Understanding Management Pack Operations

Applies To: Operations Manager 2007 R2

If you are familiar with Operations Manager 2007 SP1 and have experience in creating or customizing management packs, this information in this topic will be familiar to you. This topic highlights the terminology and relationships between the various elements within a management pack to help administrators who are new to Operations Manager get started. Details of Operations Manager 2007 R2 Model-Based design are not covered in this document. To gain a fuller understanding of how service modeling and health modeling interact to describe the state of your environment, see the chapter about Operations Manager 2007 Key Concepts (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=150428) in the Microsoft Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack Authoring Guide (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=150417).

Management Pack

A management pack is the physical file (or files) that contain the rules, monitors, tasks, views, and reports that are used to describe the application, service or hardware. A management pack tells Operations Manager how to discover and monitor an object in the system environment. Operations Manager is typically not aware of anything in its environment unless the appropriate management pack is imported.

In the case of cross-platform systems, Operations Manager cannot discover, monitor, or perform tasks on any UNIX or Linux systems until the management pack for the specific operating system is installed. There are multiple parts in the monitoring process that are briefly described in the following sections.

Rules

Rules collect data. Information from rules is collected and stored in the Operations Manager database to generate reports.

Monitors

Monitors collect data from an actively running computer or process. The data is evaluated to calculate the state of a computer and change the state of the computer as appropriate. An alert can be triggered on the change in state of the computer, based on monitor settings. Monitor-collected data is not stored in the Operations Manager database.

Alerts

Alerts are notifications that are triggered by a change in the state of a computer or process by a monitor evaluation. An alert occurs for an actionable situation. You can think of alerts as to-do items for the administrator.

Tasks

A task is one or more actions to be taken as the result of an alert. Tasks can also be executed on demand.

Health

The health model describes how the health states of those pieces affect the health of the entire application. The health model is a collection of monitors that represent different aspects of the object type. There are security monitors, availability monitors, performance monitors, and so on, that are all aspects of the health of a particular model. Default entity health consists of Availability, Performance, Security, and Configuration.