System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed [Paperback]

Kerrie Meyler (Author), Cameron Fuller (Author), John Joyner (Author), Andy Dominey (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0672329557 | ISBN-13: 978-0672329555 | Publication Date: February 29, 2008

This book is your most complete source for in-depth information about Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007!

 

System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed is a comprehensive guide to System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2007. Like its MOM 2005 predecessor, OpsMgr 2007 helps you implement operations management, but with a far different and more holistic approach from MOM 2005’s focus on individual servers.

 

This book guides you through designing, deploying, and configuring OpsMgr 2007. You will find detailed information and hands-on experience on topics such as estimating database sizes and designing redundant OpsMgr configurations. You learn how to tackle challenges such as setting up ACS, establishing client monitoring, using and creating synthetic transactions and distributed applications, and developing management packs and reports.

 

• Size your OpsMgr databases
• Architect for redundancy and performance
• Install or migrate to OpsMgr 2007
• Secure OpsMgr
• Back up OpsMgr components
• Understand how monitors and rules work
• Manage different aspects, including ACS, client monitoring, synthetic transactions, and distributed applications
• Extend OpsMgr
• Develop management packs and reports

 

CD-ROM includes:

• Database sizing spreadsheet
• Utilities, management packs, and reports
• Microsoft’s best practices for rule and monitor targeting and PowerShell Cheat Sheet
• Live Links--more than 200 hypertext links and references to materials, connectors, sites, and newsgroups related to OpsMgr

Contents

 

Introduction  1

Part I         Operations Management Overview and Concepts

1        Operations Management Basics  11

2        What’s New  63

3        Looking Inside OpsMgr  97

Part II        Planning and Installation

4        Planning Your Operations Manager Deployment  137

5        Planning Complex Configurations  203

6        Installing Operations Manager 2007  233

7        Migrating to Operations Manager 2007  277

Part III       Moving Toward Application-Centered Management

8        Configuring and Using Operations Manager 2007  303

9        Installing and Configuring Agents  369

10      Complex Configurations  425

11      Securing Operations Manager 2007  471

Part IV       Administering Operations Manager 2007

12      Backup and Recovery  539

13      Administering Management Packs  593

14      Monitoring with Operations Manager  647

Part V        Service-Oriented Monitoring

15      Monitoring Audit Collection Services  739

16      Client Monitoring  797

17      Monitoring Network Devices  845

18      Using Synthetic Transactions  903

19      Managing a Distributed Environment  949

Part VI       Beyond Operations Manager

20      Automatically Adapting Your Environment  1005

21      Reading for the Service Provider: Remote Operations Manager  1047

22      Interoperability  1095

23      Developing Management Packs and Reports  1141

Part VII      Appendixes

A       OpsMgr by Example: Configuring and Tuning Management Packs  1229

B       Performance Counters  1261

C       Registry Settings  1271

D       Active Directory and Exchange 2003 Management Pack Parameters  1295

E       Reference URLs  1305

F       On the CD  1323

Index  1329

 

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Kerrie Meyler, MA, BA, MCT, MCSE, CNA, MOM MVP, is an independent consultant and trainer with more than 15 years of Information Technology experience. A previous Senior Technology Specialist at Microsoft, she focused on infrastructure and management solutions, presenting at numerous product launches. Kerrie was also a Management Insider, presented at internal Microsoft conferences, and received company recognition and awards, including a SPAR MGS award. Kerrie presented on Operations Manager 2007 and gave several podcasts at TechEd 2007. As an MCT, she worked with Microsoft Learning on Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) for several courses, and did the “beta teach” for course 2250, “Implementing Microsoft Operations Manager 2000.” More recently, Kerrie participated in the alpha walkthrough for Certification Exam 70-400, “Configuring Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007.” She also participated in defining the domain objectives for Certification Exam 70-402, “IT Operations and Service Management.” Kerrie is the lead author of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Unleashed, and was awarded the MOM MVP award just as this book was being completed.

 

Cameron Fuller, BS, MCSE, MOM MVP, is a Managing Consultant for Catapult Systems, an IT consulting company and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with numerous competencies, including Advanced Infrastructure and Network Infrastructure Solutions. He focuses on management solutions, and serves as the Microsoft Operations Management Champion for Catapult. Cameron’s 15 years of infrastructure experience include work in the retail, education, healthcare, distribution, transportation, and energy industries. Cameron continually focuses on improving his existing business and technical skill sets through hands-on experience and leveraging certifications, including MCSE (since NT 3.51), MCSA, A+, Linux+, Server+, and CCSA. Cameron is also a public speaker, presenting on Operations Manager 2007 at TechEd 2007, co-presenting with Microsoft on MOM 2005 at TechEd 2005, and the MOM 2005 product launches in Dallas and Tulsa. He is the co-author of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Unleashed.

 

John Joyner, LCDR USN-R, BS, MCSE, MOM MVP, is a presenter and inventor in the systems management space. A senior architect at ClearPointe--a leader and pioneer in the Managed Services Provider (MSP) industry--he has been using Microsoft systems management technologies to deliver SLA-based guarantees of application performance in multi-tenant environments since 2001. John received his B.S. in Business Administration on a U.S. Navy scholarship. As a Navy computer scientist, he deployed Microsoft Mail to the battlefield for NATO in the former Yugoslavia in 1995, and then took Exchange 4.0 afloat in 1996 for the first Internet-connected aircraft carrier battle group deployment in history. John retired a Lieutenant Commander from the Navy in 1998 and has worked for ClearPointe since then. He has provided consulting services on behalf of Microsoft to design some of the world’s largest Operations Manager deployments. John speaks Italian and Dutch, and visits his daughter in Amsterdam as often as possible. John is a contributing author of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Unleashed, and was recently selected as a MOM MVP.

 

Contributor

Andy Dominey, MCSE, MOM MVP, has been in the IT industry for 8 years. He started out as a field service and support engineer and worked his way up to systems administrator, responsible for MOM, Active Directory, Exchange, web hosting, SAN technology, and clustering for an Exchange hosting provider based in the United Kingdom. He is currently working as a Senior Consultant for 1E, a Windows-management firm based in the United Kingdom. Andy has a number of large-scale MOM and OpsMgr deployments to his credit and is an avid evangelist for the product. He was also awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for MOM for the past 3 years. Andy authored Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Field Guide (Expert’s Voice).

 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The process of operations management is a combination of people, procedures, and tools—all three are necessary, and the absence of one component can put an entire enterprise solution at risk. At a more granular level, operations management is about correlating what may appear to be seemingly unrelated events and data across machines to determine what information is significant to your operational environment versus what is not.

With System Center Operations Manager 2007, Microsoft continues its commitment to providing a solid monitoring and management product. Although Microsoft licensed NetIQ's Operation Manager technology in 2000, not until Operations Manager 2007 did Microsoft put its finishing touches on reengineering the product. Now in its third major release, the software formerly known as "MOM," or Microsoft Operations Manager, has been rewritten and rebranded into Microsoft's System Center product line. Operations Manager 2007 concentrates on end-to-end application monitoring, moving beyond its previous server monitoring focus.

Operations Manager 2007 monitors the health of an application, defined and measured by the health of the various pieces that make up that application. In today's environment, applications are no longer monolithic, so monitoring health typically includes network devices and the various pieces of a distributed application. Monitoring at the component level means that if a database used by an application has a problem, Operations Manager knows which application is affected.

Operations Manager 2007 also brings to the plate the capability to manage security and audit data, client machines, and common desktop applications, and collect and report on user application errors. Rather than being evolutionary in its changes as are most version updates to an application, Operations Manager 2007 is truly revolutionary in its approach to monitoring when compared to its MOM 2005 predecessor.

Successfully implementing Operations Manager requires planning, design, and a thorough understanding of how to utilize its many capabilities. This complete guide for using Operations Manager 2007 from the authors of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Unleashed gives system administrators the information they need to know about Operations Manager 2007 and what it can do for their operations—from an overview of why operations management is important, to planning, installing, and implementing Operations Manager 2007.

System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed provides a comprehensive guide to this newest version of Microsoft's premier management product.

As always, we do have a disclaimer: Resources and management packs related to the product continue to change rapidly. Sometimes it seemed that even before we finished a chapter, the information was changing. This has been particularly challenging because Microsoft is close to releasing its first service pack for Operations Manager 2007 as we complete this book. We have done our best to present the information as it relates to both the released version and the service pack, even as that continues to take shape. The information in the book is current as of the time it was written, and the authors have done their best to keep up with the constant barrage of changing management packs, utilities, URLs, and Knowledge Base articles.

Part I: Operations Management Overview and Concepts

Part I of this book introduces the reader to Operations Manager 2007 (OpsMgr), outlining its features and functionality and comparing and contrasting it to MOM 2005.

• Chapter 1, "Operations Management Basics," discusses the concepts behind operations management and Microsoft's management approach, and introduces Microsoft's management suite of products. An overview of ITIL and MOF (and an alphabet soup of other acronyms) is included, along with a discussion of how the different MOF quadrants relate to Operations Manager.

• Chapter 2, "What's New," appropriately tells you just that. You will find there is an incredible amount of new functionality in this version! We also cover the history of Operations Manager and compare OpsMgr 2007 with MOM 2005 and System Center Essentials 2007.

• Chapter 3, "Looking Inside OpsMgr," discusses the Operations Manager components, its processing flow and architecture, and how management packs work.

Part II: Planning and Installation

Before diving into OpsMgr's setup program, it is best to take a step back to map out the requirements for your management environment and plan your server topology.

• Chapter 4, "Planning Your Operations Manager Deployment," discusses the steps required for successfully planning an Operations Manager installation. We also introduce our OpsMgr databases sizing spreadsheet and discuss the logic behind the sizing calculations.

• Chapter 5, "Planning Complex Configurations," addresses advanced implementations of OpsMgr. We also discuss planning for redundancy and designing large and more interesting environments.

• In Chapter 6, "Installing Operations Manager 2007," we discuss hardware and software requirements before going through the steps to install the various server components in a management group.

• Chapter 7, "Migrating to Operations Manager 2007," discusses the required steps to migrate from an existing MOM 2005 environment to OpsMgr 2007. Note that the process is a migration, not an upgrade. If you have MOM 2005, you will want to read this chapter—because not everything can be migrated.

Part III: Moving Toward Application-Centered Management

With OpsMgr 2007 installed, how does one start using it? Part III moves beyond setup to post-installation activities and potential adjustments to your initial configuration.

• Chapter 8, "Configuring and Using Operations Manager 2007," discusses what you need to know to get started with OpsMgr. We provide an overview of the Operations console and a drilldown into its functionality.

• Chapter 9, "Installing and Configuring Agents," goes through the details of computer discovery, the different techniques for implementing agents, and potential problems related to agent installation.

• Chapter 10, "Complex Configurations," discusses various management server and management group configurations, and presents suggestions for implementing redundant components.

• In Chapter 11, "Securing Operations Manager 2007," we discuss role-based security, Run As Profiles and Accounts, required accounts, and mutual authentication, as well as when you need and how to install certificates. We also discuss security for the ACS component, an optional but highly recommended part of your OpsMgr implementation.

Part IV: Administering Operations Manager 2007

All applications require administration, and OpsMgr is no exception.

• Chapter 12, "Backup and Recovery," discusses the components required for a complete backup and recovery plan, and the steps for designing a disaster recovery plan.

• Chapter 13, "Administering Management Packs," covers the components of a management pack, how to troubleshoot, deploy, and manage management packs, and the details of converting, importing, and exporting management packs into your OpsMgr environment.

• Chapter 14, "Monitoring with Operations Manager," discusses the different monitors and rule types in Operations Manager and their functionality. It also covers creating alerts, overrides, resolution states, notification workflow, and approaches for tuning monitors and rules.

Part V: Service-Oriented Monitoring

In this section of the book we get into what Operations Manager 2007 is really about—using it to ease the pain of monitoring and managing your environment, from end-to-end. We discuss using OpsMgr to manage different aspects of your environment.

• Chapter 15, "Monitoring Audit Collection Services," focuses on auditing and security monitoring concerns. Audit Collection Services is a new component with OpsMgr 2007 that is a valuable addition to your monitoring toolkit.

• In Chapter 16, "Client Monitoring," we discuss new capabilities in OpsMgr for client monitoring. We also cover managing crash errors using the new Agentless Exception Monitoring functionality.

• Chapter 17, "Monitoring Network Devices," shows how to use Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) with OpsMgr and discusses monitoring hardware and network devices.

• Chapter 18, "Using Synthetic Transactions," talks about simulating connections into applications to verify their performance.

• Chapter 19, "Managing a Distributed Environment," discusses OpsMgr's capability to monitor the various pieces and components that make up the distributed applications commonly used in today's multisystem computing environment.

These chapters talk about the issues faced by administrators in each of these areas, and they show how Operations Manager 2007 helps to monitor operational issues and maintain application health and stability.

Part VI: Beyond Operations Manager

In this section we look at extending one's use of Operations Manager 2007 with connectors, third-party management packs, and customization. We also look at Microsoft's direction for operations management.

• Chapter 20, "Automatically Adapting Your Environment," begins the last part of the book by looking at how you can use Operations Manager 2007 to automatically adapt your environment as changes occur.

• Chapter 21, "Reading for the Service Provider: Remote Operations Manager," talks a...

Product Details

• Paperback: 1416 pages
• Publisher: Sams (February 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0672329557
• ISBN-13: 978-0672329555
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.1 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #306,705 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Resource, April 1, 2008

By 

Grant Fritchey (MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed (Paperback)

Anyone that uses System Center Operations Manager knows that the documentation is a bit sparse. This book more than makes up for that lack of information. The authors have created a very thorough and complete set of information starting with outlining the reason for SCOM and the underlying architecture. They spend a great deal of time and effort describing how to install and configure the tool. My favorite sections start about half way through when they get into configuring all the rules and monitors to gather data and respond to alerts. The chapter on reporting was also very helpful. They even include a small section on other management packs in the Appendixes, with information on the one that interests me most, SQL Server. The Appendix also has a great walkthrough on step by step configuring and tuning your own management pack.
I can't say this is a must own for anyone using SCOM, but if you've been floundering a bit, as I have, or you're just getting started, this is a fantastic resource to get you on your feet and get your SCOM system up and running.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Information overload, December 14, 2009

By 

Murad Akram "Pacman" (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed (Paperback)

As few people have already mentioned in their reviews, this book's got too much irrelevant information that can be removed cutting it in almost half the size. Most of the time when I was reading/reviewing this book it felt like its all cut & past from TechNet articles/blogs. I've learned more about SCOM of off blogs, and few Microsoft site then this book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Just don't buy it, July 22, 2011

By 

Barat (NJ) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed (Paperback)

I purchase and I read lots of technical books and this book is one I absolutely wish I didn't purchase or attempt to read, it is horrible. I would say it may make a good reference book but I'm not even sure of that. What shocks me the most is that 10 people rated with 5 stars (at the time I purchased it). I'll update the post when I find a better SCOM 07 book.