Configuring SharePoint 2010 Farm Monitoring with SCOM 2007 when missing sharepointMP.config file

Microsoft made management pack installation much easier in System Center Operations Manager 2007, but I recently had problems with the new automated process.

Directly installing the management packs from the catalog will appear to function fine, but a critical file “sharepointMP.config” will be missing. There are very references on the internet to issues with the x64 version of Windows installing the file to the wrong location—this is not the solution. A search of the entire server will not return the file.
The solution turned out to be trivial. Download the management pack the old fashioned way as an MSI from Microsoft and install it noting the x86/x64 issue if it is appropriate. Once installed you will find the “sharepointMP.config” file in the directory. Follow the instructions in the “Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Products Management Pack Guide” on Microsoft’s site to edit the file appropriately for your service account. Basically just change these two entries:

• Association Account="SharePointService" (an account with rights to the farms)
• Machine Name="spoint" (or some string that is in all your sharepoint server names)

Then run the "Configure SharePoint Management Pack" command in the action pane of the SharePoint Folder in SCOM. It will take a while for the data to appear once this is done. Microsoft suggested 30 minutes in their documentation.