We have a ticketing system for which there is no SCOM connector and we wanted to provide a simple way to forward an alert to the ticketing system by email. We already stumbled upon the Alert Forward Task MP by Cameron Fuller but to add some flexibility I decided to rewrite it using a powershell as the application that is being executed. Contrary to agent task there is no default functionality to specifically run a powershell script to it took some time to figure out how I should call the script from the task and how to pass the needed parameters.
The variables I wanted to get from the alert where the MonitoringObjectName,Name,Description,Severity and Time Raised. I would then use those variables as named paramters to the powershell script that actually sends the mail. This is the code for the powershell script:
Param($managedobject,$name,$description,$time,$severity)
# Variables
$recipient= someone@someone.local
$mailserver = mail@someone.local
$sender= someoneelse@someone.local
$body=@"
<html>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<body>
<h1>$name<br></h1>
<b>Managed Object:</b>$managedobject<br>
<b>Description:</b> $description<br>
<b>Time Raised:</b> $time<br>
<b>Severity:</b> $severity
</body>
</html>
"@
$subject="Operations Manager Alert:"+"$name"
# Let's send an email
Send-MailMessage -ErrorVariable $mailerror -From $sender -To $recipient -SmtpServer $mailserver -Subject $subject -Body $body -BodyAsHtml
# If you enable output on the console task use the clause below to give some output.
#"@
#$message=@"
#The alert: $name ,
#has been forwarded.
#"@
#if ($mailerror)
# {
# Write-Host $mailerror
# }
#else
# {
# Write-Host $message
# }
As you can see it is a rather simple script that takes the input from the alert, builds an html message and uses Send-MailMessage to send the message. If you’d like to show output (error, success) you can uncomment that section and set RequireOutput to true in the XML.
Then I created a console task in the SCOM Authoring console and specificed a command line application, the paramters and working directory. Of course it took me some time to find the right syntax and looking at the xml I noticed something peculiar, all the parameters you enter in the gui are put into one <parameter> element inside the XML. Even when you edit the xml by hand and add each parameter as a separate element and open up the pack in the console and change something like the display name and save it it wraps them all up in one element again. Testing showed that with all the arguments in one element in the XML the task doesn’t work.
Here is the XML snippit of the console task:
<ConsoleTask ID="MCSE.AlertForward" Accessibility="Public" Enabled="true" Target="System!System.Entity" RequireOutput="false" Category="Alert">
<Application>%windir%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe</Application>
<Parameters>
<Parameter>-noprofile</Parameter>
<Parameter>"& \\someuncpath\forward-alert.ps1"</Parameter>
<Parameter>-ManagedObject '$MonitoringObjectName$'</Parameter>
<Parameter>-Name '$Name$'</Parameter>
<Parameter>-Description '$Description$'</Parameter>
<Parameter>-Severity '$Severity$'</Parameter>
<Parameter>-Time '$TimeRaised$'</Parameter>
</Parameters>
<WorkingDirectory>\\someuncpath\</WorkingDirectory>
</ConsoleTask>
Easiest way to add this task would be to copy/paste the xml into an existing MP and import the MP into your SCOM environment.
I put the powershell script on a share accessible to all our SCOM operators, used powershell.exe as the application and the script path and the variables from SCOM as arguments.Notice the double quotes around the script path and the single quotes around the alert variables.
You can of course create a more elaborate email, for instance using this excellent script by Tao Yang as an example. (Tao creates his own channel to send email notification and set up subscriptions but the code used to collect the data from SCOM can also be used in a console task).
Multiple Choice System Engineer 