There is a great article on sealed and unsealed management packs here so I’m not going to repeat the same information. Instead, I’ll assume you know the reasons why you want to start authoring Management Packs in Visual Studio and sealing those Management Packs before you import them into SCOM.

1. To get started, you’ll need Visual Studio. Community edition gives the same technical functionality as Professional and Enterprise editions of Visual Studio as long as you work within the licensing limitations.

Download Visual Studio Tools – Install Free for Windows, Mac, Linux (microsoft.com)

    Download System Center Visual Studio Authoring Extensions for Visual Studio 2022 from Official Microsoft Download Center

    2. Once the above are installed, you’ll need to create a key file. A help file for sn.exe can be foundĀ here.

    First up, you’ll need to find sn.exe – a quick search in file explorer led me to here (Visual Studio 2019 Professional):

    C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v10.0A\bin\NETFX 4.8 Tools\x64

    3. We need to create a Key File so run PowerShell as an administrator and change the path to wherever sn.exe resides and run the following:

    .\sn.exe -k c:\temp\SCOMKey.snk (ignore the .\ if you are using a command window)

    4. Store the key in a secure location that you can get to when you need to seal a Management Pack.

    Now, whenever you create a management pack that you want to distribute sealed, you can use this key file to seal it.

    Just don’t lose the key file. If you do, you’ll never be able to update the management pack in SCOM as you won’t be able to build \ seal with the original seal. In that case you would have to:

    • Create a new key.
    • Delete the original management pack (that has the original \ lost seal) along with any dependency management packs.
    • Seal the management pack with the new key
    • Import the management pack and any dependency management packs you had deleted.

    By graham