SCOM 2016 – What’s New UNIX/Linux Series: File System Discovery e.g. Exclude /tmp

A little pain in SCOM 2012 R2 was, that as soon you installed the UNIX/Linux management packs for your distribution all UNIX/Linux folders were discovered on the file system. This could be lead to a huge list of monitored directories e.g. /tmp, /var… which was not intended to be. To overcome this problem, you would have needed to create a group, add the objects and disable the discovery rule for this group. The override parameters in SCOM 2012 R2 looked like this…

…the discovery itself…

…and the properties…

In SCOM 2016 there is a new option which let’s you exclude directories using regular expressions. The override parameters in SCOM 2016 look like this…

As you can see there are two options, either override by file system name or by file system type.

How does this work? Let’s see…

Excluding /tmp and xfs file system type

Before I override the parameter the discovered objects look like this…

Next, I set the override parameter to exclude the /tmp directory and all xfs file system types. Note here, I use regular expression ^(\/tmp)$ which means ^ and $ define start and end of string, () defines a group and the backslash is used to escape the forward  slash.  Then I set the discovery interval to 60 seconds just for testing purposes and save these settings in a override management pack…

…next time the discovery runs the objects are gone…

Nice feature!