Chapter 1. Introduction to MOM 2005
As you manage your Microsoft-based infrastructure, your goal is to develop a higher level of operational awareness concerning your unique IT environment. This awareness can be summed up in a simple statement: “I know what is going on in my IT environment right now.” When you can say this with a high degree of confidence, you have arrived at your goal.
You can reach this goal by performing operations management. Operations management is not system administration. System administration, and the skill sets that go along with it, are used in operations management, but system administration is narrower in focus in that it applies to a single system or platform. Operations management has a broader scope. It looks at how multiple systems work together to provide IT services to a company. It involves troubleshooting, managing, and reporting on all those systems as a whole.
You can perform operations management manually by examining Windows event logs, gathering performance monitor data, and depending on your users to tell you that something has gone awry. This can be very time-consuming, even if you have a small number of machines; ultimately, this approach leaves you reacting to events rather than preventing them. Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM 2005 or just MOM) performs many of these tasks for you and generates an alert when it detects a malfunction in the monitored applications or a condition that can lead to a malfunction. In the alert, MOM ...