Operations Manager Server Provides Crucial Infrastructure Support

Appropriately nicknamed “MOM,” the new Microsoft Operations Manager is a powerful and scalable event and performance monitoring system that watches over and helps maintain the availability of a family of Windows servers and server applications. Although Microsoft has provided basic server monitoring in other products, it counted on third-party vendors to help customers build enterprise-scale monitoring and management systems. As part of its new .NET Management Services initiative and with the urging of its customers, Microsoft has brought serious system monitoring in-house. Rather than re-create the wheel, Microsoft acquired MOM’s base technology from NetIQ and focused on building considerable “knowledge” into the product, allowing customers to see benefits faster.

System Monitoring Challenges

Because most system monitoring solutions are distributed across many machines and require a high degree of built-in intelligence to sort out the trivial from the critical, modern monitoring systems are only slightly less complicated than the systems they manage. Furthermore, the lack of industry standards means that firms implementing monitoring solutions must make large commitments to proprietary technologies. However, these obstacles must be overcome, because distributed systems will never have the reliability and availability of their mainframe predecessors unless they have effective automated monitoring systems. (See “The Need for Monitoring and Management“.)