Have you ever wanted being notified about new Operations Manager KB article? Your answer will be yes I already have RSS-Reader and stuff like that. But is that cool? Is that the geeky way to do things? Hmm…no. Because I wanted to fool around with Orchestrator and SCOM so I built a Runnbook which sends me an alert if there is a new KB article 
.
The Runbook is very simple. The first activity runs every hour after that it runs the script which I will explain later and if there is a new article it will create an informational alert in SCOM.
The alert looks like this…
Setup
The actual data provider is http://kbupdate.info/ this is a service which collects all KB sources from Microsoft and transforms it into a structured overview. Of course there are many other MS products you could go for, but I was just interested in SCOM.
The Runnbook looks like that…”Run every Hour”
…”Check for new KB”
The Script connects to the URL http://kbupdate.info/system-center-operations-manager-scom-2007-2012.php . Next it downloads the website into the webpage.txt file. Then it parses the content and counts the articles. Next it writes the count of the article into the count.txt file. In the next run it will compare the last count against the actual count of the article. If the new count is higher it will extract the new article and build the message and the http link.
Therefore you need to modify the $path and the $url variable where these text files could be stored (default c:\temp) and which URL you want to download from http://kbupdate.info.
Next I published two variables (message and link) which will be mapped into the alert.
The published alert variable is for a filter in Orchestrator to determine if an alert needs to be generated or not.
And last step the alert activity “Create Information Alert”. I mapped the link variable to the description field and the message variable to the name field of the alert.
Of course I could have created a script rule or monitor in SCOM, but since Orchestrator is much cooler let’s use it.
Cool, huh?
You can download the script here.
