Introduction to Monitoring

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The following best practices are recommended to help you support MOM:

  • Use the knowledge base. Encourage employees to enter their knowledge about resolving a problem into the knowledge base, so that this knowledge is available for everyone, and is not lost if the employee moves on.

  • Enforce a policy that all resolved incidents in the ticketed system are transferred back to a resolved resolution state in MOM by either the subject matter expert or the help desk.

  • Document all processing rule changes, including newly added rules, previous and modified threshold values, and modified or added scripts.

  • Limit the number of MOM Administrator and MOM Author roles to a few individuals who are responsible for rule changes. Other MOM users, such as Exchange or Active Directory Administrators, should only be members of the MOM Users group (unless these users need to edit rules or runtime tasks).

The information in this chapter is based on a MOM deployment, with distributed components, that is managing 20 computers. Although your organizations IT group may support fewer or more computers, this chapter provides guidance that you can use in your environment.

Before You Begin

Before you start setting up your monitoring environment, you should verify that you have completed all of the tasks identified during deployment, and have implemented the recommended settings for the various MOM components.

It is recommended that you review:

  • The MOM 2005 release notes to identify any changes that could affect operations.

  • The Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Security Guide. This guide contains security best practices and information about the level of privileges required to work with MOM components.

For monitoring your MOM deployment, ensure that:

  • You have deployed and configured MOM using the best practices and recommendations documented in the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Deployment Guide. This guide also provides information about:

    • Supported deployment scenarios.

    • Deploying agents automatically or manually.

    • Installing Management Packs and reports.

  • You have agents installed on distributed MOM components, such as the operational and reporting database servers.

  • You have installed all of the Management Packs that you want to use for monitoring MOM servers.

  • You have installed all applicable MOM 2005 and SQL Server hotfixes.

It is recommended that you download the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Resource Kit, which contains tools and best practices that you can use for monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimizing your MOM environment. Chapter 8 of this guide, "Tools", provides information about the resource kit tools as well as the tools that ship on the product CD.