Creating a New Monitoring Management Pack for Customizations

Topic Last Modified: 2012-11-26

Most vendor management packs are sealed so that you cannot change any of the original settings in the management pack file. However, you can create customizations, such as overrides or new monitoring objects, and then save them to a different management pack. By default, System Center Operations Manager 2007 saves all customizations to the Default Management Pack. As a best practice, you should, instead, create a separate management pack file for each sealed management pack you want to customize.

Creating a 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 the 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.

  • You can 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’s easier to track and update customizations to individual management packs.

For more information about sealed and unsealed management packs, see Management Pack Formats (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=108355). For more information about management pack customizations and the Default Management Pack in Operations Manager 2007, see About Management Packs in Operations Manager 2007 (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=108356).

For more information about management pack customizations in Operations Manager 2012, see Management Packs: Working with Management Packs