What's in a Management Pack?

At a high level, a management pack (MP) consists of one or more Operations Manager (OM) files that describe the discovery and health models of a managed component (which could be an application, OS service, or device). A discovery model enables OM to find instances of that component, while a health model encapsulates the operational knowledge needed by OM to ascertain the health of instances of monitored components and to help human operators find and fix the underlying cause of an unhealthy state. Configuration models allow OM to check that component instances are properly configured.

The relationship between models and MPs is somewhat loose: the discovery, configuration, and health models for a particular type of component can be contained within a single MP (the most common case); they can be in separate MPs; and portions of the models can even be spread across multiple MPs. Both Exchange and SQL Server break the models into multiple MPs (for maintenance reasons), but aside from affecting the number of discrete steps a customer must perform to install the MP of a particular component type, the packaging doesn’t affect the final outcome.