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

Dashboards


With each new release of OpsMgr, the dashboards on offer get better and better and although Microsoft never claim to be the best on the market for network monitoring, the visualizations you get out of the box with OpsMgr are more than effective in showing the health of your network devices and connections.

In Chapter 9, Visualizing Your IT with Dashboards, we'll dive into all of the dashboard options available to you with OpsMgr but for now, the following sections will give you the low-down on the four dashboards specifically targeted at network monitoring.

Network Summary Dashboard

The first dashboard that we will look at is the Network Summary Dashboard. Accessed from the Network Monitoring folder in the Monitoring workspace, this dashboard contains seven widgets/views that include information on nodes with the slowest response time, nodes with the highest CPU usage, interfaces with the highest utilization, send/receive errors, and nodes with the most alerts.

As shown in Figure...