Anyone have any experience with Silect’s MP authoring tools? I am starting to need to custom write some management packs and have downloaded the free version but I am wondering if the pay versions are worth the money. I am looking at the feature and the ability to test a MP before deploying it could be useful. Just wondering if anyone had some advice or experience.
I did not like it. - If you like scripting I suggest you take a look into authoring with Visual Studio. There is an extensions called VSAE which supports authoring to a good extend.
There is a fantastic, free web training on Channel 9 which guides you step by step through building of an MP.
https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/System-Center-2012-R2-Operations-Manager-Management-Packs
It’s for SCOM 2012 R2, but since the schema did not change all still applies to SCOM 1801.
The training is accompanied with a website that contains all plus more depth:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/15251.system-center-management-pack-authoring-guide.aspx
If you have questions, feel free to ask.
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I will check it out I do not have much visual studio experience or done much scripting since college and that was some time ago (C was still pretty big then and C++ was the new kid). Also most of the people I will be creating MP’s for have little IT experience a lot are medical people that moved into and IT post to manage specific software. This is common in hospitals. So Silect seemed at surface to be something they could visually see and understand. The other thing that attracted me to the MP Studio was the ability to simulate deploying it and know what alerts would trigger which would be huge hit with management and my change control board.
Silect is actually very good at getting from 0 to finished MP very quickly, and it supports version control, as well as testing and BPA. Most tasks are wizard-driven, and you can examine remote computers for things like WMI and registry classes, so it is very fast. Drawbacks are that it is a bit buggy at times. All in all it\'s great if you don\'t need to do anything too advanced. If you need to do advanced MPs, VSAE is your best bet, but for discoveries, classes, views, groups, and tasks, MP Studio works very well.
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I second this - If it’s the snippet side of things that interests you with Silect, then Kevin Holman started doing these in VSAE before Silect picked it up. He wrote a series on it, which can be found here: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kevinholman/2016/06/04/authoring-management-packs-the-fast-and-easy-way-using-visual-studio/
Fun fact from webinar I just watch Kevin Holman user MP Studio to create his fragment library.