The process of operations management is a combination of people, procedures, and tools—all three are necessary, and the absence of one component can put an entire enterprise solution at risk. At a more granular level, operations management is about correlating what may appear to be seemingly unrelated events and data across machines to determine what information is significant to your operational environment versus what is not.
With System Center Operations Manager 2007, Microsoft continues its commitment to providing a solid monitoring and management product. Although Microsoft licensed NetIQ's Operation Manager technology in 2000, not until Operations Manager 2007 did Microsoft put its finishing touches on reengineering the product. Now in its third major release, the software formerly known as "MOM," or Microsoft Operations Manager, has been rewritten and rebranded into Microsoft's System Center product line. Operations Manager 2007 concentrates on end-to-end application monitoring, moving beyond its previous server monitoring focus.
Operations Manager 2007 monitors the health of an application, defined and measured by the health of the various pieces that make up that application. In today's environment, applications are no longer monolithic, so monitoring health typically includes network devices and the various pieces of a distributed application. Monitoring at the component level means that if a database used by an application has a problem, Operations Manager knows which application is affected.
Operations Manager 2007 also brings to the plate the capability to manage security and audit data, client machines, and common desktop applications, and collect and report on user application errors. Rather than being evolutionary in its changes as are most version updates to an application, Operations Manager 2007 is truly revolutionary in its approach to monitoring when compared to its MOM 2005 predecessor.
Successfully implementing Operations Manager requires planning, design, and a thorough understanding of how to utilize its many capabilities. This complete guide for using Operations Manager 2007 from the authors of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Unleashed gives system administrators the information they need to know about Operations Manager 2007 and what it can do for their operations—from an overview of why operations management is important, to planning, installing, and implementing Operations Manager 2007.
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed provides a comprehensive guide to this newest version of Microsoft's premier management product.
As always, we do have a disclaimer: Resources and management packs related to the product continue to change rapidly. Sometimes it seemed that even before we finished a chapter, the information was changing. This has been particularly challenging because Microsoft is close to releasing its first service pack for Operations Manager 2007 as we complete this book. We have done our best to present the information as it relates to both the released version and the service pack, even as that continues to take shape. The information in the book is current as of the time it was written, and the authors have done their best to keep up with the constant barrage of changing management packs, utilities, URLs, and Knowledge Base articles.
