitoring on Windows Server 2016+ (version agnostic).
XML authoring
The pack greatly decreases alerts, workflows on your AD integrated DNS servers, and the XML authoring is an easy feat. After you import the pack, find/replace is required for two pieces.
- Group GUIDs update, after installing this pack.
Find/replace the GUIDs, as they are unique to every SCOM management group, hard coding the group ID GUID is not possible.
From PowerShell, on your SCOM management server, run these commands (after DNS Addendum installed)
Use get-scomclassinstance -DisplayName “GroupNameHere” | ft Id
Find/Replace the GUID in the pack with the ID from the output above.
- Discovery group regular expressions (RegEx)
##DNSServerRegEx##
Find ##DNSServerRegEx## and replace with your DNS server expressions.
Example server names: 16dns01, 19dc01,16dns02,19dc02,19dc03, etc.
RegEx = (?i)16dns0|19dc0
Save and Import & Enjoy!