Configuring Exchange Baselines in OpsMgr

This is an example of the type of alert that causes lots of noise in some environments. We run Remote Operations Manager, so I decided to apply this to all the Exchange instances.

OpsMgr Alert: Number of RPC requests is outside the calculated baseline
Monitor Rule: Microsoft.Exchange.ExchangeComponent.IS.RPCRequests

The Number of RPC requests is outside the calculated baseline. The current value is 0.333333333333333

One could of course just ignore it (sure...) or completely disable the rule. I've been looking at two helpful posts (see links below) that seems to provide the answer, painstaking as the process is. The process is as follow:

1) Identify both the rule and the monitor in question. They first have to be disabled.
2) Change the rule sensitivity (I used 3.81 as a default)
3) Change the "Inner sensitivity" value on the monitor to be the same as the rule sensitivity value. Also take care that "Outer sensitivity" needs to be higher than that of the "Inner" value.
4) Enable both the rule and the monitor.

I will report back on the effectiveness of this tuning excercise; hoping this will work!

Links:
OpsMgr by Example
Rajeev Sudhakar

SMS 2003 SP3 Hotfix (941214) Blues

Yip, so after you deploy the "updated" client.msi (KB941214) you will see multiple 10021 events as you check the advertisement status for this package:

"The program was able to be executed but the system was restarted unexpectedly before the program could be completed or before status could be recorded. No installation status MIF was found after the system restarted"

Don't be alarmed, as per KB 840864 this is expected behaviour when a hotfix contains multiple other hotfixes, and the MIF files don't play nicely.

Gotta love the workaround suggested though! So glad I did not raise MOM alerts for this. Sigh...