Chapter 6. Operator Console

With the minor exception of Chapter 1, this book has focused on aspects of MOM that are controlled and viewed through the Administrator consolespecifically, how to configure and control the behavior of management groups and the information that they produce.

This chapter shifts focus to cover the Operator console and how to get the information you want out of it. As such, this chapter is for consumers of MOM information, not just MOM administrators. However, MOM administrators are not off the hook; you need to go through this chapter as wellafter all, who are the MOM users going to turn to for help with using the MOM 2005 Operator console?

The Operator console will tell you what is going on in your environment right now. Two types of user/console interactions are necessary to find that out. The first is MOM-initiated and it happens when a significant event occurs anywhere in the environment. It comes in the form of an alert or a state update. In this instance, MOM is saying, "Hey you, this thing that you wanted me to tell you about, well, it just happened over here." The top-level alert and Operator console State views provide a broad perspective of the whole environment. This can be limited to a portion of the environment if you've implemented console scopes.

The other use of the Operator console is to find out what happened or is happening in a smaller portion of the environment. For example you may need to find out, "What is the available disk space on the Exchange mailbox servers?" or "What was happening on the ISA when the DMZ web site was hacked this afternoon?"

This chapter could just as easily have been called "A million and one ways to look at your MOM data," because the Operator console is so flexible in how it can present the collected information. The simplest way to describe the Operator console is that it is a filtering tool used to find operational data in the operations database. Using the Operator console effectively is really a matter of learning how to manipulate its filtering functions.

This chapter teaches the use of the Operator console through several scenarios presented in the context of the Leaky Faucet environment. The information MOM Operator console users will see and the tasks they have access to is controlled by the console scope that is applied.