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

Designing the environment


Before you dive in and begin installing OpsMgr, its best practice to take a step back and think about how you will design the environment. A good design takes into account the overall monitoring requirements of the business, the physical and logical locations of the infrastructure to be monitored and any existing monitoring applications that are currently in place.

Involving members of each business unit/department in the organization is paramount to delivering a monitoring solution that works for everybody and can deliver real benefits and time-saving back to the business.

Here's some advice to get you started with your initial OpsMgr designs:

  • Don't run before you can walk: A full enterprise deployment of OpsMgr can be very complex and could span across many geographical locations monitoring thousands of computers and network devices. For this reason, it's recommended to start small and approach your design in different phases. Postpone deployment of advanced features...