System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager (SCOM) can be a very in-depth monitoring solution owing to its ability to gain an insight of various areas of an infrastructure. SCOM has the ability to start helping you understand your environment from the physical hardware of your network switches, SANs, and physical servers right through to the operating systems, whether they be Unix, Linux, or Windows operating systems, and the applications running either within your data centers or externally in public cloud solutions such as Microsoft Azure.

Because of the wide-reaching and powerful solution that System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager delivers, it is very important before implementing it to understand what the various roles and features of SCOM are as well as how they function and, more importantly, relate to the business and its needs.

This chapter will help break down these areas to enable you to gain that knowledge as well as show you what areas of your design can be architected to provide high availability and how to size your environment.