Monitoring Networks with Operations Manager 2007 R2

Next session was "Monitoring Networks with Operations Manager 2007 R2" I took a lot of notes on this one as I can see the benefits to an ops team, in that we often need to go to the Central Processing or Enterprise Networks teams and say dumb things like "My application is running bad", whereas "Server 51 is connected to Switch ABC on port 1, and we're seeing a lot of dropped packets between 9-11am" would be a bit more useful.

As you'll already doubtless know, R2 supports SNMP (V1 & v2) and can create either SNMP or SysLog workflows. What I didn't know is that it will also integrate with other monitoring solutions such as Solarwinds via a connector so that we can see the outputs of that alerting system right in the SCCM console. Pretty cool eh?

The larger part of the session was devoted (of course!) to v.Next, and how this offers more functionality. Please note this is all work in progress so subject to change before it goes gold.

The key points I noted are:

* Out of the box monitoring/discovery and reporting
* Server to network dependency discovery
* Multi Vendor/Multi Protocol support (SNMP v1/2/3 & IP v4/6 (note that discovery is IP4 ONLY!)
* Better scalability

Discovery can be manual or automatic (auto only needs one router IP address to discover the entire network!) and can be scheduled, via SMNP trigger or used on demand. This will support layer 2 & 3, VLAN memberships and HSRP (Cisco). Key monitor components by default are memory, CPU, Port, Interface card, PSU, temperature and voltage.

Monitoring defaults out of the box include port/interface up/down, traffic volume, CPU % utilisation, data drop and broadcast rates, memory counters (inc total and free RAM), PSU temperature and voltage and connection health end to end.

Final point was on inbuilt visualisation, which comes in either Dashboard or Diagram flavours - both looked common sense and useful, and of course were configurable ad infinitum.