Chapter 1. Introduction to MOM 2005

As you manage your Microsoft-based infrastructure, your goal is to develop a higher level of operational awareness concerning your unique IT environment. This awareness can be summed up in a simple statement: "I know what is going on in my IT environment right now." When you can say this with a high degree of confidence, you have arrived at your goal.

You can reach this goal by performing operations management. Operations management is not system administration. System administration, and the skill sets that go along with it, are used in operations management, but system administration is narrower in focus in that it applies to a single system or platform. Operations management has a broader scope. It looks at how multiple systems work together to provide IT services to a company. It involves troubleshooting, managing, and reporting on all those systems as a whole.

You can perform operations management manually by examining Windows event logs, gathering performance monitor data, and depending on your users to tell you that something has gone awry. This can be very time-consuming, even if you have a small number of machines; ultimately, this approach leaves you reacting to events rather than preventing them. Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM 2005 or just MOM) performs many of these tasks for you and generates an alert when it detects a malfunction in the monitored applications or a condition that can lead to a malfunction. In the alert, MOM 2005 tells you what is wrong, what the most common causes of the problem are, and the likely initial steps to fix the issue. Whether these issues have a large impact or are unnoticeable to the end user, resolving them quickly has two effects. If the impact is largesay an Exchange server mailbox store is downthen quick resolution is the obvious goal, with obvious benefits. If the issue is small, for example a missed Active Directory (AD) replication cycle, then fixing it now often prevents a small issue from causing larger issues that will continue to snowball until you have a major outage on your hands. Being able to fix small issues promptly because you know what is going on in your environment lets you be proactive. This is the biggest benefit of successful operations management and is why developing your operational awareness is critical to that success.

The goal of this book is to teach you how to use MOM 2005 correctly so that you can raise your level of operational awareness for your environment. Every IT environment will have unique monitoring, alerting, and reporting requirementsthere is no cookie-cutter implementation for MOM. The key to using MOM correctly for your environment is to understand how MOM works and how to use it. Throughout this book, I will show you ways to implement and use MOM in different environments. You can then plan and use MOM to the greatest effect in your environment.