The ability to provide custom monitoring to different servers is key to the success of SCOM. We are all familiar with the monitoring that is targeted at SQL Servers or IIS Servers, but SCOM is highly extensible and can be configured to discover custom applications and target specific monitoring for them as well.

The key task when developing custom monitoring is to work out the service model that represents your application. A service model is broadly speaking a description of the classes and their relationships. Once you have this, you can work out how you will identify the servers hosting this application as being different from a server that does not host the application. For example, a SQL Server is identified by the existence of a registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Machines. Later scripts can be used to identify the specific components of SQL that are installed. The registry is used because this is the most efficient...