Manage your operating environment
Microsoft is getting serious about the way you manage its OSs and applications. The latest product that the company has added to its management lineup—Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2000—complements two other Microsoft management packages: Systems Management Server (SMS) 2.0 and Application Center 2000. Whereas SMS helps you with change and configuration management and Application Center assists with deployment and management of Web- and component-based applications built on Windows 2000, MOM's job is to simplify your day-to-day management of servers and applications.
To provide meaningful reporting and trend analysis, MOM offers centralized monitoring capabilities and intelligently analyzes and distills data from monitored systems. MOM also lets you configure rules so that the system can recognize symptoms and automatically resolve problems. I installed MOM in the Lab and looked for ways in which the product might help us manage some of our systems.
Meet MOM
MOM's architecture comprises four primary components: a Microsoft SQL Server database, a Data Access Server (DAS), a Consolidator, and agents. The SQL Server database stores event information, rules logic, prescriptive advice, and links to Microsoft's Knowledge Base or your company's knowledge base. MOM services use the DAS to access the database. The Consolidator handles all communications with MOM-managed computers and updates the database through the DAS. The Consolidator also contains an Agent Manager, which deploys and updates agents on each managed Windows computer. The agents are the primary mechanism for collecting and analyzing information and executing MOM commands.
An installation that consists of one database, one or more DASs, one or more Consolidators and Agent Managers, and any number of agents is called a Configuration Group. You can use multiple Configuration Groups to organize groups of computers according to geography, organization, or bandwidth.
MOM uses Management Packs to intelligently assess management data and suggest or perform corrective measures. The documentation describes a Management Pack as a collection of modules, which are sets of knowledge (i.e., an understanding of the meaning and importance of events), predefined rules (which define how the system reacts to specific circumstances), alerts, and actions specific to a service or application. According to Microsoft representatives, however, the term Management Pack applies to not only the collection of modules but also the individual modules. Whatever the terminology, Management Packs and modules interpret and correlate events to find the root of a problem and—if necessary—take appropriate action.
The standard MOM 2000 release includes a Management Pack for managing a Win2K network environment. (Table 1 lists the modules that this Management Pack contains.) The Management Pack contains more than 5000 rules for managing a wide array of integral Windows products and services. Expect Microsoft and third-party vendors to produce additional Management Packs that address management of enterprise applications.
On any system from which you want to administer or report on MOM, you can choose among three UIs, depending on the task you want to perform. (The system must meet the minimum requirements for the type of interface you want to install.) The MOM Administrator Console, which Figure 1 shows, is the central monitoring and configuration point; the Web Console provides remote-monitoring capabilities and easy access for roaming administrators; and the MOM Reporting interface utilizes Microsoft Access 2000 to generate reports.
Installation and Configuration
The Installation Assistant guided me through MOM's preinstallation tasks. A Verify Prerequisites dialog box let me check my system for all required components before I chose the Setup option. The Setup Prerequisites window prompted me to install a few Microsoft Office 2000 components and make some minor changes to my system before installing MOM. Then, I chose the Typical installation option (which installs all the components on one computer) and provided accounts for the DAS, Consolidator, and Agent Manager to use. The computer that hosts these components is called the central computer.
I accepted the default changes to the local security groups, which would provide varying levels of access to MOM. I also accepted the default installation of all Management Pack modules. The setup process took about 10 minutes to install files and create necessary database entries.
Post-Installation Tasks
After I installed MOM, I used the Installation Assistant to perform the post-installation tasks of installing agents, configuring notification, and configuring Management Pack modules and reports. First, I familiarized myself with the MOM Administrator Console—a Microsoft Management Console (MMC)-based interface that contains Monitor, Rules, and Configuration snap-ins.
Systems that MOM manages must have a management agent installed. To install agents on the computers I wanted to manage, I opened the Agent Manager Properties dialog box and modified the Managed Computer Rules. You enter the NetBIOS names (which can include wildcards) of computers that you want to include. However, IP addresses and Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs) aren't acceptable entries in the Computer name field. After I specified the rules for my environment, the system installed agents on the appropriate computers and they began to communicate with MOM.
You configure notification in three different areas in MOM. First, under the Configuration snap-in's Global Settings object, you specify a Microsoft Exchange Server account to use for sending email notifications. Second, under the Rules snap-in, you configure Notification Groups, which let you logically group operators and determine which operators to contact by email, pager, or external command for a given alert type.
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