How to question: Exclude Test Windows Services from a Service Class

Question

How to question: Exclude Test Windows Services from a Service Class

Saiyad Rahim 431

Similarly to my last query, i just found myself being requested to split Notifications between Test and Prod Windows Services from a single Class.

I created a Class for a Windows Service called "Telephony" and this captured all win services that started with the name "Telephony". So far it collected Win Services from Test Servers and Prod Servers altogether as expected and worked well for alerting and notification as i target my Telephony Class.

Issue now is that Business wants Notifications from Test Services to go Team A and notifications from Services from Prod to go to Team B.

We now that SCOM does not have the "do not include" or "Exclude" ability in Notification and Alerting.

So how do I split this?

What's the best practice that you all use?

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Answer 1

Hi Saiyad,

From your description, I would not try to solve this by keeping one broad Telephony class in the subscription and then trying to exclude Test later. The cleaner approach is to split the monitored instances into two non-overlapping groups and scope the subscriptions to those groups. In SCOM terms, that usually means an instance group for Telephony Services - Test and another for Telephony Services - Prod. Instance groups can contain the actual monitored objects, which is the better fit when the alerts are raised by service instances rather than just by the hosting computers.

If the distinction between Test and Prod is really a server/environment distinction, then populate those two service-instance groups dynamically based on where the service is hosted, for example:

Telephony service instances hosted by servers in the Test computer group
Telephony service instances hosted by servers in the Prod computer group

That "contained by / hosted by another group" pattern is a common way to get very granular scoping for notifications, overrides, and views.

Then create:

one subscription scoped to Telephony Services - Test → Team A
one subscription scoped to Telephony Services - Prod → Team B

The important part is to make those groups mutually exclusive. I would not scope one subscription to the full Telephony class and the other to Test, because then you create overlap and duplicate notifications. Microsoft’s SCOM notification guidance also calls out that the Scope tab does not support a native "not equal to" or "not a member of" style exclusion, so trying to solve this as an exclusion problem is usually the wrong direction.

If this Test/Prod split is permanent and important beyond notifications, then the more structured long-term design is to create two separate discoveries / classes instead of one shared class, for example Telephony Service - Test and Telephony Service - Prod. That gives you cleaner targeting for monitors, overrides, views, and subscriptions later on. Kevin has also shown an approach for discovering class instances based on computer name when the server split is static and known.

So my recommendation would be: keep the current service class if you want, but introduce two dynamic instance groups of that class, based on the hosting Test vs Prod servers, and then scope the two subscriptions to those groups. That is usually the cleanest and most supportable way to do it.

Hope that helps you out.

Best Regards

Stoyan Chalakov

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