As you will have seen and understood from previous recipes, SCOM tracks the health and alerts of each agent on the agent itself. This allows for excellent scaling characteristics and enables one to really focus on each individual server and its health. However, in the modern IT landscape, the focus is on providing a service to the customer, and the health of a single server does not always adequately reflect the health of the overall service.

In order to achieve this, SCOM allows you to create a distributed application. A distributed application allows you to select and group components together to form a representation of the application, as illustrated by the following example from the Active Directory management pack.