Moving Outside the Box

Oftentimes we tend to get caught up in mundane daily activities and lose sight of a larger picture - this can take place at home as well as at work. From an operations management perspective, we can be busy closing alerts in OpsMgr and lose sight of what we're really trying to accomplish. OpsMgr can be more than closing alerts ... or drilling down in the Health Explorer ... or even determining what management packs you want to implement to monitor your applications and services.

OpsMgr is most commonly used to identify conditions that occur and provide notification if something unwelcome takes place. Monitoring with OpsMgr allows us to react more quickly than we would otherwise. Once we become aware of an issue, we can use OpsMgr's product knowledge to help us more quickly resolve the problem. We can also use other tools, including articles and blogs in the user community that discuss use of the product.

The key word though was react. Operations management should be more than just reacting to conditions, and it is! OpsMgr for example has the functionality to monitor proactively. Here are several examples:

• It is easier to fix a disk drive that is low on free space by freeing up additional space than it is to recover from a system crash caused by running out of free space.
• If you utilize statistics for trending purposes, you can watch a server grow from 50% memory utilization in January to 60% in March and 70% in June, and realize that memory utilization will likely become a bottleneck prior to September. 

Using OpsMgr enables us to not only identify and resolve problems quicker, but become more proactive in monitoring issues before they become problems. Remember the old saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?

But even beyond this, OpsMgr can be used to help you automatically adapt to your environment. This can take place not only by utilizing the capabilities in the product itself, but by integration with other products. What is being emphasized here is the art of adapting.

If you're familiar with Microsoft's Infrastructure Optimization (IO) Model, you may recall it has four levels. The 4th level is the Dynamic level, which I sometimes refer to as IT nirvana. At this level, your processes are automated and you are no longer fighting fires. OpsMgr can help you achieve that IT nirvana ... although remember it is just a tool. Tools are only a means to a solution - and operations management is a combination of people, procedures, and tools.

If you're not yet familiar with the IO model, you may want to read about it at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/infrastructure/default.aspx. I'll talk more about the art of adapting in a future article. The art of adapting is also discussed in System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed.