Comments on: Watch Those Variant Types http://operatingquadrant.com/2009/08/13/watch-those-variant-types/ Living in the I.T. Operating Quadrant. Useful articles on real world solutions involving Monitoring (System Center Operations Manager), Virtualization, Reporting, Scripting (PowerShell), and much more. Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:50:45 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Kristopher Bash http://operatingquadrant.com/2009/08/13/watch-those-variant-types/#comment-223 Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:06:40 +0000 http://operatingquadrant.com/?p=56#comment-223 I agree with you about the obvious omission from the GUI. However, much of OpsMgr’s SNMP capability is not exposed through the GUI, but only in the Authoring Console, and even then, much of it is not terribly well documented. I suspect this is an area that will be improving in every future version.

If you’re working in the Authoring Console and creating composite datasources, there’s a bit of handy trick you can play with the SNMP data types. A null value can be converted to a string without error, but not to a numeric data type. So if you’re polling an OID that may or may not have a value, you can use an expression filter to compare the value in string form, and only if it looks ok there pass it to a condition detection that compares it in numeric form.

]]> By: Matt Duguid http://operatingquadrant.com/2009/08/13/watch-those-variant-types/#comment-222 Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:35:24 +0000 http://operatingquadrant.com/?p=56#comment-222 Thanks for writing this article, we ran into this particular issue with SCOM 2007 R2 and with the information quickly resolved it.

We found we also needed to set the VariantType to 3 (integer) rather than the 8 (string) and we also needed to use a XPathQuery of “/DataItem/SnmpVarBinds/SnmpVarBinds[2]/Value” to actually get the condition to be met.

We were left pondering why they didn’t create a drop down box for variable type in the application GUI and ability to run a live check…would save a load of time when setting up a lot of monitors!

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