Essential Microsoft Operations Manager [Paperback]

Chris Fox voc (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 10, 2006

For system administrators, ensuring that all Windows servers are performing optimally is a tall order. The larger the enterprise, the greater the chance for irritating, time-consuming configuration problems. Sometimes, you can determine the root cause of the problem yourself-but that's only if you're lucky.

With Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), the diagnosis is done for you. MOM monitors server operations and automatically notifies you of problems by sending an immediate alert to your console, email address, or pager. To help you better understand how MOM works, O'Reilly presents Essential Microsoft Operations Manager.

The goal of this comprehensive tutorial is to give first-time MOM administrators a solid foundation for planning, implementing, and administering MOM 2005. Author Chris Fox, a renowned MOM expert, offers the type of practical, real-world advice that you need to improve the performance of your IT infrastructure.

After taking you through the entire process of setting up MOM on the network, the book moves on to more advanced administration issues. It carefully instructs you how to program and automate MOM and the agents that reside on the servers themselves. You'll also learn how to manage the scripts that determine which server agents are relevant to report.

By capturing system data, intelligently analyzing it, and then notifying you with a suggested course of action, MOM makes extinguishing fires a breeze. And now, thanks to Essential Microsoft Operations Manager, learning how to use MOM is a breeze, too.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Chris Fox has been working with MOM 2000 SP1 since 2002 and has architected and implemented MOM 2000 and 2005 for over 500 managed nodes. Prior to this he has been developing enterprise AD/DNS/DHCP/WINS and Exchange architectures for 9 years. He has been published in Outlook & Exchange magazine, .NET magazine and authored a chapter on clustering in Exchange 2000 24x7. Chris currently works as a Portals Technology Specialist for Microsoft Corporation.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (February 10, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596009534
• ISBN-13: 978-0596009533
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,030,926 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book for the Microsoft Ops Manager Newbie, May 20, 2006

By 

Richard T. Kingslan "Consultant for a Major S... (Omaha, NE) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Essential Microsoft Operations Manager (Paperback)

If you are looking to get your feet wet with Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, this IS the book for you. However - right up front I WILL STATE - if you are an EXPERIENCED MOM Admin - you will not find a lot of value here, unless of course, you want a different viewpoint.

As a little bit of background, Chris has worked as a Consultant with a major Microsoft Gold Partner as an Exchange Consultant, he has worked for a major food company as a multi-application administrator, and is now with Microsoft as a Product Specialist in the SharePoint product line. So, how does that qualify him as a MOM Expert - enough so to write this book? Chris simply excels at anything he decides to be involved with. He was (and likely still is to some degree) the pre-eminent Exchange expert in the Midwest during the time he was doing Exchange. He excels in his understanding and ability to provide pre-sales guidance on why SharePoint is important and how it can solve business problems.

When he worked actively with MOM (2000 and 2005)he implemented the platform and transitioned the day-to-day maintenance and management to another team..

Essential MOM delivers exactly what it promises - the essential information on how to get started with setting up MOM, configuring MOM, and how to get started with operational management with MOM. It touches on the essentials of database configuration, management pack work, and essentials of how to interact with reports and consoles for administrators and those you want to give view-only to.

Some of the crticism for this book is clearly due to expectations that were not met. However, I don't put that blame on Chris - he delivered what he intended. I would ask the critics to do this - If you are very experienced WITH MOM, get ahold of O'Reilly. I suspect that a MOM Cookbook or more advanced treatment or MOM for experienended Admins would interest them greatly. But, please - don't put this book down because it delivered essentials - not advanced MOM techniques. It is, of course, called "Essential Microsoft Operations Manager" for a reason.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars good for first time MOM setup - but otherwise - where's the admin foo?, March 6, 2006

By 

M. Taylor "enterprise LAN admin" (Chicago IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Essential Microsoft Operations Manager (Paperback)

Oreilly seems to be getting a bit lax in their MS Windows-oriented coverage. I enjoy their "Learning" "xxxprogramlanguage" series and some of their "essential" titles (essential system adminstration and any of their unix/linux titles come to mind), but that coverage level does not exist in this MOM overview. I wish I had this book when I first setup MOM management packs, rules, scopes and other management framework integration (that's the "2 stars"). But for the admin who has MOM up-and-running, the book lacks good extensibility coverage. The MOM Reporting Services chapter is light. For real meat and potatoes coverage of MOM (leveraging scripts to find alert culprits, creating custom tasks, setting and using state variables, other creative scripts, extending reporting services) look to microsoft newsgroups and various web sites - because that type of "adminfoo" schooling is lacking in this book. Little coverage of the resource kit (v1 or v2 - the alert to rss utility here is awesome - but not covered in book) is quite an oversight (though there is good coverage of using eventcreator.exe to test rules). Perhaps I should've waited for second printing of this book - cause this doesn't cut the mustard - yet. MOM just may be the most "deep" application MS has created outside of their own OS code - and this book gives 341 pages (mucho screenshots) to what easily could have been double the "essential" topic coverage.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Where's the beef?, June 24, 2006

By 

Lowell (Texas, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Essential Microsoft Operations Manager (Paperback)

I had now purchased both of the available MOM books, both seem to cover roughly the same material, but neither really has any meat to it! I would have given this 3 stars, but unfortunately, the author makes a boring topic even more boring.