MOMA MIA!
I've spent some time checking out
Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) over the two weeks. If you don't know what it is, it's a solution designed to manage the operations of servers and data center infrastructure. I'm extremely impressed by MOM 2005. Let me give you more background as to why.
This is of particular interest to me specifically because of my experience with web hosting. In my early days of hosting, we built our own custom operations monitoring software/solution. It was very basic, but it did enough to page me in the middle of the night if a server stopped responding.
Eventually, we built the system to utilize SNMP to get detailed information about what was happening in our environment. Using the Berkley SNMP agent (now NetSNMP), we were able to run scripts, check performance, software availability, hardware failures (i.e. RAID), etc. After my company was acquired by a larger enterprise and had more capital, we started looking at how to grow our business, which included investing in an enterprise level operations management/monitoring solution.
At the end of the day, after looking at many of the solutions out there, we decided that none of the enterprise solutions gave us exactly what we were looking for. They all had some nice features about them, but none of them gave us the flexibility we needed in our growing business. When we added new products and features to our hosting solutions, we needed a way to adapt our monitoring/management solution. In the end, we got more value from engineering our own SNMP-based solution. First, the open-source SNMP agent could be installed on a variety of platforms, while many of the enterprise solutions had agents which didn't support BSD/OS or FreeBSD, which were critical components of our hosting offerings. Secondly, it was easier to tie in our management solution with our trouble-ticketing systems, generate custom reports, and run custom queries against our reporting database.
When I first heard of MOM 2005, I have to admit that I was a little skeptical that it would work well in the Hosting industry. I thought it would be a good solution for enterprise, but there is a gap between the needs of a hoster and your typical enterprise IT shop. MOM 2005 is not your typical enterprise solution, however. In a stroke of genius, the developers realized that their management solution wasn't necessarily the be-all-end-all solution, and created a framework on which MOM2005 can be extended.
There are two key parts of this extensibility. First, the concept of a "Management Pack". A management pack is used to tailor the monitoring, alerting, reporting, and knowledge management to the specific roles/functions you are managing. For example, if you have a SQL cluster you are managing, you apply the SQL management pack, a server with IIS will be monitored/managed via the IIS management pack, etc. The management packs have an SDK, so that they are extensible beyond just the standard Microsoft roles. There are already a ton of management packs available which have been developed by third parties.
The second part of the extensible nature of MOM 2005 is called the MOM Connector Framework, or MCF. This is used to tie MOM to other components of your overall infrastructure. It can be used to connect multiple layers of MOM management groups, or used to tie MOM to third party systems, such as other monitoring systems, a ticketing system, CRM, etc. A list of management packs and connectors available for MOM can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/management/mma/catalog.aspx. There are even a few packs which are designed to support linux.
I'd be remiss if I also didn't mention how slick the operator console is. It mimics the design of Outlook 2003, and the interface is extremely user-friendly. The MOM administrator console is based on MMC, so it can be integrated into any other MMC-based administrative tools you already manage. All things said, I consider this more of a "bonus" than a key requirement.
In short, you get the best of both worlds: An enterprise-level monitoring and management tool, as well as the extensibility you need to manage a highly customized, heterogeneous environment as is typically found in the Hosting industry.
