Microsoft: Windows Server PowerPack, version 117

Version 117 of the Microsoft: Windows Server PowerPack updates several Dynamic Applications and libraries version.

• Minimum Required SL1 Version: 12.1.0

Before You Install or Upgrade

Ensure that you are running version 12.1.0 or later of SL1 before installing "Microsoft: Windows Server" PowerPack version 117.

For details on upgrading SL1, see the relevant SL1 Platform Release Notes.

Installing or Upgrading to this Version

By default, installing a new version of a PowerPack will overwrite all content in that PowerPack that has already been installed on the target system. You can use the Enable Selective PowerPack Field Protection setting in the Behavior Settings page (System > Settings > Behavior) to prevent the new version of the PowerPack from overwriting local changes for some commonly customized fields.

If you are currently using the Dynamic Applications in this PowerPack to monitor devices, collection errors might occur for one or two polling cycles during the installation of a new version. To prevent collection errors during an upgrade, you can optionally disable collection for monitored devices before performing the following steps and re-enable collection after the upgrade.

To install this PowerPack:

1. Search for and download the PowerPack from the PowerPacks page (Product Downloads > PowerPacks & SyncPacks) at the ScienceLogic Support Site.
2. In SL1, go to the PowerPacks page (System > Manage > PowerPacks).
3. Click the Actions menu and choose Import PowerPack. The Import PowerPack modal appears.
4. Click Browse and navigate to the PowerPack file from step 1.
5. Select the PowerPack file and click Import. The PowerPack Installer modal displays a list of the PowerPack contents.
6. Click Install. The PowerPack is added to the PowerPack Manager page.

For more information about using the PowerPack, see the Monitoring Windows Systems with PowerShell manual.

Features

This release includes the following features:

• Dynamic Applications that collect configuration and performance data about Windows Servers
• Event Policies that are triggered when Windows Server devices meet certain status criteria
• Device Classes for each type of Windows Server

NOTE: The Device Classes include older device types that can be discovered but are no longer supported by ScienceLogic.

• Run Book Policies and Run Book Actions that align a more detailed device class with each discovered device
• A sample Credential for discovering Windows Server devices
• A Credential Test to ensure that your Windows credential works as expected

Enhancements and Issues Addressed

The following enhancements and addressed issues are included this release of the "Microsoft: Windows Server":

• Updated the “Windows Server Process Details - ICDA“ PowerShell request in the “Microsoft: Windows Server IC Process Service Cache” Dynamic Application to catch errors when merging process collections. (Case: 00409172)
• Updated the snippets of "Microsoft: Windows Server IC Process Inventory" and "Microsoft: Windows Server IC Process Performance" Dynamic Applications to verify the length of the command line variable and avoid tripping the "IndexError: list index out of range error" message. (Case: 00423993)
• Updated the snippets in the "Microsoft: Windows Server IC FileSystem Inventory" Dynamic Application to more accurately report disk size. (Case: 00410752)
• Added the 'DO_REGEX' flag to the snippets of the "Microsoft: Windows Server Service Configuration" Dynamic Application. This flag can be manually adjusted to enable or disable the use of regex for adding services to the services blocklist. (Case: 00377286)
• Updated the PowerShell request of the "Microsoft: Windows Server BIOS Configuration" Dynamic Application to be compatible with pypsrp when the Concurrent PowerShell is enabled.
• Updated the "Microsoft: Windows Server Memory Performance" PowerShell request in the "Microsoft: Windows Server Performance Cache" Dynamic Application to work with extended characters in the page filename/path. (Case: 00373383) (Case: 00428292)
• Updated the PowerShell request "Windows Server Details - ICDA" in the "Microsoft: Windows Server Performance Cache" Dynamic Application to be compatible with pypsrp when Concurrent PowerShell is enabled. (Case: 00367221)
• Updated the "WinRM Configuration Wizard" Script to include the ViewAnyDefinition to the list of permissions assigned when creating or configuring minimal permissions for a SQL Server user. For more information about the script, see Monitoring Windows Systems with PowerShell.
• Updated "Microsoft: Windows Server IC Interface Inventory" and "Microsoft: Windows Server Services Configuration" to remove outdated terminology in the code.
• Updated the "Windows Server Service Details - ICDA" PowerShell request in the "Microsoft: Windows Server IC Process Service Cache" Dynamic Application to support special characters.
• Updated the PowerShell request "Windows Server Interface Configuration" in the "Microsoft: Windows Server Performance Cache" Dynamic Application to add an index column of Index. This allows the parser to find all individual interfaces.
• Updated the silo_apps content library to version 5.1.5. Updated the silo_api_support content library to 0.1.4.
• Updated the Numeric Range value to 500 for the Pages Per Second Numeric High threshold in the "Microsoft: Windows Server Memory Performance" Dynamic Application.
• Updated the Percentage threshold to Integer and changed the numeric range high value setting to 101 for the following Dynamic Applications threshold values:
  • Microsoft: Windows Server Memory Performance>Memory Usage High
  • Microsoft: Windows Server Memory Performance>Paging File Usage High
  • Microsoft: Windows Server Disk Performance> % Disk Time High

Known Issues and Workarounds

The following known issues affect version 117 of the Microsoft: Windows Server PowerPack:

• Customers running version 12.1 of SL1 must manually update the threshold values for the "SL1 Agent for Microsoft: Windows Server Template" device template after installing the PowerPack.
• Windows Server Process and Service monitoring will not work in environments in which Constrained Language mode is enabled for PowerShell.
• If the list of IP addresses assigned to an interface is longer than 235 characters, the "Microsoft: Windows Server Interface Configuration" Dynamic Application will strip the list of IP addresses after 235 characters and the following will appear in the logs:90.PoolWorker-2.Extended_Internal_Collection: Skipping IPv6 Address due to powershell collector characters limit of 235 chars. did: <did> app_id: <app_id> Interface: <if>90.PoolWorker-2.Extended_Internal_Collection: Skipping IPv4 Address due to powershell collector characters limit of 235 chars. did: <did> app_id: <app_id> Interface: <if>If an IPv4 address is invalid, the "Microsoft: Windows Server Interface Configuration" Dynamic Application will remove the address and the following notice will appear in the logs:90.PoolWorker-2.Extended_Internal_Collection: Skipping IPv4 Mask due to powershell collector characters limit of 235 chars. did: <did> app_id: <app_id> Interface: <if>
• When updating the PowerPack, in the "Microsoft: Windows Server IC Interface Inventory" Dynamic Application, corrupted IPs with empty spaces, curly brackets ({}), or ellipses (...) will need to be deleted.  Review the rows that will be deleted with the following query in the SL1 database:

  SELECT id, did, ip, netmask FROM master_dev.device_ip_addr WHERE ip REGEXP '(^([{])|([}]$)|([.]{3}$)|([...}]$)|(\\s))';

  This will display all rows that will be deleted in the next step.

  
  Use the following query in the SL1 database to delete the rows:

  DELETE FROM master_dev.device_ip_addr WHERE ip REGEXP '(^([{])|([}]$)|([.]{3}$)|([...}]$)|(\\s))';

  The deletion cannot be reversed after running this query.

• Dynamic Applications will produce errors and data will not be collected if your language is set to anything other than English (i.e. Turkish, Portuguese).
• For mount point paths, all instances of "\" have been changed to "/" in the "Windows: Server IC Filesystem Inventory" and "Windows: Server IC Filesystem Performance" Dynamic Applications. Drives that are hidden will not be loaded, but will be visible in the "Microsoft: Windows Server Disk Configuration" Dynamic Application.
• The Collector Affinity setting for Windows Server IC Dynamic Applications changes to Default if there are any changes made under the Properties tab. To keep the setting as Assigned Collector, run the following query:

UPDATE master.dynamic_app SET cu_affinity=2 WHERE ppguid IN ('<PP-GUID>');

• If you use the "Microsoft: Windows Server IC Interface Performance" Dynamic Application to populate interface performance data, then you cannot enable the Packets setting on the Interface Properties page (Registry > Networks > Interfaces > interface wrench icon) without causing an unhandled exception.
• The "Microsoft: Windows Server Software Configuration" Dynamic Application cannot properly parse installation dates that are not in yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss format, such as "Wed Jul 05 12:41:46 EDT 2017".

• The Dynamic Applications with "Microsoft: Windows Server IC" in the name may not align to newly discovered devices until nightly discovery runs.