Now that you have an understanding of the other key components of System Center, it's time to introduce you to Operations Manager (OpsMgr)—the core monitoring solution from Microsoft for over a decade. OpsMgr built its reputation in infrastructure monitoring of Microsoft workloads before expanding its capabilities to cover cross-platform monitoring of Unix/Linux distributions. The first OpsMgr 2012 release branched out to include monitoring of physical network devices as well as cloud and fabric environments, through its integration with Virtual Machine Manager and Microsoft Azure.

On top of all this, Microsoft has given us the opportunity to truly deliver full 360 degree monitoring of our applications by modeling them as IT services in OpsMgr and gaining code-level visibility with Application Performance Monitoring (APM). With OpsMgr 2012 R2 and the release of OpsMgr 2016, we get deep integration into Microsoft's cloud-based Operations Management Suite (OMS) - which gives us enhanced capabilities for log analytics, alert remediation and best practice recommendations.

If you have a requirement to report back to senior management in your organization on how available your IT services are, then OpsMgr has that covered too. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can be tracked and reported on easily to determine the overall level of SLA compliance.