Microsoft® Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 delivers extensible and scalable enterprise-class operational management by providing comprehensive event management, proactive monitoring and alerting, reporting and trend analysis, and system and application specific knowledge and tasks to improve the manageability of Windows Server System™ environments. Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 provides:

User interfaces optimized for the task at hand, whether it be administration, operations, or reporting

Operational knowledge obtained directly from developers and operational staff to help identify, understand, and resolve IT issues

Easily extensible architecture to manage custom applications and integrate with third party solutions

The Cost of Downtime
When IT services are interrupted, IT Professionals are expected to take the necessary actions to restore services as quickly as possible. The cost of downtime can be directly linked to how long it takes to restore the services and time is money. However, a significant amount of time is spent:

Dealing with issues that could have been avoided if detected earlier

Trying to determine the importance and priority of events and their root cause

Searching for the appropriate resolution information

MOM 2005 provides the tools and capabilities to help IT Professionals reduce both the time spent identifying and resolving issues, and the number of issues requiring investigation by simplifying and streamlining the identification, understanding and resolution processes for the issues potentially causing service outages.

Now, the IT Professional can spend less time managing crises and more time delivering new services to the business.

Administrator Console
Targeted to configure and optimize MOM 2005, install management packs, create rules, configure and deploy agents, and configure user views and security settings

Operator Console
Provides an intuitive user interface for the MOM Operator to quickly identify issues. This console includes multiple views such as a topology diagram reflecting the relationships between servers and systems, a state view summarizing the health of each server, and an alert view for displaying actionable events

Web Console
Acustomizable web interface built on the MOM 2005 Software Development Kit (SDK), which provides a summary of computers, in addition to alert and event views

Reporting Console
Provides access to a large number of predefined reports for systems, applications, and environments monitored by MOM 2005 — utilizing SQL Server™ Reporting Services. Additional custom reports can also be created in the Visual Studio® development environment

Determine what needs to be monitored

Troubleshoot issues when they occur

Management packs contain a collection of monitoring rules with predefined thresholds, a knowledge base with troubleshooting and resolution information, and scripts that can be used to quickly resolve identified issues.

The pre-defined rules and thresholds help reduce the time an IT Professional needs to spend on identifying which alerts are important and need to be monitored, and what the reasonable thresholds are when monitoring specific services. They also reduce the number of alerts that are routed to operator consoles, freeing operators from the tedious task of working through large numbers of alerts trying to determine whether they are significant or not.

The knowledge base provided with the management pack contains the known root cause analysis and troubleshooting information that the operator might have previously obtained through consulting product documentation, run books, or online articles. By linking this knowledge base directly to the alert, an operator now has the information immediately at hand, shortening the time needed to troubleshoot the issue.

To further help with quick resolution, the management pack also provides operators and administrators with the capability to add custom troubleshooting scripts, customer specific information or links to additional knowledge sources.

64-bit Support
Management of applications running on 64-bit operating systems

Agentless Monitoring
Limited management capabilities for servers without requiring the installation of a MOM agent

Maintenance Mode
Ability to stop alerts from being displayed in the Operator Console while a system is being maintained

Rule Override and Hierarchy
Ability to override the default parameters and thresholds for selected computers or groups, and precedence setting to prevent potential conflicts caused by multiple overrides

Multi-homing
Information collected by MOM 2005 agents can be forwarded to and monitored by multiple and separate IT groups requiring visibility into the health of the same servers

Multi-tiering
Bidirectional alert synchronization and aggregated views between tiered MOM servers for distributed environments

Fully Globalized
Operates in multi-language and localized environments, and the MOM 2005 consoles and management packs are localized for English, French, German, and Japanese.

The following solutions are part of the Service Monitoring Solution Accelerator.

Notification Workflow
A Microsoft SQL Server Notification Services application that can be used to extend notification functionalities of MOM 2005 through a subscription-based approach and by sending notifications via email

Auto-ticketing
Provides guidance for automated ticket generation — enabling fully automated posting of a request (or ticket) into the Trouble Ticketing (TT) system used for an incident management

Alert Tuning
Helps streamline alert management. The solution provides:

Prescriptive guidance with proven methodology on effective ‘noise’ reduction and review metrics for dealing with alerts

Three key MOM 2005 reports on Alert Tuning

Service Continuity
Helps increase the availability of MOM 2005 services. The role MOM 2005 plays in providing availability monitoring for business applications makes it important that critical operations management tools deliver high levels of availability and continuity. The MOM 2005 Service Continuity solution offers IT managers guidance on:

Increased availability and continuity of the monitoring services within IT operations

Automation for rapid failover of MOM 2005 service across key service layers

Various architectural configurations spanning multiple geographical locations

Multiple Management Group Rollup
Provides guidance for propagating data from multiple management groups into one data warehouse for consolidation and aggregate reporting. The Multiple Management Group Rollup solution enables the ability to:

Store long-term operational data propagated from multiple MOM 2005 management groups

Develop report that provides business with information to analyze infrastructure reliability capacity, and behavior

The Service Monitoring Solution Accelerators can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com/msm.

Managing Beyond Microsoft

Third Party Management Packs
Management packs for Microsoft applications are developed by the individual product teams in conjunction with Microsoft Consulting Services and Microsoft Product Support Services — combining the best of development, deployment, and troubleshooting knowledge. In addition, there is a wide range of third-party application and hardware management packs that allow MOM 2005 to reach further than the Microsoft components of your IT infrastructure.

To help deliver improved management for applications provided by other vendors, MOM 2005 includes tools that any application provider can use to create a management pack. Since application providers have sophisticated knowledge associated with their applications, it is easy to create management packs that embed the necessary operational knowledge to provide pre-defined rules, thresholds, knowledge and scripts.

A list of MOM 2005 management packs can be found in the Management Pack Catalog: http://www.microsoft.com/management/mma/catalog.aspx.

MOM Connector Framework
Managing the Microsoft components is an important subset of managing a heterogeneous enterprise. Integration between the Microsoft management tools and third party corporate-wide management systems is necessary to proactively manage and maintain the entire IT environment. To simplify and facilitate integration with other management tools in the enterprise, MOM 2005 includes the web services-based MOM Connector Framework (MCF). The MCF web service provides a generalized abstraction of the MOM 2005 alerting infrastructure, resulting in the ability to:

Identify and surface MOM 2005 alerts to be forwarded to another management system

Insert alerts from other management systems and display them in the MOM 2005 Operator console along with alerts generated by MOM 2005

Track which alerts have been forwarded to another management system, and when they require updating

Synchronize alerts between management systems, reducing duplicate efforts for alert tracking and updating

With MCF, IT Professionals can reduce the investment required in the costly and time consuming integration between unlike management systems. MCF also provides an easy way to incorporate information from multiple management tools into a single view.

Monitoring Scenarios
Once a monitoring tool has been selected and implemented, IT Professionals are expected to use the tool to start realizing the benefits promised. To help capitalize on an investment in MOM 2005, below are three scenarios outlining how MOM 2005 can be used to deliver on the benefits in each of the three areas highlighted – identifying, understanding and resolving of issues.

Identifying Important Issues
Many mission critical applications run on SQL Server 2000 databases. It is commonplace for nightly processes to be executed against the SQL database to verify data integrity. If a nightly process fails, there is the potential for interruption in the application service or inconsistencies in the data. With MOM 2005 monitoring the database using the SQL Server 2000 Management Pack, such failures can be monitored and surfaced through the state monitoring view. The state of a computer is a rollup of the state of various roles the computer is performing. In this case, while the operating system component may be healthy, the unhealthy SQL Server role will cause the overall computer state to be unhealthy and demand attention. The operator can drill into this particular role to view the alert generated in MOM 2005. The alert also provides a severity level indicating how critical the alert is, as well as detailed information on the cause of the alert.

In addition, many large enterprises have dedicated operations staff to manage specific applications, and with MOM 2005 an operator’s view can be customized to a particular subset of servers, allowing the SQL Server owners to see only the relevant information for managing their servers.

MOM 2005 provides a variety of topological views from which the existence of nodes and relationships can be discovered automatically by the management pack — providing a reliable and accurate way to visualize the topology of the application. For example, with the Exchange Server 2003 Management Pack, MOM 2005 has the ability to discover and depict memberships of routing groups, relationships between routing groups, roles of the various Exchange servers, and status of servers, providing an up-to-date view of your Exchange implementation.

In addition to monitoring server and application availability, it is important to understand the end-user experience, especially with business critical services such as email, and proactively prevent potential issues from occurring. The Exchange Sever 2003 Management Pack includes synthetic transactions to monitor the latency experienced by Outlook®, Outlook Web Access, Outlook Mobile Access, and Exchange ActiveSync® technology, and warning alerts can be generated when the latency is over a predetermined threshold. The MOM 2005 views and reports can then be used to help analyze historical performance, advising the operator to obtain the information needed to detect concerning trends and prevent potential issues.

It is often a time consuming process to identify a replication failure as the cause of for example an access issue and to quickly remedy the problem. With MOM 2005 and the Active Directory Management Pack, each Active Directory Domain Controller can be monitored to help ensure the replication is configured correctly, both inter-site and intra-site replication is occurring within reasonable thresholds, and end-to-end replication is occurring within service level agreements. Detailed knowledge is available through the management pack should a replication issue arise, helping to quickly identify the root cause.

To help resolve the issue and remedy the problem, MOM 2005 best practice guidance can be applied directly from the Operator Console by accessing the context-sensitive tasks and diagnostics directly from the alert. Customized sets of tasks are available based on the view selected in the console, and can automatically be populated with pre-discovered data. This information can then be used to intelligently target the correct instances and parameters to execute the task against. The operator retains control of the final approval before the task is executed in order to verify information.

Trouble tickets should also be created when executing any task to track the resolution of issues. An MCF product connector can be used between MOM and the trouble ticketing system. A task can be configured to automatically open a trouble ticket and populate it with information directly from the alert. MCF allows easy synchronization between MOM 2005 and other systems, any change in the status on either system can be updated automatically, providing visibility into the latest resolution status.