System Center 2008 Management Packs for TFS 2008

System Center 2008 Management Packs for TFS 2008 is now available for download on Microsoft Download Center

The Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2008 Management Pack monitors exposed services of TFS. This management pack includes event rules and monitors. It is designed to proactively monitor quality and availability of TFS services and even automate recovery in some scenarios.

Feature Summary

• Auto discovery of TFS components
• Leverages ASP.NET MP and SQL MP
• Implements containment hierarchy reflecting logical architecture of the Product
• Implements a proper health model using Monitors
• Contains tasks, diagnostic and recovery for certain failures
• Events indicating service outages
• Alerts indicating configuration issues and connected data source changes
• Verification that all dependant services are running
• Targeted running of BPA against TFS Servers from Operator Console

New monitoring capabilities can be easily added.

TFSWarehouse Cube Corruption

Ever got your TFSWarehouse Cube corrupted?

One of the reasons I got that corruption was due to machine failure that corrupted some of the cube's XML files, I spent quite some time trying to figure out the problem and how to solve it, but luckily I got to fix it easily in 4 steps.

1. Open SQL Management and Stop the TFS Analysis Service on the TFS Data Tier.
2. Go to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.2\OLAP\Data" on the TFS Data Tier, and delete the folder TFSWarehouse.0.db and the XML file TFSWarehouse.0.db.xml
3. Run the following command on the TFS Data Tier to rebuild the cube, it can be found in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Tools"SetupWarehouse -o -s TFSServer -d TFSWarehouse -c warehouseschema.xml -a TFSServiceAccount -ra TFSReportsAccount -mturl http://TFSServer:8080
4. Start the TFS Analysis Service on the TFS Data Tier and Process the cube to get back on track.

That's all you need to do. Hope that will help ...

TFS Reliability & Disaster Recovery

bharry posed a great article on his blog talking about TFS reliability and disaster recovery breaking it down to the application and data tiers.

We continue to evolve and improve upon the TFS reliability and disaster
recovery story. Fundamentally reliability and disaster recovery are about
preserving service (or minimizing outage) and eliminating data loss in the face
of failure in components of your system. When we look at TFS component
failure, we primarily focus on the application tier (or web tier), the data tier
and the disk subsystem.