Essential Microsoft Operations Manager

Troubleshooting

Not surprisingly, the MOM 2005 management pack includes 95 event processing rules and 17 performance processing rules that specifically target agents, as well as hundreds of other rules that monitor the other MOM components. MOM is well equipped for self-diagnosis. You will rely on MOM’s ability to report on itself in almost all troubleshooting scenarios, and almost all troubleshooting is done in the Operator console.

The main concerns of troubleshooting agents are:

• Is the agent up or down?

• If it is up, is the agent providing a heartbeat?

• If the agent is not providing a heartbeat, when was the last successful contact with the agent?

• If the agent is up, is it successfully sending event, alert, and performance data to the management server?

• Is the agent successfully receiving updates from the management server?

These concerns are listed from most critical to least, but an agent has to be doing all of these things successfully to be fully functional. The first place to check the current status of any service is in the State view in the Operator console (see Figure 3-35).

Here, the focus is on homesqlserver in the results pane. The current state of each machine is reported in the leftmost column and is the worst state of any of the monitored components for that machine. In the MOM agent column, you can see that the

Figure 3-35. The current agent condition is reported in the State ...