A client of mine recent came and asked about SCOM – their discovery process was running “forever” – and sure enough it was.

The permissions looked fine, the SPN’s had been set the SQL broker was enabled….

It turned out to be that the collation on the SQL server was set differently to the collation on the Operations manager databse – as documented by this blog post – http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/2010/04/failed-to-store-data-in-data-warehouse.html and this technet article – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958979

Its a bit disappointing that the pre-req checker doesnt pick this up!