During my last assignment I worked with the SCOM to SCSM Alert connector. This connector is syncing alerts from System Center Operations Manager to System Center Service Manager. This is a two-way connector, information from SCSM is synced back to Operations Manager. During the configuration of this connector we ran into an issue with Secure Vantage Audit Manager ACS Optimizer.

After adding the SCOM Alert Connector in SCSM all components of the connector were configured. A product connector in SCOM was installed and a subscription was created. The alerts where syncing from SCOM to SCSM without any issues. After a change of the connector it stopped syncing alerts. We checked the eventlog on the SCSM Management Server and found the following errors:

Error 1:

The System Center Data Access service client threw an unknown exception while processing a type cache refresh notification. The cache was not updated successfully:

System.InvalidCastException: Unable to cast object of type ‘System.DBNull’ to type ‘System.String’.

Error 2:

Encountered Operations Manager exception. The synchronization will resume on the next scheduled time.

Message: An object of type MonitoringClass with Id <<id >> was not found..

So the first thing to check was which MonitoringClass is causing the issue. Unfortunately this was a Sytem.Group object. So not very useful for troubleshooting. After some searching on the Internet we found the following blogpost of Daniele Grandini

https://nocentdocent.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/issues-connecting-svcmgr-2012-to-opsmgr-2012-part-1/

https://nocentdocent.wordpress.com/2012/05/03/issues-connecting-svcmgr-2012-to-opsmgr-2012-part-2/

Daniele is describing this issue very detailed. Using his query showed us that images in the Secure Vantage Audit Manager MP were causing the error. Unfortunately Secure Vantage is/was not answering to support calls by phone or email. So we needed to find a solution for our problem. Deleting and adding the MP didn’t solved our problems. So we needed to fix the MP. We exported the MP and we investigated the images in the MP and we had found the root cause. 2 Images where missing the ImageCategory definition in the MP. So we created a custom Management Pack with a reference to the existing MP and added the following ImageCategories to that custom MP:

<Categories>
 <Category ID="Cat.SecureVantage.Security.Role.16x16Image.02e04ec5" Target="SVT!SecureVantage.Security.Role.16x16Image.02e04ec5" Value="System!System.Internal.ManagementPack.Images.u16x16Icon" />
 <Category ID="Cat.SecureVantage.Security.Role.80x80Image.01e2c4f4" Target="SVT!SecureVantage.Security.Role.80x80Image.01e2c4f4" Value="System!System.Internal.ManagementPack.Images.DiagramIcon" />
</Categories>

After saving this MP and importing it in SCOM the error was gone in SCSM. We checked the database again with the query and the missing ImageCategories were added by Custom MP we have imported in our SCOM environment.

So if you have the combination of SCOM, SCSM and SecureVantage and you are planning to use the SCOM Alert connector in SCSM be aware of this issue!

Thanks to Daniele Grandini for his detailed blogpost!

Thanks to Oskar Landman for helping on this issue!