Azure Automation Form Generator
A web tool to easily auto-generate forms from your powershell automation runbook in Azure.
Blazor State Management
This post is a small tip if you are dealing with managing and persisting states in your Blazor app. Jeremy Likness made a good post covering the challenges with maintaining the state of your component and what options you have to solve it. An obvious example here is when you want to maintain the data in your form. When you are filling out a form, and then navigate away from the page, it would be convenient in most cases (depending on the scenario), that the data you filled out is not gone. Looking at the Counter component from the template [...]
SCSM Giveaway 1: Send Email – Change Request 2016
It ain't over until the phoenix in its own right sings. I'm giving away some of the Service Manager (and a bit of SCOM) stuff I've been doing over the past couple of years just sitting and collecting dust. And whatever opinion or feelings you might have about this product, there are still many customers around the world using the tool every day. So before it's too late, I feel it be better to get it out while it's still being used. This first give-away is, you could say, an obligation to give to the community, because it was created [...]
Send instant message from server back to client using SignalR
UPDATED 28-08-2018: Added guidance to send message to specific client and not just for all + more screenshots on how _signalContextHub was added. This is a small blogpost explaining how to use SignalR for ASP Core 2.1 to send a message (or a signal :) ) from the server (controller action) back to the client view. Alot of posts explains how to make various bidirectional chats using SignalR to send messages from client to the server (from view to controller and back again), but the other way around (from server to client) is useful if you want to show progress bars [...]
ASP.NET Core 2.0 MVC: editing complex viewmodels with child models and dynamically retrieve properties from the model in the view or just a REALLY long title…
For the past couple of months I've been doing ASP.NET Core coding projects – building the backend and frontend of various websites for our customers. This has been a fun experience, but at times also very frustrating when things aren’t really working out. One thing is to follow examples and tutorials based on “perfect world” scenarios, another is to deal with real-world data and requirements. So this will be my first post in hopefully a series of ASP.NET Core posts to share some tips and tricks when things get a little more complicated. I assume you have some knowledge of [...]
How to use SCCM SDK in C# with a WQL Query that contains joins
Sometimes you just stop and wonder: how DO you make a WQL query with joins and use it with the SCCM SDK in C#? It's that gnawing thought we all have right? So after spending an hour reading through people saying: "It's NOT supported!" and some people who said it was (without any examples whatsoever), I managed to get a small sample working. So if any of you should come across this challenge (which is of course the most of the world), then here is a code-example on how to do it: It's a small console application that output all [...]
Send Email for SCSM 2016 – Service Request
System Center Service Manager 2016 have been released for quite a while now and more and more are starting the upgrade process. As you probably know, the .NET framework has also been bumped to 4.5.1, which effectively means that all solutions made in the old .NET 3.5 Framework also needs to be upgraded. Microsoft have done their part, but all custom solutions needs to be upgraded as well as community solutions. One of those solutions is the popular Send Email made my Travis Wright for Incident (codeplex project uploaded by Christian Booth)and later adopted to Service Requests by Patrick Sundqvist. [...]
VIP Users Part 2 or how to synchronize group membership from AD to SCSM
Dealing with VIP users is a common practice within Service Management. This old blogpost explains a very good approach to mark VIP users in SCSM as VIP users. We simply extend the User class with an extra boolean property (true/false) and we then expose that property on the Incident right under the Affected User. That way Analysts can quickly see if the person is VIP and you can also make various workflows or notifications based on this property. What is missing in the above post is how we figure out who is VIP or not. For many, this relationship [...]
Azure Automation + Slack + Service Manager
In this post I will demonstrate an example on how to use the popular team collaboration tool Slack together with Azure Automation to retrieve data from your on-premise SCSM environment. The data in this example are Incidents retrieved via an Azure Powershell runbook. The setup is very simple and does not require any development skills (only a little powershell ). The scope could easily be extended to more useful scenarious such as sending reviewal messages to your managers or perhaps a Change Advisory Board (CAB) to accept or decline Review Activities in their small team meeting room. This is just [...]
Cireson Portal – Getting started with customization and general tips & tricks
This post is made to help you get started with customizing the Cireson self-service Portal, but also includes a collection of customization code examples and tips you perhaps didn’t know about. The blogpost will mainly focus on customization done in CSS and Javascript/jQuery and not the customization you can do via the Cireson administration GUI or JSON files. If you are new to the Cireson Portal I would recommend you to read up on some of the good knowledge articles Cireson has on the topic. I’ve gathered a list here which also include some external ressources from the community. [...]
SCSM Send Email for Cireson Analyst Portal
07-12-2016 Updated to support Cireson Portal 6+ Many people still use the community solution called Send Email made by Travis Wright for Incident and later extended to Service Requests by Patrick Sundqvist. This allows the analyst to write a message to the Affected User or other related users on the Incident or Service Request and wrap the message in a nice email notification with prefilled information of your own choosing. Example: At the same time you can control what should happen to the Incident or Service Request after the email has been sent – for example if the Message [...]
How are my SCSM views performing?
Powershell script to analyze all existing SCSM Views and find out if there is any performance issues.
Impacted Business Services – Free console task for SCSM
UPDATE: 24-11-2015: Version 2.0: Added support for localization. Open the new provided Coretech.ImpactedBusinessService.Configuration.xml Management Pack and edit/add language pack sections (instructions inside) Example of German translation (thanks to Florian Schwendtner): Added ability to choose own columns related to the System.Service class (instructions inside configuration management pack) The Listview is now a Service Manager listview Added new transparent task icon Often you want to quickly determine which Business Service(s) is affected/impacted from a Change Request when making a certain change to a Configuration Item, e.g. a database, computer, network component etc. There is no quick way to achieve this today [...]
Service Manager powershell snippets
Merry x-mas! In today’s December calendar tips & trick I'm going to a post some useful powershell snippets for Service Manager. As we all know, the December 11th is the special day where the Bethlehem-powershell star outshined all the others. The scripts here is mostly for administrative purposes. They are of course provided “as-is” so feel free to expand/optimize/ include more error handling etc. Create Management Pack UPDATE: Script now works with different windows localization. Default language will now be set according to the console language user preference and not the windows locale Unfortunately we are not [...]
AD-Connector – Running with Error: Stopping at 92% – Object instance not set to an instance of an object
Yesterday I encountered an error I haven’t seen before when trying to set up a new AD Connector in SCSM. The connector always stopped at 92% and generated the following error in the eventlog: Data synchronization failed by DefaultCache.MomStore.ADUsers_Manager.DefaultCache.ADConnector.5f4e989660d749b6b420fb4532c5ed9a:Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.Connector.Sql.DataConnectorSql. Exception type:NullReferenceException Exception message:Object reference not set to an instance of an object.. StackTrace: at Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.Linking.Consumer.OperationalStore.DataSetTransformer.ComputeManagerDeletes(Dictionary`2 result, IList`1 existingManagers, Dictionary`2 userToNewManager) at Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.Linking.Consumer.OperationalStore.DataSetTransformer.DeleteObsoleteManagerRelationships(ManagementPackRelationship relationshipType, Dictionary`2 result, EnterpriseManagementGroup managementGroup) at Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.Linking.Consumer.OperationalStore.DataSetTransformer.TransformToEnterpriseManagementObjects(EnterpriseManagementGroup managementGroup, ManagementPackType storeType, SessionSettings sessionSettings, Boolean useStagingSDK, Boolean isGRCSolution) at Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.Linking.Consumer.OperationalStore.OperationalStoreConsumer.ConsumeData(DataSet data, SessionSettings sessionSettings) at Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.Connector.Datacenter.SessionHost.DataSync() As I couldn’t find anything on the net, I started digging into the error. [...]
Set-SCSMTemplateWithActivities powershell script
UPDATE 02-01-2014: Fixed some issues in script When dealing with the cmdlet: Set-SCSMTemplate in SMLets, you might have noticed that if you apply a template with activities, the prefix of the ID’s (e.g. RA300 or MA250) is all missing. And it’s the same issue if done via the SDK or Orchestrator. One workaround, described by Lee Berg here: http://www.leealanberg.com/blog/2013/03/13/scsm-automated-service-request-smlets-creation-issues-and-work-arrounds/ is to modify the management pack that contains the template, and then insert the prefix like this: MA{0}. This approach works, but can be quite cumbersome as it takes time to do and also “locks” the template so any modification [...]
Solution to clean User Input from Service Manager Portal and commit it to the Action Log
This solution converts end-user userinput from Service Manager Portal into a clean formated string table and commits it to a new Action Log entry in top. The script can be modified for other purposes: e.g. used in Orchestrator or appended to the description field.
How to create a link to a Knowledge Article in an email template
What if I told you.. you could make a direct link to a knowledge article that is attached to an Incident (or other workitems) and present it in an email template to a user. Scenario: 1) The supporter gets a new Incident from an end-user: 2) Instead of writing the same message over and over, he or she decides to attach a knowledge article related to the issue and send a little message along to the end-user: 3) The end-user then receives a new email triggered from the SendEmail worklfow 4) He can then click on the link and [...]
Service Manager 2012 R2 Preview – Features and updates
Just installed Service Manager 2012 R2 Preview version! Download available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/system-center-2012-r2.aspx As I couldn't find any good release notes information, I thought I'd make a first-move on any new stuff. I will try to update this post regularly as I discover things. These are the official release notes: What's new in Service Manager 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn299380.aspx Release notes for Service Manager 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn299381.aspx The links sound promising, but doesn't actually state anything. Installation I installed this on a virtual machine running Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview Standard edition with SQL2012(yeah why not go all in on R2? ). [...]
How to change status on Service Request templates (or other templates)
A small how-to guide on how to change the status on templates that can't be done via the scsm console.