Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) is a component which belongs to the System Center Suite. It can be installed as a standalone product. The latest version is SCOM 2007 R2 and it enables you to do end-to-end service management, meaning that you can monitor your entire Microsoft infrastructure from the Windows Server (OS), application servers to the Microsoft Exchange. Through a single UI, an administrator and/or engineer can monitor the health, performance, and availability of data-center environments across applications, operating systems, hypervisors, and even hardware.
What happens when you use SCOM is described in this section. Each machine which needs to be monitored has an agent (that is, opsmgr healthservice) running. This agent watches several sources on that computer, including the Windows Event Log, for specific events or alerts generated by the applications executing on the monitored computer. When a specific event...