hello, why is the MS actually pinging back the machine which stopped heartbeating (SCOM 2k7 R2, only built-in default MPs)? a) If I just disable the agent service and stop the service while leaving the computer operational and accessible from MS (firewall disabled), the State of the agent just greys out. Correct? b) When I completelly unplug the computer from network, it does just the same - greys out. No other alerts or events appear anywhere which would differentiate between the two states. c) So how do I determine whether the computer is online with agent failed for some reason or whether the computer has just been unplugged from network? d) Is there any indication in the Monitoring console about when the greying out state happend? I can see 20022 error event in the Operations Manager log, but not anything simplier in the Monitoring console. e) will the greyed-out state change anytime later? ondrej.

There are 2 monitors 1 heartbeat failure. 1 server unreachable. When the heartbeat monitor turns critical it will run a response to ping the server on it's fqdn and when this fails the server unreachable monitor becomes critical as well. These are 2 alerts so you can distinguish between the 2 situations. But make sure the ping is allowed over the network/by the computer firewall, else this always fails. Make sure the RMS can resolve the fqdn of the server it needs to ping, else this always fails. Keep in mind that it does ping with the wmi ping class. That's just 1 try instead of the 4 you used to with ping.exe (shouldn't be a problem when the network is ok though) To see some more info about why an agent is critical you can go the opsmgr > agent views and open the health explorer from there. Loads of times it will just be the heartbeat failures, but there are more reasons why an agent is critical. When the agent resumes heartbeating, the monitors (both) become healthy again. (you are just looking at the computer view, while you should be looking at alerts and/or the healthwatcher). Rob Korving http://jama00.wordpress.com/

thanks a lot, but the problem with my installation is that I don't have any such alert. What management pack do I need to see such alerts? When I stop the health service on a client, the computer state just goes grey but no alerts are showing. I have actually create an All Alerts view but still not see anything. ondrej.

goto the opsmgr>agent views in the consoles. Open the health explorer from the healthwatcher and you'll see all the monitors you need. Default those should get an alert, but this could be overridden.Rob Korving http://jama00.wordpress.com/