Essential Microsoft Operations Manager

Chapter 6. Operator Console

With the minor exception of Chapter 1, this book has focused on aspects of MOM that are controlled and viewed through the Administrator console—specifically, how to configure and control the behavior of management groups and the information that they produce.

This chapter shifts focus to cover the Operator console and how to get the information you want out of it. As such, this chapter is for consumers of MOM information, not just MOM administrators. However, MOM administrators are not off the hook; you need to go through this chapter as well—after all, who are the MOM users going to turn to for help with using the MOM 2005 Operator console?

The Operator console will tell you what is going on in your environment right now. Two types of user/console interactions are necessary to find that out. The first is MOM-initiated and it happens when a significant event occurs anywhere in the environment. It comes in the form of an alert or a state update. In this instance, MOM is saying, “Hey you, this thing that you wanted me to tell you about, well, it just happened over here.” The top-level alert and Operator console State views provide a broad perspective of the whole environment. This can be limited to a portion of the environment if you’ve implemented console scopes.

The other use of the Operator console is to find out what happened or is happening in a smaller portion of the environment. For example you may need to find out, “What is the available disk space ...