Book Image

Getting Started with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager

By : Kevin Greene
Book Image

Getting Started with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager

By: Kevin Greene

Overview of this book

Most modern IT environments comprise a heterogeneous mixture of servers, network devices, virtual hypervisors, storage solutions, cross-platform operating systems and applications. All this complexity brings a requirement to deliver a centralized monitoring and reporting solution that can help IT administrators quickly identify where the problems are and how best to resolve them. Using System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr), administrators get a full monitoring overview of the IT services they have responsibility for across the organization - along with some useful management capabilities to help them remediate any issues they've been alerted to. This book begins with an introduction to OpsMgr and its core concepts and then walks you through designing and deploying the various roles. After a chapter on exploring the consoles, you will learn how to deploy agents, work with management packs, configure network monitoring and model your IT services using distributed applications. There’s a chapter dedicated to alert tuning and another that demonstrates how to visualize your IT using dashboards. The final chapters in the book discuss how to create alert subscriptions, manage reports, backup and recover OpsMgr, perform maintenance and troubleshoot common problems.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Getting Started with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Monitoring interfaces


An important aspect of monitoring network devices is to have visibility of the interfaces (or ports) on the devices that your servers are connected to. For example, these days network switches are fairly reliable and they rarely need to be replaced due to a hardware fault; however, it's entirely possible that someone working onsite in your datacenter might accidentally disconnect a network cable from the switch, resulting in a connectivity issue on your servers.

To ensure that you get alerted when a scenario like this occurs, OpsMgr provides the capability to monitor each individual interface on your network devices when using SNMP as part of your discoveries. Taking this into account, you might be surprised to learn that the default monitoring status for an interface that is connected to a computer is configured as not monitored! Only ports that connect to other network devices are monitored by default.

Although this might sound a little strange at first, when you think...