I am interested to know the back-end mechanism which controls approval of agents and what allows/restricts agents to communicate in a SCOM management group ?

There is a setting in SCOM to not allow manually installed agents. You can turn this off if you want. Otherwise, manually installed agents have to be approved by an administrator via the admin part of the ops console. Once approved the agent can talk to the management group and start to send data and be monitored.Regards, Blake Email: mengotto<at>hotmail.com Blog: http://discussitnow.wordpress.com/ If my response was helpful, please mark it as so, if it answered your question, then please also mark it accordingly. Thank you.

I have manual approval configured under security. I wanted to actually understand how the SCOM instance knows if an agent has been approved ? i.e. is there a flag which is set in the ops database ? I am troubleshooting a specific issue and something appears to be broken in relation to the approval process which is reason for question.

There is some attribute on the managed object that indicates this yes, just as there is one that tells ops db if its manual install or pushed. Where you would find this, I do not know. I would start with some posts from Kevin Holman's blog.Regards, Blake Email: mengotto<at>hotmail.com Blog: http://discussitnow.wordpress.com/ If my response was helpful, please mark it as so, if it answered your question, then please also mark it accordingly. Thank you.