Wednesday, May 24, 2017

SCOM 2016 Update Rollup 3 (UR3) Now Available

Yesterday, Microsoft released a new (and widely anticipated) Update Rollup (UR3) for SCOM 2016.


This update contains fifteen documented fixes with one in particular (APM crashing IIS agent) being the most important and a top priority for me and my customers due to the agent IIS crash issue I blogged about a while back.

***Update 6th June 2017: Microsoft has posted more information about this issue remaining after deploying UR3 and have mentioned a hotfix is still in the works. Check out their latest post on this issue here.***

Here's some of the highlights of fixes that are covered in this update:

  • The Application Performance Monitoring (APM) feature in System Center 2016 Operations Manager Agent causes a crash for the IIS Application Pool that's running under the .NET Framework 2.0 runtime. Microsoft Monitoring Agent should be updated on all servers that use .NET 2.0 application pools for APM binaries update to take effect. A restart of the server might be required if APM libraries were being used at the time of the update.
  • When overriding multiple properties on rules that are created by the Azure Management Pack, duplicate override names are created. This causes overrides to be lost.
  • When the heartbeat failure monitor is triggered, a "Computer Not Reachable" message is displayed even when the computer is not down.
  • The Get-SCOMOverrideResult PowerShell cmdlet doesn't return the correct list of effective overrides.
  • When creating a management pack (MP) on a client that contains a Service Level (SLA) dashboard and Service Level Objects (SLO), the localized names of objects aren't displayed properly if the client's CurrentCulture settings don't match the CurrentUICulture settings. In cases where the localized settings are English English, ENG, or Australian English, ENA, there's an issue when the objects are renamed.
  • The Event ID: 26373 error, which may cause high memory consumption and affect server performance, has been changed from a “Critical” message to an “Informational” message.
  • The UseMIAPI registry subkey prevents collection of processor performance data for RedHat Linux system. Also, custom performance collection rules are also impacted by the UseMIAPI setting.
  • Organizational Unit (OU) properties for Active Directory systems are not being discovered or populated.
  • The Microsoft.SystemCenter.Agent.RestartHealthService.HealthServicePerfCounterThreshold recovery task fails to restart the agent.
  • An execution policy has been added as unrestricted to PowerShell scripts in Inbox management packs.
  • SQL Agent jobs for maintenance schedule use the default database. If the database name is not the default, the job fails.

You can see the full list of fixes from the official UR3 knowledge base article here.

To get access to this update, you can choose to either manually download it from the Microsoft Update Catalog here or you can use Windows Update to pull down the update automatically to your SCOM 2016 environment.

**Note: I've yet to test this update rollup on the existing SCOM 2016 agents that I've previously applied the NOAPM=1 workaround to (mentioned in my post here) and I suspect that a push install of this UR from the console to those agents will fail as the APM binaries are no longer installed. I'll create a new post on updating those agents when I've tested the process fully.**

Whatever method you choose to deploy this update, make sure to read through the full installation instructions as there are some manual tasks to carry out once the update has been applied to each SCOM role and if you're not confident, I'd always recommend waiting for Microsoft's Kevin Holman to add his walk-through post for this UR to his blog here.

Finally, this update is one part of a larger UR3 release for covering other products in the System Center 2016 suite. If you've deployed additional components of the suite alongside SCOM, then you might be interested to check out the updates now available for DPM 2016, SCSM 2016 and SCVMM 2016.

Full details of all the fixes in the main System Center 2016 UR3 downloads can be viewed at: