Monitoring Heterogeneous Environments with Operations Manager

Microsoft has architected Operations Manager (OM) 2007 to provide support for heterogeneous environments in two ways:

Bidirectional data exchange with ESM products. Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 introduced the MOM Connector Framework (MCF), a Web service-based technology for forwarding alerts and synchronizing data between MOM and third-party enterprise system management (ESM) and incident-tracking solutions. Although the MCF makes it possible to view alerts on the OM console that were generated by other monitoring systems, most customers use the MCF to send OM-generated alerts to other ESM systems or to integrate OM with incident-tracking applications. This allows operators to open tickets from within the OM console when an alert appears but close the alert from within the ticketing application once work has been completed. With OM 2007, the MCF was upgraded and called the Operations Manager Connector Framework (OMCF). However, the MCF or OMCF alone is not sufficient; they require extra software to link the Connector Framework’s Web service to an ESM product’s native APIs. One example of such connector software: Engyro’s Product Connector Suites. EMC also sells connector software that integrates its Smarts management solution with the MOM 2005 and OM 2007 MCFs.