Monitoring DPM 2019 with SCOM 2019

In this blog post, we will go through how to set up monitoring of DPM 2019 with SCOM 2019.

Prerequisites

A running System Center Operations Manager 2019 environment.
A running System Center Data Protection Manager 2019 environment.
DPM 2019 management pack for SCOM 2019.
SCOM agent installed on the DPM server.

Description

There are many benefits of integrating the System Center products with each other, first of all, they integrate very well and easily with each other.

Integrating DPM with SCOM can also be cost-effective, meaning that you don't need any other third-party software to do the same job.

If you already own one product from the System Center suite, it means that you actually own all products within the suite, the System Center suite is purchased as a whole which means all System Center products are licensed automatically.

Installing the SCOM agent on the DPM server

The SCOM agent can be installed either by pushing the agent from the Operations Console or by installing the agent manually.

Install the SCOM agent manually on the DPM server:

msiexec.exe /i \\SCOM2019.lab.ad\Share\MOMAgent.msi /qn /l*v %temp%\OMAgentinstall.log USE_SETTINGS_FROM_AD=0 MANAGEMENT_GROUP=Lab-MG MANAGEMENT_SERVER_DNS="SCOM2019.lab.ad" MANAGEMENT_SERVER_AD_NAME="SCOM2019.lab.ad" ACTIONS_USE_COMPUTER_ACCOUNT=1 USE_MANUALLY_SPECIFIED_SETTINGS=1 AcceptEndUserLicenseAgreement=1

Push the SCOM agent to the DPM server via the Operations Console:

1. In the Operations Console (SCOM console) head to the Administration pane.

2. Right-click on the Agent Managed tab and select Discovery Wizard.

3. Select Windows Computers and then click Next.

4. Select Advanced discovery and click Next.

5. Select "Browse for, or type-in computer names", click Browse and type in the DPM server name, click OK and then click Next.

6. Click Discover.

7. Check the check box for the DPM server that we've discovered and then click Next.

8. Click Finish to start the SCOM agent deployment.

9. Once the SCOM agent has been successfully deployed, we should see a similar window as shown below:

Click Close to finish.

The DPM server should now have a SCOM agent installed and we should see it under Agent Managed:

Importing the DPM management packs

The first step is to make sure we have the management pack for DPM. the latest DPM 2019 management pack can be downloaded from here:

1. Download the latest DPM 2019 management pack from HERE to the SCOM 2019 management server.

2. To install the DPM management pack right-click the Microsoft System Center Management Pack for DPM .msi installer file and select Install.

3. Check the "I accept" check box and click Next.

4. Click Next again.

5. Click Install to install the management pack on the SCOM 2019 management server.

6. Once the installation has completed, click Close to close the installation wizard.

7. A File Explorer window should open up showing the installed DPM 2019 management packs as shown below:

8. Open the Operations Console (SCOM console) on the SCOM 2019 management server.

9. Once the Operations Console has opened, head to the Administration tab.

10. To import management packs right-click Management Packs and select Import Management Packs.

11. A Import Management Packs window will open up, click on + Add and then click on Add from disk to add a management pack from a local or remote disk.

12. An Online Catalog Connection window will show up, click on No to not search for any dependencies for the management packs.

13. Browse to the path where the DPM 2019 management pack was installed, select all of them and then click Open.

Note: If you've downloaded the English version of the management pack it will be located here by default: C:\Program Files (x86)\System Center Management Packs\Microsoft System Center Management Pack for DPM (ENG)

14. There will be security warnings saying that the management pack contains rules which have write actions, as this is a management pack from Microsoft it's safe to say that the management pack comes from a trusted source.

Click Install to import the DPM 2019 management pack.

15. A window will pop up asking if we want to continue with the import of the management packs as they have security risks, click Yes to continue.

16. Once the DPM 2019 management pack has been successfully imported, click Close.

Installing the DPM Central Console on the SCOM management server

Now it's time to install the DPM Central Console on the SCOM 2019 management server.

1. Mount and extract the DPM 2019 installation media on the SCOM 2019 management server, unless it is already extracted somewhere.

2. Once the DPM 2019 installation media is extracted, open the extracted folder "System Center Data Protection Manager 2019", right-click the Setup.exe, and choose Run as administrator.

3. The System Center 2019 Data Protection Manager installation menu will appear, select the DPM Central Console.

4. A Microsoft Software License Terms window will appear, click Accept.

5. A Data Protection Manager Central Console Setup window will now open, click Next.

6. In the next step we will have three (3) different options to choose from:

Install Central Console server-side Components
Install Central Console client-side Components
Install Central Console server-side and client-side Components

In this guide, we will install the DPM Central Console on the SCOM 2019 management server itself, choose Install Central Console server-side and client-side Components then click Next.

7. There will now be a prerequisites check, if all prerequisites passed we can click Next to continue.

8. On the Installation settings step ,click Next to continue.

9. Select whether we want to opt-in or opt-out for Microsoft Updates, then click Install.

10. Once the installation is complete, we should receive an identical as shown below:

The installation will install the following components:

Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 DPM Remote Administration
Microsoft System Center 2016 DPM Remote Administration
Microsoft System Center 2019 DPM Remote Administration

Take extra note of the message:
"Setup has configured Operations Manager Server to run DPM data source discoveries at 06:00 and 18:00 DPM server time every day".

Click OK and then on Close to finish the installation wizard.

If nothing is showing up/being discovered in the Operations Console (SCOM console) this is most likely the reason why these discoveries can be overridden if needed:

Overview of the DPM monitoring

Under the Monitoring pane within the Operations Console (SCOM console), we should now have a new folder called "System Center Data Protection Manager" which contains a few subfolders and many views, as shown below:

Once the discoveries have been triggered (by default at 06:00 and 18:00 daily), we should start seeing the state views being populated.

Creating overrides for the DPM discoveries

The discoveries can be changed by creating overrides within the Operations Console (SCOM console), all the DPM discoveries are configured by default with a frequency of 43200 seconds(12 hours).

Here's a list of all the DPM discoveries in SCOM:

[supsystic-tables id=57]

We can also find all of this information from the technical documentation library over at the System Center Wiki website.

1. In the Operations Console, head to the Authoring pane.

2. Go to the Object Discoveries tab.

3. Click on Scope which can be found on the upper toolbar in the Operations Console.

4. Select "View all targets", look for "System Center Data Protection", select all the found objects and then click OK.

5. We should now see all object discoveries related to DPM:

6. Let's say we want to override the discovery of the DPM server:

Right-click the "DPM server discovery" under the "Discovered Type: DPM Server (5)" select Overrides > Override the Object Discovery > For all objects of class: DPM Seed.

7. We should now have the Override Properties window in front of us, as shown below:

8. If we want the discovery for DPM servers to be shorted, we simply check the check box for "Internal in seconds" and change the Override Value to a lower value.

Once we've done that, we need to create a new overrides management pack for DPM (unless we haven't already done so), then click OK to apply the override.

The DPM server discovery should now be triggered every 600 seconds (10 minutes).

Note: If you haven't discovered any DPM servers yet, you can speed up this process by overriding the "Time” at which to do initial discovery and define a time.