Operations Manager Overview

Because all but the smallest organizations depend on computers to perform mission-critical functions, outages and service impairments can impose significant and immediate hardships. More than ever, IT departments need automated monitoring systems to help them proactively ward off outages and respond rapidly to problems-preferably before users are even aware they exist-as well as measure how well they are meeting service-level commitments.

Operations Manager (OM) is Microsoft’s product for automated monitoring of IT systems, designed to detect problems early and capture data required to resolve them. To perform these tasks, OM relies on hardware devices, system software, and application software to be instrumented in a way that generates and exposes basic data needed for determining component health status. On top of this basic instrumentation, OM adds the following:

• An infrastructure able to collect and aggregate relevant instrumentation data efficiently across a complex distributed