Operations Manager, as a management and monitoring system, is most commonly used to identify conditions that occur, notifying you if specified conditions take place. Generically speaking, the concept of monitoring is "Watch my back, and let me know what’s going on."
Monitoring with OpsMgr or any other type of management system allows us to react more quickly than we would otherwise. Once we know about an issue, we can use OpsMgr for product knowledge to help us more quickly resolve the problem. In addition to Microsoft's knowledge and what's captured in your own head (and potentially stored as company knowledge within your own Operations Manager database), you can look to the user community for help with problem solving, as there are numerous articles and blogs such as this one that discuss use of the product.
Something new in the user community is a resource called ReSearch This!, which you can incorporate as a management pack within OpsMgr 2007 (or MOM 2005). Research This! provides a shared community-based knowledge repository for OpsMgr, System Center Essentials and MOM 2005. This resource is hosted by SystemCenterForum. You can download the Ops2007 version of the management pack at http://systemcenterforum.org/wp-content/uploads/ReSearchThisOpsMgr.zip. A version for MOM 2005 is available as well, at http://systemcenterforum.org/wp-content/uploads/ReSearchThisMOM.zip. The management pack includes tasks that search the SystemCenterForum repository for the alert you specify, and allow you to link to the SystemCenterForum repository to share your own resolutions with the community.
After resolving an issue, you will want to store information on its resolution in company knowledge and optimally share it with the community using the management pack. These two approaches work together to allow an administrator running OpsMgr the means to resolve issues more quickly than it would be possible without using a monitoring solution.
Check it out and see if it helps you! The more people that use the Research This! resource, the more effective it will be!
Kerrie Meyler, a Microsoft MOM MVP, is an independent consultant and trainer with more than 15 years of Information Technology experience. A previous senior technology specialist at Microsoft, she focused on infrastructure and management solutions, presenting at numerous product launches. More recently, she presented on Operations Manager 2007 and gave several podcasts at TechEd 2007.
Kerrie has worked with Microsoft Learning to develop Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) for several courses, including the Implementing Microsoft Operations Manager 2000 course, and did the beta teach for that course.
Kerrie is the lead author of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Unleashed and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed
Check out an excerpt from System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed, Chapter 3: Looking Inside OpsMgr.
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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