Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM)

hanakuin

Has anyone here had any experience with MOM? Good or bad? I'm getting ready to implement it in the lab enviroment, it looks like a great product; but, I'd like to see what anyone else has experienced with it.

royal

It's a good product. The next version called SCOM, System Center Operations Manager, has a redone GUI that makes managing the software less tedious. It's like going from the Exchange 2003 UI to the Exchange 2007 UI. There are virtual labs provided by Microsoft that will guide you through certain operations through MOM. You can view those virtual labs here. The nice thing about MOM, is you can download Management Packs for various software pieces that will enable MOM to be able to monitor those specific applications.

keatron

It's certainly extremely robust and if you're not careful you can get lost in that robustivity. Make sure you clearly identify exactly what you're going to be using it for before loading it. Then lab out sims of what you'll be using it for. You should be good then. You can always learn about other features and add them as you see fit.

blargoe

keatron wrote:

It's certainly extremely robust and if you're not careful you can get lost in that robustivity. Make sure you clearly identify exactly what you're going to be using it for before loading it. Then lab out sims of what you'll be using it for. You should be good then. You can always learn about other features and add them as you see fit.

I wish someone had told me that before I started our MOM implementation a few months ago!

It is a very capable product but there is a steep learning curve especially if you are looking for alerting on specific events. Fortunately there are dozens of sites out there dedicated to scripts and tools to help you out.

For my envrionment, the out of the box alerts aren't enough, so I have to have a good knowledge if Windows security events, important processes used by our production apps, proficiency in vbscript, WMI queries, LDAP queries, and SQL.

SCOM 2007 should alleviate a lot of this for me. I will be evaluating it as soon as my overloaded plate allows.

keatron

I'm certainly not one to play one vendor against another, but I've used a product in smaller environment clients (1000 or less nodes) called Event Sentry. I think it's superior to MOM in pure event log monitoring and alerting. I can't remember the exact website but if you google for event sentry you'll get there. They have several nice out of the box pre-configs. For example, there's one called SOX, you enable it and automatically all the recommended Sarbanes events are logged, alerted and stored in a database. Pretty slick stuff.

blargoe

EventSentry is a great product, I forgot about that one. We used that at my last job but I wasn't the one who administered it. We used it for server down notifications and event log alerts.