Microsoft’s Jim Britt has another great article where he goes over the underlying moving parts of why we do what we do in SMA. This is post that came about due to questions generated by a previous article titled Automation–Service Management Automation...

Microsoft’s own Jim Britt posted a great article that covers the specifics around getting setup to use Service Management Automation (SMA) as well as how to import our future examples and fire them off in order to review the solutions in action. This...

Microsoft’s own Charles Joy has the final part of his Service Management Automation series posted: “There comes a time when a project’s complexity increases to the point of requiring pre-requisites. The follow-up post to Automation–Service Management...

Microsoft’s Charles Joy posted his follow-up post to Automation–Service Management Automation Runbook Spotlight–Virtual Machine Startup by Priority (Part 1) . In that first post he provided SMA Runbook examples based on an older Orchestrator post that...

When you run the System Center Cloud Services Process Pack installer, the installer may fail. When this occurs, the following exception is logged in the SCCloudServicesSetupWizard.log file: 05:01:12:***ERROR*** Unexpected Error: Setup is terminating because...

Microsoft’s Charles Joy just posted part 1 of his 2 part series that contains SMA/PSv3 workflow examples on virtual machine startup by priority. This is a great post that also serves to bridge from Orchestrator to SMA through the example itself. You can...

Yesterday the new " Microsoft System Center 2012 Orchestrator Cookbook " was published and is available at Amazon.com, Amazon.de and Packt Publishing website. The authors are Sam Erskine (future MVP?), Steve Beaumont (future MVP?) and Andreas Baumgarten...

The Run .Net Script activity in System Center 2012 Orchestrator handles the output of array data very differently than it did in previous versions of Orchestrator/Opalis Integration Server. In fact, if you are interested, you can review its previous behavior...

This post covers the specifics of getting setup to use Service Management Automation (SMA) as well as how to import future examples and fire them off in order to review the solutions in action!  This post should be considered another “staple” in...

With automation getting an increasing focus in our stack and datacenter/cloud discussions, we thought it would be interesting to take a step back and look at some of the usage cases for automation, which apply to any automation engine but happen to be...

Just a quick FYI on a new Knowledge Base article we published today. This one talks about an issue where the Runbook Service takes itself offline due to database errors resulting from being the victim of one or more deadlocks. Orchestrator platform events...

Balancing server patching with maintaining the availability of the services that run on these servers can be a difficult task for an IT Pro, with lots of repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone steps. Luckily, Orchestrator has emerged as an effective...

Update Rollup 2 for Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now available and includes the following updates for Orchestrator: Issue 1: The Monitor SNMP Trap activity publishes incorrect values for strings when a Microsoft SNMP Trap Service...

We just published a new KB article that explains an issue where in Orchestrator 2012, the Monitor Event Log fires every time there is any new event on the specified computer regardless of filters, or if the event does not match the filters, the published...

A new capability in System Center 2012 SP1 - Orchestrator allows an activity developer to define "cascading dependencies" between input parameters.  For example if the user chooses a state like 'California' in the State input parameter...

We just published a new KB article that talks about an issue where the System Center 2012 Orchestrator Send SNMP Trap activity always sets the Generic Identifier value as coldStart(0) regardless of the value selected. The work around is pretty straight...

Hi Everybody, This has been covered in the blogosphere pretty heavily now, but maybe a little bit more will help prevent the next accidental "discovery" of the issue. The following was sent to me from Paul Chen, and he asked me to post it for him...

So John Messec and I were delivering our session at Tech Ready 16 yesterday (SCIM351 - Enabling Hosted IaaS Clouds for Service Providers, big shout out and my thanks to all who attended) and I was asked to put out a quick blog post showing the URLs that...

We just published a KB article about an issue where new Orchestrator Runbooks and/or folders that have been created using the Runbook Designer are not displayed even though the user has the appropriate permissions to see them. You may also notice that...

We just published a new KB article that explains an issue where the NetCool/Omnibus integration pack for System Center 2012 Orchestrator returns an "Invalid ObjectServer data type" error. This is fixed in SP1 but there’s an alternate workaround...

We just published a new KB article for System Center 2012 Orchestrator describing an issue where a triggered Runbook never finishes and the policy module log shows the process as terminated. This can occur if disallow results from triggers is enabled...

We just published a new KB article about an issue where under certain circumstances, users accounts may be able to see content that they should not have access to based on permissions defined within the Runbook Designer when that content is provided via...

We just published a new KB article about an issue where attempting to deploy the Integration Pack for .NET that comes with the Orchestrator Integration Toolkit to a Runbook Server that is remote from the Management Server fails and logs an Event ID: 10005...

This morning we announced the availability of System Center 2012 SP1.   You can read more about the release on the System Center blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/archive/2013/01/15/system-center-2012-sp1-is-generally-available.aspx...

I’ve seen this situation twice now in the last week so it’s probably worth a blog post on it.  Here’s the situation.  You are logged into the System Center - Service Manager (SCSM) console and you can see a bunch of objects like for example...