Outside of the OpsMgr administrators and key operators, the first introduction most other IT team members and management have to the monitoring solution is through alerting and reports. When the team responsible for managing OpsMgr has completed their initial alert tuning exercises, an agreed process is typically put in place to send alerts with specific criteria to the relevant people across the business. These alerts can be forwarded through transport mediums, such as e-mail, SMS texts, Instant Messaging, and custom scripting.
Detailed reports containing useful health, performance and availability data can also be scheduled to ensure an analytic and pro-active approach is taken to ensure systems are maintained at optimal levels. Reports are an excellent way to keep senior management in the loop about what's happening with the infrastructure and to provide information on whether or not agreed SLA's have been met.
In this chapter we will...