System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a cross-platform data center monitoring system for

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

s and

hypervisor A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called ...

s. It uses a single interface that shows state, health, and performance information of computer systems. It also provides alerts generated according to some availability, performance, configuration, or security situation being identified. It works with

Microsoft Windows Server Windows Server (formerly Windows NT Server) is a group of operating systems (OS) for servers that Microsoft has been developing since July 27, 1993. The first OS that was released for this platform was Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server. With the ...

and

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

-based hosts.

History

The product began as a network management system called SeNTry ELM, which was developed by the

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...

company Serverware Group plc. In June 1998 the

intellectual property rights Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

were bought by Mission Critical Software, Inc. who renamed the product ''Enterprise Event Manager''. Mission Critical undertook a complete rewrite of the product, naming the new version OnePoint Operations Manager (OOM). Mission Critical Software merged with

NetIQ NetIQ is a product line within the CyberRes line of business at Micro Focus, which includes solutions focused on cybersecurity, including ArcSight, Fortify, Voltage, and NetIQ. NetIQ was previously based in Houston, Texas, with products that pr ...

in early 2000, and sold the rights of the product to Microsoft in October 2000. It was later renamed into ''Microsoft Operations Manager'' (MOM) - in 2003, Microsoft began work on the next version of MOM: It was called Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 and was released in August 2004. Service Pack 1 for MOM 2005 was released in July 2005 with support for Windows 2003 Service Pack 1 and SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4. It was also required to support SQL Server 2005 for the operational and reporting database components. The development for the next version—at this time its codename was “MOM V3”—began in 2005. Microsoft renamed the product ''System Center Operations Manager'' and released System Center Operations Manager 2007 in March 2007. System Center Operations Manager 2007 was designed from a fresh code base, and although sharing similarities to Microsoft Operations Manager, is not an upgrade from the previous versions.

2009

In May 2009 System Center Operations Manager 2007 had a so-called “R2” release - the general enhancement was cross platform support for UNIX and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

servers. Instead of publishing individual service packs, bug fixes to the product after System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 were released in the form of so-called cumulative updates (CUs).

Central concepts

The basic idea is to place a piece of software, an ''

agent Agent may refer to: Espionage, investigation, and law *, spies or intelligence officers * Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another ** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuranc ...

'', on the computer to be monitored. The agent watches several sources on that computer, including the Windows Event Log, for specific events or ''alerts'' generated by the applications executing on the monitored computer. Upon alert occurrence and detection, the agent forwards the alert to a central SCOM server. This SCOM server application maintains a database that includes a history of alerts. The SCOM server applies filtering rules to alerts as they arrive; a rule can trigger some notification to a human, such as an e-mail or a

pager A pager (also known as a beeper or bleeper) is a wireless telecommunications device that receives and displays alphanumeric or voice messages. One-way pagers can only receive messages, while response pagers and two-way pagers can also acknow ...

message, generate a network support ticket, or trigger some other workflow intended to correct the cause of the alert in an appropriate manner. SCOM uses the term ''management pack'' to refer to a set of filtering rules specific to some monitored application. While Microsoft and other software vendors make management packages available for their products, SCOM also provides for authoring custom management packs. While an administrator role is needed to install agents, configure monitored computers and create management packs, rights to simply view the list of recent alerts can be given to any valid user account. Several SCOM servers can be aggregated together to monitor multiple networks across logical

Windows domain A Windows domain is a form of a computer network in which all user accounts, computers, printers and other security principals, are registered with a central database located on one or more clusters of central computers known as domain controlle ...

and physical network boundaries. In previous versions of Operations Manager, a web service was employed to connect several separately-managed groups to a central location. As of Operations Manager 2007, a web service is no longer used. Rather, a direct TCP connection is used, making use of

port A port is a maritime facility comprising one or more wharves or loading areas, where ships load and discharge cargo and passengers. Although usually situated on a sea coast or estuary, ports can also be found far inland, such as H ...

5723 for these communications.

Integration with Microsoft Azure

To monitor servers which are running at Microsofts Cloud Infrastructure Azure it is possible to enable Log Analytics Data Sources which are collecting and sending their data to on premises SCOM Management Servers. In November 2020 Microsoft announced the plan to make SCOM a fully cloud managed Instance at their Azure Environment, Codename was "Aquila".

The Command Shell

Since Operations Manager 2007 the product includes an extensible command line interface called The Command Shell, which is a customized instance of the

Windows PowerShell PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management program from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and the associated scripting language. Initially a Windows component only, known as Windows PowerShell, it was made open-so ...

that provides interactive and script-based access to Operations Manager data and operations.

Management Pack

SCOM can be extended by importing management packs (MPs) which define how SCOM monitors systems. By default, SCOM only monitors basic OS-related services, but new MPs can be imported to monitor services such as SQL servers,

SharePoint SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform that integrates natively with Microsoft Office. Launched in 2001, SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system, but the product is highly configurable and its usage v ...

, Apache,

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VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

and SUSE Linux. Many Microsoft products have MPs that are released with them, and many non-Microsoft software companies write MPs for their own products as well. Whilst a fair amount of

IT infrastructure Information technology infrastructure is defined broadly as a set of information technology (IT) components that are the foundation of an IT service; typically physical components (computer and networking hardware and facilities), but also vario ...

is monitored using currently available MPs, new MPs can be created by end-users in order to monitor what is not already covered. Management Pack creation is possible with the System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Resource Kit,

Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such ...

with Authoring Extensions and Visio MP Designer.

Versions

References

Literature

* * * * * * * *{{cite book, author1=George Wallace, url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1EiPBQAAQBAJ, title=Microsoft System Center Extending Operations Manager Reporting, author2=Bill May, author3=Fred Lee, date=20 November 2014, publisher=Microsoft Press, isbn=978-0-7356-9579-5

External links

System Center Operations Manager

Microsoft Tech Net guide on MOM

Microsoft Operations Manager SDK
(''in

MSDN Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) was the division of Microsoft responsible for managing the firm's relationship with developers and testers, such as hardware developers interested in the operating system (OS), and software developers developing ...

'')
Introducing System Center Operations Manager 2007
A tutorial by David Chappell, Chappell & Associates
Operations Manager 2007 R2 Management Pack Authoring Guide
(fro
UK TechNet

System Center Central (System Center community)

TechNet Ramp Up: Learn how to install, implement and administer Operations Manager 2007 R2.Blog of Kevin Holman regarding SCOM
Windows Server System Information technology management