How to Setup Lync 2010 SCOM Management Pack and Synthetic Transactions

It’s not news that Lync has a pretty comprehensive and useful SCOM Management Pack,

It includes a number of “Synthetic Transactions” that can be run against a pool with test

users to check everything is working as expected.

Here are the high level steps for deploying it. I really encourage it if you have SCOM in your environment.

There is also a decent document included in the management pack download, but here are the steps

with screenshots.

I did this on the following setup

• Lync 2010 SE, CU6
• SCOM 2007 R2
• SQL 2008 (SCOM backend)
• Windows Server 2008 R2 “Watcher Node”

We’ll assume SCOM 2007 R2 is setup and working nicely.

The “Watcher Node” is just a server that the Synthetic Transactions are run from,

so a Standard Windows Server with SCOM and Lync core components.

Initial SCOM Setup for Lync Severs and Lync Management Pack

On SCOM, ensure the relevant Servers are discovered and have management packs installed:

Ensure your Agent Properties allow Agent Proxy, it won’t work without this.

OK now we are ready to install the Lync management pack:

Download Management pack now only seems to list 2013

Since this is a pure 2010 environment I went and downloaded the 2010 management pack

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=12375

Install management pack on SCOM

Import into SCOM:

Select “from disk”

It will then take a while to discover your topology (took about 5 mins in my lab)

Up to this point SCOM and the Management pack is working, but with no synthetic transactions, this is still useful, but Synthetic transactions add real value.

Adding Synthetic Transaction Setup

On the Lync SE, setup a new trusted app pool and trusted application for the watcher node

On the Watcher Node, install the Lync core components.

Enable Lync

Start Replication

CU6 the Watcher Server (or same CU as your Pool)

On the watcher node add the following registry key:

Add the Lync Watcher Node Computer to the RTCUniversalReadOnlyAdmins

Restart the Watcher Node server after the group change.

Create Two users, enable them for Lync in the usual way on the pool you want to test (you need two users per pool you are going to test and enable them for Lync)

Note, any tests will respect these users Voice Policies (for example Test-CSPSTNPeertoPeerCall)

Define these users to be used as the CSHealthMonitoringConfiguration for the Pool (Lync uses Cert Auth to impersonate the users for the tests)

Enable-CSComputer the Watcher Node again

From the Watcher Node, check you can register to the pool

You can see there is a “HealthService” that actually runs the transactions, you may need to restart this to kick it off.

Giving it about another 5 minutes and we can see in SCOM the Synthetic Transactions are active

Initial Errors I hit with Synthetic Transactions and Fixes

I hit a few problems with the Synthetic Transactions initially, here are some tips:

Simple one, my Address Book had no entries (new lab) so I hit this, fixed when entries were added

You may need to define firewall exceptions on the Pool/Watcher node to allow the Transactions to run (there is no Lync client install making the normal firewall exceptions)

The meet simple URL seems to hit a bad URL by default.

Changing this test to hit a graphic that gets served correctly worked around the issue.

https://meet.lab20.com/meet/Resources/CommunicatorLogoType.png

www.simplesharebuttons.comTake a second to share this, thanks, Tom

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Tom Arbuthnot

Senior Consultant at Modality Systems

Tom Arbuthnot is a Microsoft MVP and Senior Consultant at Modality Systems. Tom is actively involved in the global Unified Communications community. He is a founding member of the Microsoft UC User Group London, a contributing writer to Lync Server 2013 Unleashed and is a technical reviewer for Trainsignal. Modality Systems is a UC Centre of Excellence – specializing in strategy, infrastructure, user adoption, managed services and software development.

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