Sometimes, when trying to remove a Management Pack from your Operations Manager through the Administration pane of the Operations Console, the following error dialog is presented:

This situation only occurs when one or more object have (previously) been added to a Live Maps view that are defined in the Management Pack that you want to delete. When you follow the suggestion as presented in the dialog above, all Live Maps views that have been created will be deleted.

Obviously, in most situations this is not what we want as this would enforce us to recreate all our Live Maps views from scratch. In this article I will describe the process to follow to remove the dependency from the Live Maps Authoring Management Pack without losing all our other Live Maps views.

Where did that dependency came from?

When objects of a class as defined in another Management Pack are added to  a Live Maps view, either as explicit objects or through Membership Rules, a Reference to the defining Management Pack is added to the Live Maps Authoring Management Pack. In this example a Live Maps view is created which contains all SQL Server 2000 Databases by using a Membership Rule as follows:

When we now take a look at the XML export of the Live Maps Authoring Management Pack, we will find that specific references to the SQL Server 2000 Management Packs are added:

<Reference Alias="MicrosoftSQLServer2000Discovery6066480">
 <ID>Microsoft.SQLServer.2000.Discovery</ID>
 <Version>6.0.6648.0</Version>
 <PublicKeyToken>31bf3856ad364e35</PublicKeyToken>
 </Reference>
<Reference Alias="MicrosoftSQLServerLibrary614000">
 <ID>Microsoft.SQLServer.Library</ID>
 <Version>6.1.400.0</Version>
 <PublicKeyToken>31bf3856ad364e35</PublicKeyToken>
</Reference>

When we further explore the Live Maps Authoring Management Pack, we will find the Alias for these references used in the definition of the Membership Rule for the Live Maps group created above.

How to get rid of that dependency?

Before we can delete the SQL Server 2000 Discovery Management Pack, we need to remove all explicit objects and Membership Rules from all our Live Maps views through the Live Maps Authoring Console:

After removing them all, we can export the Live Maps Authoring Management Pack in the Administration pane of the Operations Console:

Make a copy of the unmodified exported XML file as a backup!

Then open the XML file in an XML Editor of your choice (e.g. Microsoft’s XML Notepad 2007) and make a note of the Alias used. Search the remainder of the XML file to assure that there are no Membership Rules that are using the alias.

Then delete the Reference section(s) to the Management Pack(s) that we want to delete:

After importing the modified Live Maps Authoring Management Pack into our Operations Manager environment again, the previously referenced SQL Server 2000 Management Pack can now be deleted:

If the import of the manually modified Live Maps Authoring Management Pack fails, it probably means that the Alias of a removed Reference is used anywhere else in the Live Maps Authoring Management Pack or that the XML structure itself became invalid. Please revert back to the previously created backup of the unmodified exported XML file and carefully repeat the steps described above.

More information on Live Maps can be found here.