Chapter 4. Administering Management Packs

The MOM 2005 components discussed so far provide the functional infrastructure of MOM. Each component plays a specific role in the management group. The agents interact with the managed computers, the management servers communicate with the database and manage the agents, the databases store collected data and configuration information, and the consoles allow interaction with MOM. But the picture is not yet complete. At this point, all the components of a management group are like the members of an orchestra. They are sitting where they are supposed to be in relation to one another, they have a conductor that coordinates the actions of the various instruments, they have tuned up, and the audience is waiting for them to perform. But no meaningful sounds are being made because they have no sheet musicthe management packs. Management packs allow the management group to identify the applications on a computer, to group computers by function, and to determine the health of the applications on those servers. They then tell management group components how to notify the outside world of pertinent information, format the information for consumption, and offer tools for troubleshooting the application.

Install reporting services before you import management packs into the management group. By doing this, the report definitions can be imported at the same time.

Microsoft has publicly stated that every server that is a member of the Windows Server System grouping will have an associated management pack developed by the application product team. They have met this goal for the most part, although sometimes the release of the management pack lags well behind the release of the application.

In MOM 2005, management packs have grown up. Earlier versions of management packs were alert-oriented, but the MOM 2005 management packs are state-oriented. These management packs provide insight into the current state of an application or a server and each of its components. They do so in an easy-to-interpret red-, yellow-, and green-light fashion. You have already seen this in the State view in the Operator console in Chapters 1 and 3. The alert helps determine the health state of an application or server. Alerts need to be handled individually, but they are not the highest level of data that MOM 2005 produces.

In the future, under Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative, management packs may evolve into or be replaced by objects called system definition models (SDMs). These models will logically represent entire computer systems (e.g., hardware, OS, and applications) to developers and monitoring applications.

This chapter discusses the most common tasks involved with administering management packs. You will see how Leaky Faucet administers management packs, and some beneficial tools will be introduced. More extensive treatment will be given to the rules that the agents execute, as well as the components of management packs. From this you will learn how to modify existing management packs and rules for your environment and how to create a simple management pack from scratch.

How well MOM produces actionable, pertinent information and how much it raises your operational awareness depends on how the management packs are administered and how the rules in those packs are adjusted.