Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 Overview

This section will provide a brief architectural overview of Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), and explain the basic setup of a MOM system. At a very high level, MOM is Microsoft’s offer that allows operations staff to monitor and manage the IT infrastructure of a company. MOM also offers a rich reporting offering that uses SQL Server Reporting Services to support long-term health tracking and performance monitoring.

MOM Components

Like many of the more advanced products in the Windows Server System, MOM requires SQL Server as the data store for both its configuration data and the actual data that MOM collects from the systems that it monitors. For smaller organisations , deployment onto an MSDE database is supported, but given the volume of data that continuous monitoring of systems will generate, the storage capacity of MSDE will be quickly exceeded in most deployment scenarios.

There are three basic entities in a MOM management system -

• The MOM Management Server, which is responsible for coordinating the overall management of a particular set of IT assets.
• MOM Management Packs, which define how management and monitoring will occur.
• Managed computers, which can be either managed via the installation of a MOM agent (which is the default and recommended configuration) or through an agent-less configuration which uses standard technologies like Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) for monitoring.

The MOM Management Server is administered through a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in, and once a MOM Management Server has been configured, management and monitoring is accomplished through the MOM Operator Console, as shown in Figure 1. The Operator Console is a managed application (again proving that Microsoft’s own internal adoption of .NET technologies is continuing to increase) that provides an Outlook-style interface for managing the day-to-day operations of an IT department.

MOM also ships with a web version of the Operator Console called the Web Console, which allows remote monitoring of a MOM Server-managed environment. Of interest to developers is the fact that the Web Console is written entirely using the publicly-released MOM SDK, highlighting the deep degree on integration that MOM makes available.

Management Packs

Management Packs are the glue that binds the whole MOM monitoring experience together. The basic atom of a Management Pack is a rule, which may be an Event Rule, a Performance Rule or an Alert Rule. A rule acts on a piece of data from a provider, which may be a Windows Event Log, the Windows System Monitor (PerfMon) or a custom log file. A rule applies criteria against this data that a provider makes available, and if this criteria is met, a response can be trigger. A response may be an email, pager notification or execution of a piece of managed code. Finally, knowledge can be applied to a rule, so that operations staff responding to an alert trigger by a rule being fired have ready access to documentation that they can use to diagnose and rectify the problem. Figure 2 shows a MOM rule and supporting entities.