SCOM CU4 - Manual agent installs not appearing in pending management

I work in fairly small server environment and due to the firewalls being up on clients, I have always installed the SCOM agents onto my target servers manually. After the agent is installed it appears under the "Pending Management" tab of the SCOM > Administration console and I simply have to approve it.



The Problem

After installing CU4 onto my SCOM management server I would no longer see these manual agent installs under the "Pending Management" tab.

After investigating the "Operations Manager" event logs on the SCOM management server I found an entry.

Source: OpsMgr SDK Service
Event ID: 26321

An agent was rejected. Current security settings do not allow the automatic insertion of agents.

Change either the security global settings, or the security settings for the specific management server.

Agent name: computer.domain.local
Management server name: SCOM001.domain.local

And on the client itself there was another corresponding event log entry.

Source: OpsMgr Connector
Event ID: 21016

OpsMgr was unable to set up a communications channel to SCOM001.domina.local and there are no failover hosts.  Communication will resume when SCOM001.domain.local is available and communication from this computer is allowed.

The Fix

The resolution was seriously simple.

1. On the SCOM management server open your SCOM Console.

2. Click on the Administration tab.

3. Select Settings.

4. Right click "Security" and select Properties"

5. Select "Review new manual agent installations in pending management". You can tick "Automatically approve new manually installed agents" but I would avoid it for security reasons.











6. Restart the SCOM agent on the client system. Voila, it appears in the "Pending Management" tab and I can then approve it.