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

Defining an alert management process


If you're faced with a console packed full of alerts, it's tempting to just dive straight in and begin disabling or modifying them but beware, without a defined alert management process in place, you'll soon find yourself diving deep into troubleshooting mode without any real context behind how the overall IT services might be affected by your changes.

The following sections will give you some pointers to help you put together a solid alert management process.

Choose your Management Packs wisely

In Chapter 5, Working with Management Packs you learnt about management packs and how they give OpsMgr the knowledge it needs to monitor your infrastructure and applications. It goes without saying so, that the first thing you need to start your alert management process with is by ensuring that only management packs you actually require are imported.

It's pretty common for OpsMgr administrators to get trigger happy with the Import Management Packs option in the Administration...