1.1. Using MOM 2005 Although the design and implementation of MOM 2005 will be unique to every environment, the steps you follow to make use of MOM will be the same: Plan and design. Essentially, these tasks involve taking inventory of your environment and determining what your business and technical needs are. This has to be the starting point of your MOM deployment, and it is where the uniqueness of your environment is baked into your MOM implementation. Here you create a design that will meet your business needs. Install MOM 2005. Every installation of MOM 2005 has the same basic components, just as every car has an engine, tires, a seat for the driver, and controls that the driver uses. But the placement and configuration of these parts varies from car to car. So, too, will the location and configuration of MOM parts vary from installation to installation. And they have to vary to meet the unique business needs of the environments they are being installed into. Deploy agents . This is the first task that you will do once you have MOM 2005 installed. Agents are deployed to machines that MOM 2005 goes out to and discovers. Discovery is performed according to rules that you configure. The most common rule tells MOM to discover all machines in a domain. Deploying agents onto machines that host applications you want to monitor lets MOM 2005 do one thing that you cannotbe in many places at the same time. Agents monitor applications on servers, as well as the servers themselves, and compare the collected data to sets of customizable health rules defined by the application vendors. When an exception is found, an alert is generated. The deployment and management of agents is covered in detail in Chapter 3. Monitor your environment and fix what is wrong. MOM 2005 will tell you things about your environment that you are completely unaware of. Some of these things will be informational in nature, and others will require immediate action for resolution. Tweak MOM. Not every health rule that MOM 2005 provides out-of-the-box will be useful or even appropriate for your environment. If MOM is alerting you to issues that you don't want to be alerted about, turn the rule off or adjust the thresholds in the rule so that MOM is giving you relevant, actionable information.
Of course these are not all the things you can do with MOM, but you will do at least these things, no matter what. In the last section of this chapter, additional services of MOM 2005, such as its reporting, will be covered. |
