A few opsmgr questions of interest - Question 5

1. Is it possible to create a view and export it for use elsewhere? How would we export from lab and reuse in production?

Yes, this is possible though it isn’t as straight forward as it might seem. Let’s walk through the process.

If you want to create views that can be exported and re-used on other servers you will need to ensure all of them are created in a separate view folder in the monitoring node.

1. From the monitoring node, right-click and select to create a new folder

2.  Enter whatever folder name you want and select which management pack to store the new folder and any content that is created within the folder. Note, in this example I am using the default management pack. It is NOT recommended to use the default management pack in production. If the default management pack is ever deleted all views and other contents stored there are also lost. Instead, create separate management packs for storing custom created items – one scheme is to create a one custom management pack for every management pack that is installed.

3.  Select the folder just created and create a performance (or any other for that matter) view.

4.  Type the name and customize the view as required.

5.  Now that we have the view created and assigned to a custom management pack, we can easily export and reuse it by simply exporting the management pack. Since this is a custom non-sealed management pack it will be exported to .XML format.

6.  If we now examine the exported management pack by opening in Internet Explorer, XMLNotepad or other XML editor we will see the details of the view we just built.