Chapter 9: Management Pack Drilldown for Windows Server

Overview

Earlier chapters have covered the MOM installation, the different consoles for administering MOM, and the different agents that MOM utilizes. Any experience with monitoring products provides the basis for an understanding that the planning and deployment of the infrastructure (Management Servers, databases, MOM agents, and so on) are the smallest parts of the equation. The majority of the work in the project as well as ongoing administration leans heavily on tuning. In this chapter, we cover the following topics related to installation and configuration of management packs:

• Windows Servers Base Operating System management pack

• DNS management pack

• Active Directory management pack

• IIS management pack

• Microsoft Server Clusters management pack

It's often purely by attrition that figuring out how to monitor an application lands in the lap of the administrator. Often, the administrator must monitor a product that he or she has never used before, let alone seen before. Usually there's a set process that the administrator can follow to make sure the basics are covered (CPU, disk, memory, and network). After those components are monitored, the components that truly make up the application are tacked on. This frequently requires trial and error, either forcing application failures or living through one. That's the most tangible way of seeing the evidence.

In this age, more and more applications are shipping instrumented for monitoring. There's still a long way to go to move every coder toward the philosophy that monitoring begins with writing proper code. An application should no longer require that the administrator know and account for every point of failure, every measurable threshold, and every conceivable event that would indicate a system to be unhealthy.

With the packaged knowledge in a management pack, you get as close as possible to being able to sleep peacefully at night with the knowledge that your systems are covered. This chapter discusses some of the more common management packs offered by Microsoft. As you step through various areas of configuration, by the end of this chapter, you should have confidence in knowing which management packs are suitable for your environment.

Online resources (documentation and downloads) are mentioned many times throughout this chapter. Additional information on most management packs is located at http://www.microsoft.com/mom/techinfo/productdoc/default.mspx. Management packs available for download are located at http://www.microsoft.com/management/mma/catalog.aspx.