A new MP authoring tool was announced today. Read the release at http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2014/01/13/mp-blog-the-right-tool-for-the-right-job.aspx
This is a FREE tool which Silect is releasing. This tool essentially replaces the functionality of the previous “Visio Management Pack Designer” This is targeted at the IT Pro, who needs to create custom management packs and author new classes, discoveries, rule, monitors, etc… but is not a developer. This new tool will make simple work of creating a new class to monitor a specific application, quickly discover it, and add several types of monitoring.
You can register and download here: http://bridgeways.com/products/mp-author
One of the big benefits of this over the Visio tool, is that it can open existing MP’s and make changes to them, where the Visio tool was a “one way” solution. This new tool also expands on the types of workflows that are possible to create over the Visio tool. If you were using the Visio MP designer, I’d recommend migrating to this new solution immediately. If you considered but didn’t like the Visio designer, – try this one out.
This is the initial release, I imagine we will see additional capabilities as time progresses. Keep in mind – this is meant for SIMPLE management packs, not a full development suite. The Visual Studio authoring extensions are the right place for a more full featured management pack development environment.
Here are some simple examples of using MP Author:
Open MP Author. Click “New” to create a new MP.
Most fields come pre-populated, but are simple to change.
Provide a location for your new MP:
The MP Author automatically creates the necessary references, and you can add more if you need to reference classes in other MP’s:
Now we can choose what we want to create from common templates.
The MOST common should be “empty management pack”. Even a “single server application” create a class for our app, but it also creates an additional distributed application for each as well, and this is not commonly needed. I’d prefer the “single server application” only create a single, simple class, based on Microsoft.Windows.Local.Application, but that is open for discussion. When we choose to create an empty MP we still have full use of wizards to help create our MP.
I choose Empty MP and click Next, Finish.
Now – what I want to do is to create a class (or “Target”) in this MP to represent an application that I need to discover and monitor. For this example, I will use the WINS server role.
Go to “Targets” and choose “New Registry Target”
Connect to an existing WINS server to browse the registry of that machine.
I will base the discovery of my class on the Registry value for the WINS service – in this case it is located at:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WINS\Start
When Start = 2 (automatic) I consider that a WINS server. Click OK, Next.
Provide an ID and displayname for the Class, or accept defaults:
Provide an ID and displayname for the Discovery, or accept defaults:
Validate or modify the expression for class membership:
Set schedule for once every day, and Finish.
SAVE YOUR MP AT THIS POINT. We’d hate to lose all our work. 
Now we can quickly add in some event rules, service monitor, performance monitors, etc…. When happy, right-click the top level folder for your MP in the left tree view, and choose Import Management pack:
We provide a MS name, and credentials. mine popped up and said it could not validate my creds which was odd. The next screen shows what referenced MP’s must also be imported. This appears a little odd to me because these MP’s are already imported in my environment anyway. This operation crashed on my PC so there might be some issues to work out yes on this process. No bother, I’d rather manually import anyway. Unfortunately I didn’t save my work FIRST. So off I go to recreate what we just did.
I manually import my MP, and I can view my discovered servers using Discovered Inventory for my new class:
Could not be any easier to create classes for granular targeting of applications, and creating common authored workflows to rapidly provide monitoring.