Ever since the beginning of OpsMgr scheduling maintenance mode always have been a pain and full of frustration! During time there are some PowerShell solutions and community tools based on scheduled tasks although they work they are not just that clever.
Finally the frustration is over and now the System Center 2012 Extended OIP includes the full maintenance mode POWER for activities for setting objects, groups of objects in maintenance mode with just a simple runbook!
Include a Initialize Data activity in your runbook, sync the runbook to SCSM and now Maintenance Mode can be leveraged from the Self Service Portal! 
(Full solution included in next post!)
Be aware with great POWER comes great RESPONSIBILITY!
Never ever put your Management Servers in Maintenance mode!! First there is no reason to and second all Management servers in Maintenance mode leaves no one to take them out anymore!
Like shutting the door with the ONLY keys still inside!
Background
Since the release of Orchestrator my expectations where high! Especially concerning maintenance mode since Orchestrator is the way to go for scheduling your maintenance mode !!!
To my frustration there are activities but they are based on a per monitor perspective which works fine but this is to detailed! People want to put groups of objects in maintenance mode to easy schedule maintenance windows across the Datacenter or do a selection and place objects in maintenance mode with the option to only select this object or the underlying objects as well!
PowerShell should work but again I want to be able to fully use everything to it’s fullest 
Therefore I created some extra activities based on C# to finally come up with a really diverse solution.
Activities
After previous activities here are the new extra activities for the Extended OIP to fully use Maintenance mode to it’s fullest POWER!!!!
- Class – Get Class Instances – Takes a class (Internal Name) and retrieves all class instances. Can be filtered by using the filtering options in the activity.
- Parameters:
-
The Internal Name of the Class. Internal name of the class
Class – Get GroupClass Instances – Takes a group (Internal Name) and retrieves all members of the group.
- Parameters:
-
The Internal Name of the group. Internal name of the group
SCOM MaintenanceMode – Start Group – Takes a group (Internal Name) and retrieves all members of the group and place them in maintenance mode.
Parameters:
| The Internal Name of the Group. | Internal name of the group |
| Maintenance Mode duration in minutes | Duration in minutes |
| Maintenance Mode Comment | Comment for the maintenance mode |
| Reason | Reason |
| Level | OneLevel – The object self Recursive – The object and all contained objects |
SCOM MaintenanceMode – Stop Group – Takes a group (Internal Name) and retrieves all members of the group and turn maintenance mode off.
Parameters:
| The Internal Name of the Group. | Internal name of the group |
| Level | OneLevel – The object self Recursive – The object and all contained objects |
SCOM MaintenanceMode – Start Object – Takes an object and places the object in maintenance mode.
| The Internal Name of the object. | Internal name of the object |
| Maintenance Mode duration in minutes | Duration in minutes |
| Maintenance Mode Comment | Comment for the maintenance mode |
| Reason | Reason |
| Level | OneLevel – The object self Recursive – The object and all contained objects |
SCOM MaintenanceMode – Stop Object – Takes an object and turns maintenance mode off.
| The Internal Name of the object. | Internal name of the object |
| Level | OneLevel – The object self Recursive – The object and all contained objects |
Wrap Up
This is version 2 of the System Center 2012 Extended OIP which now has a total of 12 Activities. With the maintenance mode activities you can basically automate all maintenance mode requirements from SCOM.
I have tested to upgrade the existing pack, but unfortunately there where some problems. Removing the old version and registering the new version worked.
<<<<<———>>>>> Download Latest version <<<<<———->>>>>
Next post tomorrow:
Maintenance mode where it should be : SCSM Self Service Portal! Use SSP to leverage Maintenance mode to the “common user” Application owners etc….
Upcoming week(s).
Exchange – Maintenance Mode Integration. Schedule your maintenance windows in a calendar and use Orchestrator to do the rest!
Challenges:
Create SCSM Approve Activity – after syncing packs an approval is now manually required. (SCSM Console SCOM CI Connector) This NEEDS to be automated.
More detailed explanation on how to build the integration packs
regards,
Oskar Landman
