Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 and SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 helps to centralize management of an IT infrastructure environment, reducing the complexity and costs of operation. Using Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, the status and performance of many products from across an enterprise can be automatically monitored, including infrastructure such as hardware or Domain Name Services (DNS); platform services such as Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server, or Active Directory (AD); and applications such as SharePoint Server 2007. SharePoint administrators can use these capabilities to monitor all the servers in a SharePoint Server 2007 farm, plus the critical platform services that directly affect SharePoint; view reports summarizing the performance and issues over time; and even perform management or troubleshooting tasks affecting those remote products and servers-all from a single desktop.

Using this central console, operators can view live and historical reports of the system status; they can drill into specific error messages or performance counters from any computer being monitored; and they can even run scripts or commands that affect those computers to make configuration changes. But rather than relying on the operators to spot problems after they occur and then spending time working out how to solve them, Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 can be always monitoring and ready to respond quickly. Thanks to preconfigured rules, performance thresholds, and best practice knowledge-provided either by the Microsoft product teams or customized and configured by the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 operators at a specific organization-Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 can automatically detect that warning thresholds have been exceeded, whether problems have occurred, or if a failure seems likely to occur. Once something is detected, Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 can respond in a number of ways-from simply logging a performance issue for an operator to examine later, to sending an e-mail or paged alert message to an operator warning of an urgent issue, to executing troubleshooting scripts to immediately resolve well-known problems.

This capability provides a proactive means of troubleshooting issues before they affect users, and it reduces the time to detect and resolve failures. Fewer failures means fewer support calls, which means lower support costs, and ultimately achieves the goal of very contented SharePoint administrators.