Start-up keeps an eye on MOM

Start-up Silect Software this week will release a tool that promises to help IT executives make sure Microsoft's monitoring software is doing its job and doing it properly.

Silect's Health Reporter 2004 watches for problems with the components and configuration of Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), a performance and monitoring tool. It also can provide users with troubleshooting tips when problems arise and help decipher MOM alert messages.

MOM and Microsoft's System Management Server are two cornerstones in Dynamic Systems Initiative, which is Microsoft's plan to build a self-healing infrastructure for Windows.

With the critical role MOM will take on, end users will need to ensure it is functioning correctly.

"The problem with MOM is that when it is down it won't tell you it is down, short of setting up a second MOM hierarchy to watch the first," says Garth Jones, chief of application support infrastructure for the Canadian government's Department of Fisheries and Oceans. "When MOM dies at 2 a.m. for an unknown reason, Health Reporter sends us an alert through e-mail and then out to a pager."

Jones uses one MOM server to monitor 60 "clients" on his network. Health Reporter not only watches the server and its attached database but also can evaluate the operation of the agents running on the clients. Health Reporter collects detailed performance data not only for the MOM database but also from the Database Access Server/Consolidator-Agent Manager (DCAM) that sits between the MOM clients and the database.

"My goal with Health Reporter is to be able to go to the management team and say MOM is up on a reliable basis and we are meeting our goal of operating on a much more proactive basis," Jones says.

Health Reporter 2004 runs as a service under Windows so it doesn't require any user interaction to function once it is installed and configured on a workstation or server. The software provides comprehensive status and configuration reports on MOM, including the size of the database, memory usage and available connectivity.

The software's Knowledge Connector automatically can search the Internet for information on MOM, how to troubleshoot and how to understand MOM alerts.

"We want to give organizations the ability to capture, share and reuse IT knowledge," says Harold Dyck, president of Silect.

Health Reporter 2004 for MOM costs $995, which includes a license to monitor and report on up to 50 MOM agents, unlimited DCAMs and one database.