Supplementary Management Packs

In addition to the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007 Management Packs, the following additional Management Packs should be installed to monitor the underlying systems and technologies that SharePoint depends on:

• Microsoft Base Operating System

• Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or Microsoft SQL Server 2005

• Microsoft Internet Information Services

• Microsoft Web Sites and Services

• ASP.NET

• Microsoft Windows Active Directory

• Microsoft Operations Manager 2005

Note 

These Management Packs are all available to download from the Microsoft Management Pack Catalog at www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/mom/mom2005/catalog.aspx.

Real World Dealing with Cryptic Errors

Although Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Management Packs generally do well to translate the errors and event messages picked up from managed computers into something meaningful and actionable by the operators, there are often just too many possible event messages that could occur to capture them all in one Management Pack. Therefore, Management Pack authors have to focus on covering the most important or most common events. Inevitably, there will be some error states or events for which the Management Packs will not include advice on how to resolve. This means in a real environment, Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 operators might encounter alerts with short, cryptic, or unhelpful error messages. There are at least two things that can help in this scenario.

The first is the event ID-the number that represents the event. This can be used to cross-reference and look up the event from other sources. A great source of this type of information is www.eventid.net-a Web site that collates and indexes event information for a huge range of products. By inputting the event ID number on the site home page, details of the error messages and a list of which products can generate the error are returned. Users of the site are able to input comments, advice on what causes these issues, and advice on how to resolve these issues, so the community helps to improve the service. Although some of the information requires a subscription to be accessed, much of the information is free to access, and you might find that the information is valuable enough to be well worth the subscription fee.

The second way to work around unhelpful event messages is to input your own help information! The Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Operator Console allows operators to edit the Company Knowledge associated with the events in the Management Pack. This means that as operators encounter new issues and solve them, they can capture the details back into Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 to ensure the problem won't take long to fix if it ever comes back again. This is a great way to customize the tools to better fit your own environment and help reduce the number of cryptic errors you are faced with.