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

Deploying Microsoft Windows agents


The majority of IT environments out there tend to have more Microsoft applications and operating systems deployed than any other vendor and for this reason; understanding how to deploy the OpsMgr agent to monitor Microsoft Windows computers has become an essential skill to learn.

Thankfully, as OpsMgr is a Microsoft product, the agent is designed for easy deployment and monitoring of pretty much everything Microsoft support. All you need to do is to ensure that the relevant prerequisites are in place and decide on your preferred deployment method.

Windows agent requirements

In the Minimum installation requirements section of Chapter 1, Introduction to System Center Operations Manager, we listed the supported Microsoft Windows operating systems that you can deploy the OpsMgr agent to. On the server side, you can monitor computers running on Windows Server 2003 SP2 right the way through to Windows Server 2016.

The following table lists the specific firewall ports...