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

Network monitoring overview


The out-of-the-box network monitoring capability has been around since the original OpsMgr 2012 release and not much has changed since then. You have the ability to perform advanced monitoring of your network devices using SNMP or basic discovery and availability monitoring using ICMP (Ping).

If you use SNMP, you can get detailed monitoring of ports, interfaces, hardware, virtual local area networks (VLAN's), and even Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) groups. With ICMP, all you get is an indication that the IP address of the network device is responding to Ping requests with very little information about the underlying components or interfaces.

Although the network monitoring feature of OpsMgr won't have network administrators throwing out the specialist tools they use from the likes of Cisco, for the IT administrator and IT pro, it's still very useful when used in the overall context of IT service monitoring. This is because, regardless of the method used to...