Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Unleashed (MOM): With A Preview of Operations Manager 2007

The most complete and detailed information available on deploying, managing, and administering Microsoft's powerful network monitoring tool.

Introduction Introduction With the licensing of NetIQ's Operation Manager technology in 2000, Microsoft sent a message that it was serious about server monitoring and management. This message was well received; those production environments running Windows servers and using a Microsoft infrastructure require tools to help them be proactive in managing those servers and the applications and services within. However, operations management is more than just looking at individual event logs from hundreds or even thousands of servers. It's about co-relating what may appear to be unrelated events across servers and determining what information is significant and what is not, what may portend a potential problem, and then taking available vendor and in-house knowledge and using that as a base of information in both preventing problems and solving them. Operations management is not just a software application; successfully maintaining Service Level Agreements involves people, tools, and processes. Although Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) is a tool, it is not a piece of software that you can simply install and have instantly working. A successful implementation of MOM involves planning, design, and an understanding of how to utilize its management packs. Operations management tools also have several target groups of users: computer operations, help desk personnel, and administrators of various areas, including operating systems, security, database, messaging, and web servers, to name a few. This book intends to answer the perennial question: "Now that I've run Setup, how do I make this work?" Successfully implementing operations management takes planning and design. Successful administration and use of MOM requires managing the thousands of rules it can encompass, working with the various types of administrators, and keeping management informed of trends. We do have a disclaimer: Resources and management packs related to MOM 2005 change rapidly. Sometimes it seemed that as soon as we completed a chapter, the information was already outdated. The information in this 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, MOM-related utilities, URLs, and knowledge base articles. Part I: Operations Management Overview and Concepts Part I introduces the reader to MOM 2005, outlining its features and functionality and comparing and contrasting it to MOM 2000 and MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition. Chapter 1, "Operations Management Basics," discusses the concepts behind operations management and Microsoft's management approach, and introduces MOM and Microsoft's management suite of products. An overview of ITIL and MOF is included along with a discussion of how the different MOF quadrants relate to MOM. In Chapter 2, "What's New," we cover the history of MOM and compare MOM 2005 with MOM 2000 and the 2005 Workgroup Edition. Chapter 3, "How Does It Work?," appropriately gives an architectural overview and discusses the MOM components. Part II: Planning and Installation Before diving into MOM's setup program, it is best to take a step back to map out the requirements for your management environment and planning your server topology. Chapter 4, "Planning Your MOM Deployment," discusses the steps required to successfully plan a MOM installation. Chapter 5, "Planning Complex Configurations," addresses more advanced implementations including planning for redundancy and how to architect management groups. In Chapter 6, "Installing MOM 2005," we discuss hardware and software requirements before going through the steps to install the various server components in a management group using a "simple" configuration. (We talk