Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007

Using Gateway servers in OpsMgr will allow you to deploy agents and monitor servers located behind firewalls, within Perimeter networks or across a slow WAN link. This video covers the process for installing and configuring a Gateway server including the installation and configuration of certificate services which is needed to allow Gateway servers to communicate with an OpsMgr Management Group.

OpsMgr 2007 comes with a very useful feature in the form of Active Directory (AD) Integration. When deploying large numbers of agents, managing agent failover can be difficult and time consuming. Using AD Integration, all agent failover is controlled through AD and when an agent comes online it connects to AD to obtain management group and management server information. This vidoe will take you through the process of enabling and testing AD Integration in OpsMgr 2007.

Maintenance Mode in OpsMgr 2007 provides a significant enhancement over that offered in previous versions of the software. Since OpsMgr now enables monitoring at a far more granular level, maintenance mode has been extended to best use this functionality. However, there are a number of pitfalls when using Maintenance Mode in OpsMgr 2007. This guide looks at the best way to use Maintenance Mode for both servers and their contained objects such as databases. It also shows you how to use a widely available tool by Clive Eastwood of Microsoft to speed up the process of putting devices into Maintenance Mode.

OpsMgr is designed around Service Oriented monitoring meaning that not only are servers monitored, but also the components that they are composed of such as hard disks and applications. OpsMgr provides the ability to map out your line of business applications in the form of Distributed Applications. This guide covers the process for creating both a basic and a more complex Distributed Application and also looks at how to display the newly created DA correctly using custom Diagram Views in the Operations Console. 

In addition to OpsMgr's ability to monitor at the component level and provide distributed application mapping capabilities, it also provides a powerful synthetic transaction engine out of the box. As well as synthetically monitoring Exchange and Active Directory as previous versions did, it now includes the ability to configure custom OLE DB, TCP Port and Web Application transactions to validate that your application and/or system is online and responding correctly.
This guide covers the creation of these transactions and shows you how to customize the settings of the web application monitor and how to record a web session. In addition, it also covers the process for adding your synthetic transactions to a distributed application.

In MOM 2005, configuring different levels of security was accomplished using Console Scopes. This functionality was somewhat limited however. OpsMgr 2007 offers far more granularity of configuration with User Roles enabling the Operations Console access rights to be tailored to individuals and teams as required.

In addition, Run As Accounts can be used by OpsMgr to carry out monitoring and tasks without the need for assigning elevated privileges to the OpsMgr accounts

This guide covers the creation and validation of User Roles and the use of Run As Accounts and Run As Profiles. 

 

No doubt at some point you will need to create some custom monitoring objects to augment those supplied in the vendor management packs. With that in mind, this video shows you how to create a management pack using the Operations Console and how to create basic management pack objects. In this guide we look at creating a basic service monitor and a view to show the data generated by that monitor.

In another video, we show you how to create advanced objects in a management pack and how to edit the management pack in the Authoring Console tool and in raw XML.

When using OpsMgr, it is often necessary to configure notifications such as e-mails alerts or instant messages to draw attention to issues identified by the product. In this guide we will cover the process of enabling notifications in OpsMgr and show you how to configure e-mail alerting to a recipient. In addition, we will also look in more detail at alert subscriptions and show you how, using a PowerShell script, you can configure single alerts to send to an e-mail address. 

At some point, it will be necessary to create an advanced management pack. This can be accomplished using the Authoring Console and raw XML. In this guide we will cover using the Authoring Console to create basic management pack objects and we will also look at viewing a management pack in raw XML. This is part 1 of a multi-part guide.