Set up automatic SCOM maintenance mode
Now this is something I am quite pleased with however after coming up with the idea and Googling I found plenty of other cleverer people had come up with this before me! Here's one very good example: http://operatingquadrant.com/2009/08/15/scom-automatically-starting-maintenance-mode-when-servers-are-rebooted-for-patching/ Anyways one of the maybe overlooked aspects of SCOM notification is that you can run commands, meaning that an event/alert can then trigger a series of scripted actions. Really cool. What the blog above explains is how to use this feature to check for an event signalling that the Windows server is going to reboot this is event ID 22 from Windows Update. I use event ID 1074 as we do not reboot our servers automatically when patching, we do however use Citrix and some of these servers have a reboot scheduled. Event 1074 is raised by USER32 in the SYSTEM log when a scheduled reboot is attempted. So you can now safely put your servers into maintenance