The upcoming Saturday, 29th of March 2014, Earth Hour will be honored between 8:30 PM and 9:30 PM in your local time zone. Organized by the WWF (www.earthhour.org ), Earth Hour is an incentive where amongst other activities people are asked to turn off their lights for an hour. I thought this also was an excellent opportunity to give some examples of how you can use automation technologies to shut down and restart Windows Azure Services.

I recently performed upgrades of a Service Manager 2012 SP1 environment at a customer and our own environment, from SP1 to Service Manager 2012 R2. While following the pre-upgrade and upgrade steps as specified in http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn520902.aspx , including disabling the Data Warehouse Jobs, both upgrades were successful but when enabling the Data Warehouse Jobs some of the jobs and job modules started failing. The jobs that was failing in both environment were:

This blog series consists of several blog posts, where I have redesigned an Operations Manager infrastructure with many Distributed Applications (DA) and Service Level Objectives (SLO). Some Distributed Applications contains other DAs, and the SLOs have these DAs as target as well as the top level DA, the “IT” Distributed Application. A major part of this redesign have been going from a single unsealed Management Pack (MP) containing all the DAs, SLOs, Components and Overrides, to a design where I have been using several sealed Management Packs for the Distributed Applications, and using unsealed Management Packs for the Overrides and customizations.

First of many posts, I hope, and looking forward to sharing my thoughts, experiences and solutions with the System Center community!