Groups show no health information

When you create a group in SCOM it does not by default have a health rollup monitor or any unit monitors, so the health state stays in the gray/uninitialized no health information state. This article describes how to add a roll up monitor so the health of the group members is rolled up to the group.

You can use the Status tile with the Scope > Advanced > Criteria to show ALL gray uninitialised objects by using HealthState IS NULL OR HealthState = 0. For more information see How to use criteria when scoping objects.

What does a gray health state mean?

Unknown/Uninitialized

The gray icon with a question mark signifies an object that has never had a health state, for example a device that has been badly or incompletely discovered. SCOM is aware of the object, but has never recorded any data from it. This covers both objects where SCOM records a health state of 0 (no health state) and those where SCOM has no record for the health state, i.e. the health state is blank or unspecified (NULL).

• To show only objects where SCOM specifies a health state of 0 use HealthState = 0 in the Scope > Advanced > Criteria (see How to use criteria when scoping objects).
• To show objects where there SCOM has no current or last known health state specified use HealthState IS NULL in the Scope > Advanced > Criteria (see How to use criteria when scoping objects).
• To show all gray objects, both those with unknown health state and those with no known last health state specify HealthState = 0 OR HealthState IS NULL in the Scope > Advanced > Criteria (see How to use criteria when scoping objects).
• For more information from Microsoft about gray health states see Not Monitored and gray Agents and Troubleshooting gray agent states in System Center Operations Manager.

To resolve groups which show a gray health state see below.

How to add a roll up monitor for the group

To show the health of the group members using the group object you will need to add a health rollup monitor for the group.

Walkthrough: Adding a dependency roll up monitor

1. In SCOM click on the Authoring tab
2. Expand Management Pack Objects.
3. Right-click on Monitors, select Create a Monitor and then Dependency Roll Up Monitor.
4. Give the monitor a suitable name.
5. The Monitor Target should be your group.
6. Leave the Parent monitor set to Availability.
7. Select the same unsealed management pack that your group is in.
8. Click Next to move on to Monitor Dependency.
9. Expand Object (Contains Entities), expand Entity Health, and click on Availability.
10. Click Next, Next, Create.

After you have created a health rollup you may have to wait a minute or two and then your dashboards should show the health for your group.

Detailed Walkthrough

This blog provides a very straightforward walkthrough with screenshots: https://sites.google.com/site/scomblogs/journal-blog/monitoringtheavailabilityandhealthofagroupinscom

Community Management Pack

Alternatively, in order to simplify this process, Tao Yang, MVP, has created a community Management Pack - OpsMgr Group Health Rollup Configuration Task Management Pack - which provides an agent task to create dependency monitors for the selected groups using the OpsMgr SDK.

Full details of that are available here;

http://blog.tyang.org/2015/07/28/opsmgr-group-health-rollup-configuration-task-management-pack/

Further Assistance

Please contact SquaredUp Support if you experience any problems and reply to the automatic response with the output of the SquaredUp DS Diagnostics (see Collecting diagnostic information) and, if possible, a screenshot of the problem.