Chapter 18: Configuring Microsoft ISA Server with Microsoft Operations Manager 2005

Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 is Microsoft's alert and event monitoring solution that can help any size business improve its overall IT operations by providing ways to effectively identify the root cause of problems through detailed monitoring, trending, and reporting analysis on Windows servers in your company. In this chapter, we introduce some of the key features of MOM 2005, and then we step through the most common procedures for grasping the health and state of your ISA servers with MOM 2005.

Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Overview

MOM 2005 comes in two versions to support any size business:

• MOM 2005 For use in companies of all sizes.

• MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition For use in smaller organizations to monitor 10 or fewer servers. It includes all of the functional capabilities found in MOM 2005, but is limited to the maximum number of servers that can be monitored.

Note 

Agentless monitoring is not supported on servers using MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition.

The focus of this chapter is on MOM 2005, but the procedures should apply to either version with little variation.

MOM 2005 can be used to monitor Microsoft Windows NT 4, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003 operating systems. For servers running software versions prior to Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 and Microsoft Internet Explorer Service Pack 4, the type of monitoring is limited to only agentless communication. To support the latest Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) release, download Service Pack 1 (SP1) for MOM 2005.

Note 

MOM 2005 SP1 requires that Windows Installer 3.1 be installed on each managed server.

MOM 2005 supports two different types of agents that can be used on the servers in your infrastructure:

• Agent-based monitoring Involves installing the MOM agent on the servers you want to monitor.

  Note 

  The procedure for installing the MOM agent is described in the section entitled, "Deploying the MOM Client to Your ISA Servers," later in this chapter.

• Agentless-based monitoring Allows MOM to monitor events, services, state, and performance of a server without requiring the MOM agent to be installed. This function is not supported through a firewall and on all management packs.