Deploying the MOM 2005 Management Packs for SharePoint Server 2007

If you are deploying a new Management Pack, the best practice is to first install it into a test environment to gain an understanding of how it works, and to document the permissions and configuration settings that might need adjusting for your system. Once the tests are complete and the configuration has been documented, the Management Pack can be exported from the test environment and then imported into the live environment with a high confidence of success.

Before deploying a Management Pack, a number of elements of the target environment should be reviewed and configured correctly to ensure the installation goes smoothly. This section covers those pre-installation tasks.

Important 

This section assumes that you have already deployed a Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 server. Deploying Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 is outside the scope of this book. For assistance with deploying Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, refer to the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Deployment Guide on TechNet, at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/mom/mom2005/Library/.mspx.

Identifying Computers to Manage

First, you must identify the computers that need to be monitored. To ensure a high availability for SharePoint Server 2007, you should monitor every server in the SharePoint server farm. However, there are also services running elsewhere that SharePoint depends on, such as Active Directory, that SharePoint administrators should be closely monitoring.

Increasing the Size of Log Files

Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 relies on the event logs of the managed computers to monitor their health. If a problem stops the managed computer from logging events, this will remove a major source of information for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 and might mean that the health monitoring picture is incomplete, which can lead to missed problems and degradation in availability for the managed computer. A common problem is that the logs quickly reach their maximum size limit and stop accepting new events. One important step to prevent this from happening is to increase the maximum size of the logs. Follow these general guidelines to increase the size of the logs:

• Increase the maximum size of Windows event logs (Application, System, Security) to at least 25 MB.

• Increase the size of other event logs (such as Directory Services, File Replication, and DNS) to at least 10 MB.

• Increase the size of any application logs, such as Internet Information Services (IIS) logs, to at least 10 MB.

Note 

Both the Windows SharePoint Services Management Pack and the SharePoint Server 2007 Management Pack focus on monitoring the Windows system event log and the Windows application event log, so ensure that these log sizes are increased.

You can also consider configuring the logs to overwrite events as needed. With this setting applied, as the logs fill up, the oldest entries are overwritten and the logs never run out of space. When changing log sizes, be sure to consider how much disk space is available, how quickly the computer is likely to generate events, and whether it is important to retain certain logs, such as the security logs, for longer periods of time.

Disabling Event Log Replication on Clustered Servers

By default, clustered servers replicate all events that occur on any node to every other node in the cluster. If any monitored components are installed onto clustered servers, each node must be monitored, but event log replication must be disabled.

Considering Slow or Expensive Network Links

If there are slow wide area network (WAN) links or expensive satellite links separating Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 from a group of servers, you might need to consider filtering the events that you are monitoring for these remote servers in order to reduce the traffic sent over the network. For example, noncritical events and performance data might be something that could safely be ignored.

Installing Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Agents

The Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 agent should be installed onto every server that needs to be monitored. The agent can be easily installed, without needing to separately visit each of the target computers, by using the Install Agent Wizard from the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Administrator Console. This is the quickest option if you are trying out the SharePoint Management Packs in a test environment, and it can also be convenient in production environments. Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 can also be configured to identify new SharePoint servers as they appear on the network and install the agent automatically on behalf of the operator, but these methods take further initial setup.

Installing Management Packs

Management Packs are distributed as .akm files, which are imported using the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Administrator Console. There is a simple wizard-driven interface that steps through the import process. Once the Management Pack has been imported, the new rules appear in the rules tree within the Administrator Console, and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 can begin to monitor the computers that you earlier identified to manage.

More Info 

For more details on deploying Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 agents, Management Packs, and other step-by-step guides to assist with configuring a Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 environment, refer to the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Deployment Guide at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/mom/mom2005/Library/.mspx.