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Purpose
Many IT administrators today are responsible for maintaining the health and performance of heterogeneous IT environments to support their corporations' business demands. Integration between the Microsoft management tools and non-Microsoft management systems is necessary to manage and maintain the entire IT environment. To simplify integration with other management tools in the enterprise, MOM 2005 includes the Web services-based MOM Connector Framework (MCF). MCF enables IT administrators to fully capitalize on the intelligence built into MOM to ensure the health and performance of their Windows environment while still utilizing existing management tools, allowing them to meet their business needs with greater ease and at reduced cost.
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Capabilities
The MCF technology comprises two distinct components, the MOM Connector Framework web service API and a product connector. The MCF web service provides a generalized abstraction of the MOM alerting infrastructure, and a product-specific product connector maps the API abstraction to the specific APIs of each management system. Through these two components, MCF technology provides the following capabilities:
- Forwarding MOM alerts to another management system or trouble ticketing tool.
- Collecting alerts from other monitoring products, so they can be displayed in the MOM Administrator console or a custom console, along with alerts generated by MOM processing rules
- Tracking which alerts have been forwarded to another management or ticketing system, and when they require updating
- Synchronizing alerts between management systems or ticketing tool, thereby reducing duplicate efforts for alert tracking and updating
- Communication across firewalls–enabling the connection and sharing of alert information between locations and various management systems or ticketing tools within discreet firewall environments
These capabilities result in interoperability between MOM and a variety of other management systems, reducing the time and cost of operating your IT infrastructure.
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Third–Party Product Connectors
A growing number of third–party vendors and management framework providers have taken advantage of the rich capabilities of MCF and developed product connectors to enable interoperability between MOM and other management frameworks. For more information on how your management framework can work with MOM, see the Partners page.
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Support Disclaimer
Third–party product connectors are not supported under any Microsoft standard support program or service.
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Elements of MCF
The MOM Connector Framework (MCF) solution contains several elements that are available for system administrators and developers.
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MCF Feature Pack
The MOM 2000 Service Pack (SP) 1 MCF Feature Pack contains the MCF Web service API, used as the base for all product connectors, and the MOM-to-MOM product connector. The MOM–to–MOM product connector can be used as an alternative to SP1 alert forwarding. For MOM 2005, the MCF Feature Pack should be installed by modifying the MOM 2005 installation. You can do this by either selecting the Custom Installation during initial setup or through Add/Remove programs in Control Panel. Note that product connectors still need to be downloaded separately.
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MOM 2000 Software Development Kit
The updated MOM Software Development Kit (SDK2) will include the MCF web service API samples, the MOM-to-generic Product Connector, and an updated Help file with MCF overview and developer documentation.
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