Building an Oracle Management Pack for OpsMgr Cross-Platform Agents, Part 1

Over a series of future posts, I intend to describe my efforts to build an OpsMgr SCX Management Pack for monitoring of Oracle running on UNIX/Linux platforms.   In this initial post, I will describe the first step in building this MP:  creating a custom shell command invoker probe action.  As I had described in this previous post, the Microsoft.Unix.WSMan.Invoke.Probe in the Microsoft Unix Library MP provides a wrapped version of the Microsoft.SystemCenter.WSManagement.Invoker.   However, I wanted a bit more granular control of the invoke action (e.g. modifying the command timeout) and felt it appropriate to create a custom Probe Action to wrap the Microsoft.SystemCenter.WSManagement.Invoker module and decided to create a similar, but custom probe action.

The creation of such a Probe Action is fairly straight-foward:

The configuration parameters are defined as follows:

The Probe Action consists only of a single Member Module: Microsoft.SystemCenter.WSManagement.Invoker.  The configuration for this module is:

And lastly, the data type configuration for the Probe Action:

The next Probe Action module that I created in this management pack was one for easily invoking Shell commands.   I knew that I would be using the ExecuteShellCommand action of the Invoker quite a bit, so I wanted to wrap that in a Probe Action that accepted just a target system, timeout, and shell command string as input. 

Creating the Probe Action:

Defining Configuration parameters:

This Probe Action has only one Member Module, the custom invoker probe action described above.  The configuration of this module is thus:

In this case, the Uri is: http://schemas.microsoft.com/wbem/wscim/1/cim-schema/2/SCX_OperatingSystem?__cimnamespace=root/scx

The Input parameter wraps the ShellCommand parameter in the necessary XML block for the invoker probe action:

<p:ExecuteShellCommand_INPUT xmlns:p=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/wbem/wscim/1/cim-schema/2/SCX_OperatingSystem”><p:command>$Config/ShellCommand$</p:command><p:timeout>$Config/CommandTimeout$</p:timeout></p:ExecuteShellCommand_INPUT>

And the data type configuration for this Probe Action.

The obvious benefit of creating this Shell Command module as an independent Probe Action (instead of in a data source) is that the same module can then be used in both discovery and monitoring data sources, by simply pairing the Probe Action with a Scheduler or Discovery Scheduler data source module.   

In the next post on this topic, I will describe the creation of a Probe Action for executing SQL queries with SQLPlus.