I was asked the other day by Network World if I could respond to a reader's request to answer the question:
"If server/switch/router or application x is down, what else will be impacted?"
Good question. With today's distributed computing environment, application dependency mapping is crucial if you want to align IT applications with business processes. You want to be able to know if a database server is down, what applications are going to have problems since they use databases residing on that server. If a part of the network is down, or an application is inaccessible, what does that mean to the rest of the environment?
While Julie Bort wrote about this need several years ago (see http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2006/ndc3/062606-ndc-application-dependency-mapping.html), I don't think when she asked me to discuss it that she realized that Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2007 has the ability to do exactly that. The Distributed Application feature has the capability to integrate metrics of the usability of a complex system composed of multiple parts, including software and hardware components.
As an example. let's say a system administrator gets a phone call at 3 am - a critical e-commerce app is down. What does he (or she) do? What does he check first, what should he look at, what is the design tree - what part of the application is down? Is it the web server component, hardware on that server, something on the network, DNS, the back-end database (or its server) ...?
OpsMgr 2007's Distributed Application Designer gives you the ability to define your own end-to-end applications to be monitored by Operations Manager. It comes with predefined services for monitoring three distributed applications deemed important by Microsoft:
It also includes two commonly used templates:
In addition, you can create your own Distributed Application Health Model to monitor custom applications. By modeling the end-to-end service you will be monitoring, you identify all the components that make up the service and the relationships between those component. Four more templates are included to help you use the Distributed Application Designer:
By starting with a template that most closely matches the distributed application you want to monitor, you get a head start with modeling. The Blank template gives you access to every object that has been discovered in your Operations Manager environment (management group). After picking the objects you want to add, you can define relationships between the components. This lets OpsMgr know when a router is down for example (or a switch, server, database ...) what is impacted.
A training video discussing the Distributed Application Designer can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/opsmgr/bb498237.aspx. I also mentioned it previously in this blog at http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/21315, and a detailed discussion is available in Chapter 19 of System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed.
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.
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Distributed Aplications and network devices
Hello Kerrie,
Just recently saw this blog post and wanted to add on this topic since we receive this kind of question often from our customers and Xian Io precisely addresses this need. Jalasoft’s Xian Network Manger Io is also Distributed Application ready. Combining this Ops Mgr 07 feature and Xian Io, you can extend your DA diagrams to include not just the network device connecting two or more critical servers, but the specific interfaces or ports connecting such machines. Therefore, you can go more in depth and find out faster that the reason your system went down is because an interface was unplugged or a major fault occurred on the power supply or fan of your switch. This is possible since Xian Io while discovering a new device, also discovers all its components, such as CPUs, interfaces, memory pools, sensors, etc, and all these nodes are made available for any DA you might want to create. For more information feel free to review the following article: http://download.jalasoft.com/pub/docs/DistributedApplicationsandXianIo.pdf
Thanks!
Roberto Alcocer
Tech Support Manager
JALASOFT