Operations Manager Enters Second Decade

System Center Operations Manager (OM) 2012, now available in beta, begins the second decade for the product. OM helps IT departments maintain security and limit downtime by centrally monitoring systems. OM 2012 improves monitoring for applications (including custom or third-party applications) written with .NET and Java technologies, incorporates major changes to enable high availability on commodity hardware, and improves monitoring for network devices such as routers, among many other changes. OM’s complexity means that partners may be needed for migration, and some OM 2012 features (such as network device monitoring) depend on management packs created by customers or third parties.

This article gives an overview of basic OM functions and features and then focuses on changes for 2012; readers who are very familiar with OM can skip the overview while others may see the overview as an introduction or as a refresher.

Operations Manager Overview

OM 2012 is the fourth major update to OM, which started as Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) in 2000 after Microsoft licensed NetIQ technology. It continues the product’s core mission: centrally monitoring the health and performance of devices, particularly Windows servers, and taking corrective actions automatically based on configurable and customizable rules and scripts.