SCOM 2016 – Agent Maintenance Mode

I was pleased to present a session about “Why we want you to migrate to SCOM 2016” with Bob Cornelissen at MMSMOA in Minneapolis. During this session I presented about SCOM 2016 Agent maintenance mode.

With System Center Operations Manager 2016 we finally have our scheduled maintenance mode and also the option to directly set the maintenance mode from the agent. We do not need custom management packs/solutions anymore to get this functionality. Everything is build in :-).

When I tried the Agent maintenance mode first, I followed this blog post. I want to share some details here:

Open PowerShell as Administrator, otherwise the module does not work. I tried to set permissions on the registry key, which is used, but that did not help. The module itself seems to check the permissions.
You need to load the module with the full path, otherwise it is not working:
import-module “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Monitoring Agent\Agent\MaintenanceMode.dll”
The Syntax to start maintenance mode is this:
Start-SCOMAgentMaintenanceMode -Duration 10 -Reason ApplicationInstallation -Comment “Test”

I recommend to use the PowerShell ISE as you then also get the entries for the reason.
The cmdlet writes the information into the registry.
hklm:\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft Operations Manager\3.0\MaintenanceMode\Record
When you try again to set the maintenance mode and the system is not in maintenance mode yet, then you get this feedback:

Last Maintenance Mode Request pending. Try afterwards.
There is a rule running on the agent, which checks the registry key every 5 min.

The rule runs a PowerShell script (ReadMaintenanceModeRegEntry,ps1), which writes a OperationsManager Event Log entry with the EventID 2222. After that appears, the maintenance mode should been set successfully.

After the maintenance mode is set, you get this message when you try to set it again during the maintenance mode:
If you want to unset the maintenance mode and set a new one, then you can delete the registry key, unset the maintenance mode in the console and then set the maintenance mode again.
You can also easily read the key through PowerShell and give users who normally do not have registry access the possibility to check the current maintenance mode window.
function Get-SCOMAgentMaintenanceMode {
$mm=(Get-ItemProperty “hklm:\software\microsoft\microsoft operations manager\3.0\maintenancemode”).Record
$split=$mm.split(“|”)
write-host “Duration:”$split[0]”
Reason:”$split[1]”
User:”$split[2].split(“:”)[0]”
Comment:”$split[2].split(“:”)[1]”
StartTime:”$split[3]
}
Get-SCOMAgentMaintenanceMode