12.1 Microsoft Operations Manager overview

To provide a solid foundation for operations management solutions, information technology (IT) operations teams need production-quality operational management tools that they can fully integrate into the existing enterprise IT infrastructure. Proactive operations management requires continuous monitoring of systems and network components.

In too many IT operations groups, the first step when a problem occurs is to begin collecting information to analyze the problem. They must determine what information might be relevant and where the relevant information is located. They waste considerable time searching for information on different systems. Often, the problem is intermittent and the information that is needed for analysis has disappeared until the problem resurfaces in the future. Ask yourself the following questions as to how you troubleshoot a problem:

• How much time do you spend collecting data?

• How many times did you not know what to look for?

• How many times is the problem intermittent, and has the needed information disappeared?

• How many times is the needed information on a different system?

• Once you collect the data, how much time do you spend looking for related information?

Microsoft has always supplied basic monitoring and management tools with their operating systems and applications. Although these were sometimes adequate for small organizations, larger enterprises seldom used them especially not for production environments. Until the introduction of Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), Microsoft had traditionally left monitoring of production environments to third-party tools.

MOM is a comprehensive and scalable server monitoring solution that provides proactive, real-time monitoring and...