Show all agents without ACS enable

In Operations Manager 2007, Audit Collection Services (ACS) provides a means to collect records generated by an audit policy and store them in a centralized database. More info about ACS here.

If you enable ACS gradually or as you install agents it is easy to forget a agent or two. Then you need a view that shows you all agents where you have not enable ACS. I was looking for that kind of view a couple of days ago. Unfortunaly I could not find it so I created it myself instead. My idea was to show all machines where the AdtAgent service, the ACS agent service, is disable. To get this to work we need to do a discovery of a registry value on all machines with a health service. The discovery will tell us the start-up configuration of the AdtAgent service (ACS agent). The result of the discovery will shown as a extra property of the health service.

1. In the Operations Manager console navigate to the Authoring workspace.
2. Expand management pack objects and right-click attributes, select Create a New Attribute
3. In the Create Attribute Wizard, General Properties page, input a name for example Contoso – noACSAgent
4. In the Create Attribute Wizard, Discovery Method page, input
   • Discovery Type: Registry
   • Target: Health Service
   • Management Pack: Select one of your unsealed MPs or create a new MP
5. In the Create Attribute Wizard, input
   • Key or Value Type: Value
   • Path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\AdtAgent\Start
   • Attribute Type: Int
6. Click Finish to save your new attribute
7. Navigate to the Monitoring workspace, right-click the management pack where you stored the attribute, select create new state view
8. Name the view “Contoso – Agents without ACS” and configure
   • Show data related to: Health Service_Extended
   • with specific Contoso – noACSAgent , configure it with 4 (Show all state with 4 Contoso – noACSAgent) A service configured with startup to 4 means that the service is disable.
9. Click OK to save your new view

This view will now show you all agents with a disabled ACS (AdtAgent) service.