Summary

To keep your IT environment running smoothly, the greatest advantage you can give yourself is to know what is going on in your environment right now. When you have this operational awareness, you can resolve major issues faster and prevent larger outages by fixing smaller issues before they snowball. MOM 2005 assists you by actively monitoring as many machines and applications in your environment as you wish and sending you an alert when anything significant happens.

MOM 2005 does this by deploying intelligent agents from a central management server to all managed computers. These agents compare the state of the monitored machine to a vendor-defined health state, generate alerts when health state rule criteria are met, and take certain actions on the managed computer. The agent sends the alert to the central management server, which captures the information in a database and then makes the alert object available to you in the Operator console.

You can use the Operator console to consume all the information that is contained in an alert and to manipulate the state of the alert. To help you troubleshoot issues, the Operator console gives you certain predefined actions that can be executed against the managed computers, along with specific troubleshooting recommendations from the application vendor. After you have completed your troubleshooting steps, you can capture that knowledge immediately into MOM through the Operator console so that it is available for future troubleshooting efforts.

MOM 2005 has a core set of components that are involved in generating and managing alerts. These are agents that read data from providers, the MOM server, the DAS, and the Operator console. Other components include the Administrator, Web and Reporting consoles, the MOM 2005 APIs, and the reporting database.

Now that you have had a brief look at MOM 2005, I’ll guide you through the necessary steps to plan for and implement a basic MOM 2005 installation in Chapter 2. Chapters 3 through 8, which are the bulk of the book, cover the most common administrative tasks that you will perform after you complete the setup wizard and use MOM to monitor and troubleshoot your environment.

Chapters 9 and 10 look at the facilities MOM 2005 has for extending its functionality and connecting to other operations management frameworks.

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