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

Creating service level objectives


After you have created a distributed application and configured its health rollup policies, its good practice to create and assign some service level tracking to it. Using service level tracking in OpsMgr, you can define a Service Level Objective (SLO) to measure the availability/performance of a specific object – in this case the IT service/distributed application model. Using SLO's, an OpsMgr administrator can then work with the IT service owner to create a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that specifies how available the service should be over a given period of time.

Even if you work within an organization that doesn't implement or hasn't yet got around to mapping out SLAs for IT services, using this functionality in OpsMgr is a great way of delivering some tangible value back to higher tiers of management within the business (think CIO's and board members) in the form of SLA reporting and dashboards.

Here's what you need to do to create an SLA for the distributed...