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?“
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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.comhttps://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) …?
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:
OpsMgr 2007’s
- Operations Manager itself
- Active Directory
- Exchange
It also includes two commonly used templates:
- Internet Explorer Service Template – to use to let you know when web browser clients cannot access critical web application resources
- Windows Explorer Data Source Service Template – which lets you know when data source clients are unable to access important data source providers (databases)
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:
- Line of Business Web Application
- Messaging
- Terminal Services Farm
- Blank
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 https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/opsmgr/bb498237.aspx. I also mentioned it previously in this blog at http://www.networkworld.comhttps://www.networkworld.com//community/node/21315, and a detailed discussion is available in Chapter 19 of System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed.
