Stale/Gray objects in Operations Manager

Occasionally you'll have grayed out agents in your Monitoring view in SCOM.  This can be due to the fact that a server was decommissioned before you had a chance to properly uninstall the agent and delete it from the Administration pane.  Even after you delete it from the Administration pane the object may still appear grayed out.  For this, I turned to SQL Management Studio.

First I run this query against the OperationsManager DB:
SELECT * FROM dbo.[BasemanagedEntity] where FullName Like '%computername%'

This shows me all instances that still reside in the DB for that computer.  Scroll over the the IsManaged and IsDeleted column.  You'll often, not always, notice a mixture of 1's and 0's.  Ideally if you want this server deleted IsManaged = 0 and IsDeleted = 1.  All it takes is one of the items in the IsDeleted column to show 0 for the object to show in the console in a gray state.

Which leads us to the SQL query to remove these from the console:

USE [OperationsManager]
UPDATE dbo.[BaseManagedEntity]
SET
[IsManaged] = 0,
[IsDeleted] = 1,
[LastModified] = getutcdate()
WHERE FullName like '%computername%'

Now IsManaged = 0 and IsDeleted = 1.  Refresh your SCOM Console and...

No more gray agent :)

The query to run the data purging Stored Proc is as follows:


DECLARE @GroomingThresholdUTC datetime
SET @GroomingThresholdUTC = DATEADD(d,-2,GETUTCDATE())
UPDATE BaseManagedEntity
SET LastModified = @GroomingThresholdUTC
WHERE [IsDeleted] = 1
UPDATE Relationship
SET LastModified = @GroomingThresholdUTC
WHERE [IsDeleted] = 1
UPDATE TypedManagedEntity
SET LastModified = @GroomingThresholdUTC
WHERE [IsDeleted] = 1
EXEC p_DataPurging

I believe this runs each night but just in case you want to force it.  Should only take a few seconds.

If that doesn't fix it, follow this guide: http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2008/09/29/agent-pending-actions-can-get-out-of-synch-between-the-console-and-the-database.aspx