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.

Such a monitoring system requires the following:

• Hardware devices, system software, and application software instrumented to generate meaningful health status data
• An infrastructure able to collect and aggregate relevant instrumentation data efficiently across a complex distributed environment
• Relevant operational “knowledge” encapsulated in such a way that it can direct the monitoring system to properly collect and analyze data and determine if the system is running properly
• Consoles where IT operators can see the system’s health state and