Customizing Management Packs
Applies To: Operations Manager 2007 R2, Operations Manager 2007 SP1
The default settings and thresholds contained in a management pack reflect the author's definition of a healthy state for the application, service, or hardware device that you are monitoring. These settings provide a starting point for administrators, who can then make customizations using overrides or by creating additional management pack elements such as rules and monitors.
When you customize the settings of a management pack, you can apply these customizations to other management groups. Most vendor management packs are sealed so that you cannot change any of the original settings in the management pack file. However, you can save customizations to a different management pack. For more information on sealed and unsealed management packs, see Management Pack Formats in Operations Manager 2007 Help.
Customizing Sealed Management Packs
One of the management packs that is imported as part of the Operations Manager 2007 installation is the Default Management Pack. By default, when you create a management pack object such as a monitor, alert, or rule, it is saved to the Default Management Pack. If you disable a rule instead of creating an override that sets the enabled flag to false, it stores this in the Default Management Pack. In addition, when you create an override to customize a default setting in a sealed management pack, that override is saved to the Default Management Pack by default.
As a best practice, you should create a separate management pack for each sealed management pack you want to customize, rather than saving your customized settings to the Default Management Pack. Creating a new management pack for storing overrides has the following advantages:
It simplifies the process of exporting customizations that were created in your test and pre-production environments to your production environment. For example, instead of exporting a default management pack that contains customizations from multiple management packs, you can export just the management pack that contains customizations of a single management pack.
It allows you to delete the original management pack without first needing to delete the Default Management Pack. A management pack that contains customizations is dependent on the original management pack. This dependency requires you to delete the management pack with customizations before you can delete the original management pack. If all of your customizations are saved to the Default Management Pack, you must delete the Default Management Pack before you can delete an original management pack.
It is easier to track and update customizations to individual management packs.
The general process for customizing a management pack is as follows:
Create a management pack.
Create overrides and save them to the new management pack.
(Optional) Add company knowledge.
Export the new management pack.
Customizing Unsealed Management Packs
When you customize an unsealed management pack, you cannot save the overrides to another management pack. All overrides are saved to the unsealed management pack itself. As a best practice, archive a copy of the unmodified, unsealed management pack to use to roll back changes or for problem-solving. For more information on archiving management packs, see Administering the Management Pack Life Cycle.