OpsMgr

Of Flying Pigs

Kerrie Meyler — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:21:29 -0400

Yes, Las Vegas is generally an interesting place without shows above and beyond its regular fare.

But the 2008 Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) had its own debut - pigs with wings. Now these were not live pigs, but four inches long by three inches high, complete with wings ... and sunglasses. And big smiles on their faces, being hurled by eager Microsofties into a cheering audience.

What was this about? Its often said that when Microsoft announced it was going open source, "pigs would fly" ... okay, you get it. The other saying at MMS this year was "well we tried to freeze this place over, but Las Vegas is too hot."

The hoopla, if you read my article from last week (http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/27354), had to do with the announced beta release of the Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions (X-Plat), available on CD to conference-goers on April 29th.

While John Fontana (http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/042908-microsoft-management-platform.html) saw this as a way for Microsoft to target CA and HP by extending System Center (Operations Manager in particular) to monitor Linux and Unix-based machines, the customers I spoke with saw it a bit differently. If you are using OpsMgr to monitor your Windows enterprise and have something in your organization that's not Windows-based, you have a gap. How do you monitor that web-server running on Linux? What about your financials package running on a flavor of Unix? Sure there is software for that, but its another user interface, another data repository, another type of reports to become familiar with.

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Management Packs and DSI

Kerrie Meyler — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 23:07:17 -0400

"Avodart" recently posted a comment to an entry on DSI dated 12/12/07. The comment read:

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The OpsMgr Command Shell

Kerrie Meyler — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:40:23 -0500

The Command Shell is an Operations Manager specific implementation of PowerShell. PowerShell of course is Microsoft’s extensible command line interface and scripting language, available for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and part of Windows Server 2008.

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Agent versus Agentless Monitoring

Kerrie Meyler — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 02:31:45 -0400

Like many other software packages, MOM and OpsMgr can deploy an agent to the system being monitored. Whether or not to deploy agents in general is always a discussion point. Let's talk about the agent used by Operations Manager.

While Operations Manager can use agentless monitoring, most management packs are built to perform better with an agent. The rules and other managment pack objects are deployed to each agent that they pertain to, allowing monitoring to occur even if contact is lost with the management server. Without an agent, the agent component on the management server collects data from the agentless managed computer using remote calls to that system. If the two systems cannot communicate, information is not collected.

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Operations Manager: Management Pack Evolution

Kerrie Meyler — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 12:38:46 -0400

If you've worked with both MOM 2005 (or MOM 2000) and OpsMgr 2007, you will have noticed that the structure of management packs has changed with Operations Manager 2007. Let's talk about that a little.

Management packs (MPs) provide a snapshot of operational health and are the mechanism OpsMgr 2007 uses to manage and monitor specific applications and services. Management packs make it possible to collect and utilize a wide range of information from various sources. They describe what data to examine and provide analysis of that data. Management packs are the brain of OpsMgr. Without MPs, OpsMgr is like a big empty shell, as the management packs provide the logic of what to monitor and what to do when a condition warrants attention.

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