Product Connectors and the MOM Connector Framework (MCF)

Product Connectors represent the deepest level of integration with MOM. The MOM SDK (available at for download from http://www.microsoft.com/mom/downloads/sdk/) offers two main modes of integration - a .NET API that can be consumed by managed applications and components written in Visual Studio.NET 2003 and a web service API that can be consumed by any web-service capable development tool, such as Visual Basic 6 with the SOAP Toolkit. For COM-centric clients, generating COM Callable Wrappers (CCW) from the managed MOM assemblies is also an option.

There are two basic motivations for writing a product connector. The first motivation is the obvious one – extending the product to do something that is doesn’t already do. For example, an organisation may want to write a connector to make data from a propriety device or system available within MOM. A number of third-party connectors that make logging and monitoring data available from non-Windows systems use the SDK to provide this functionality.

The second extension scenario is a little more obscure, but no less useful. In some situations, operations staff will have a set collection of tools that they are using for system management. Migrating from these tools to the MOM Operator Console may not be feasible due to retraining costs or functionality in the old tools that cannot be replicated easily in MOM. In these situations, it is possible to use MOM as the monitoring engine for Windows computers, and to use MCF to retrieve alerts from MOM and forward them to the existing management tool. For popular management software like IBM’s Tivoli a MCF adapter is available pre-built, but for home-grown management tools, a custom adapter needs to be written.