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Extending Operations Manager 2007

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Extensibility

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 is a very extensible monitoring platform. The following are four areas in Operations Manager 2007 that customers can extend:

  1. Application management of non-Microsoft applications -- Provides customers the ability to view the health of non-Microsoft applications, like Oracle, PeopleSoft or SAP.

  2. Value-added solutions -- Adds knowledge to Operations Manager 2007 that helps a customer use tools to customize Operations Manager 2007 for their environment and processes.

  3. Extending End-to-End Service Management  -- Monitors networks, PDAs, cell phones, SAN, storage and UNIX/Linux.

  4. Connecting Operations Manager 2007 with other enterprise management or help desk products -- to consolidate the alerts and state of an environment into one product or user interface. So, for example, data from another monitoring or help desk system can be synchronized in Operations Manager, or alerts can be taken out of Operations Manager 2007, inserted into another system, and synchronized.

Operations Manager 2007 is a service that can work with management packs, according to a manifest, to function as a management authority in a distributed environment. This includes:

  • Discovering and maintaining the model of the managed environment

  • Collecting data

  • Processing data

  • Triggering actions based on events, schedules, or commands

  • Uploading processed data, downloading commands, and configuration

Benefits of Management Packs

This section describes the benefits of using management packs with Operations Manager 2007. The benefits described are listed for your customer of the Operations Manager 2007 environment, and the benefits for your customers. For more information about what Microsoft partners have created as a result of extending Operations Manager 2007, see our catalog here.

Your benefits as application owner:

Your customer’s benefits:

A lower total cost of ownership for the monitored application

Increased availability of all parts of your systems. Less down time.

Streamlined datacenter operations

Enterprise-level integration

Reduced unplanned downtime

Customer satisfaction easy to deployment, use, understand, and report with.

A more rapid return on the investment

An increase in users’ problem-solving and troubleshooting expertise

 

A management pack is the main extensibility point in Operations Manager 2007. The key value of a management pack is that it provides the ability and flexibility to understand and manage the health of the system or device that is being monitored. A management pack contains such essential features as a health model and views required for the Information Technology (IT) professional to identify, understand, and resolve issues with the system or device being monitored. Moreover, a management pack often uses and processes the following types of data so that health can be analyzed and displayed to the user:

  • Event logs, performance counters, log files

  • SNMP data and traps

  • Syslog

  • Something that can be accessed through a script

  • Windows Management, available with Operations Manager 2007 SP1

  • Data that is inserted into the Operations Manager SDK API, for example performance data.

Key Tools

This following tools are essential in building different Operations Manager 2007 integrations:

  • The Management Pack Authoring Tool is a separate tool that needs to be installed on a computer that has the Operations Manager 2007 console installed. It includes the ManagementPackSchema.xsd file, along with system libraries and a Management Pack Best Practice Analyzer to ensure your management pack follow your companies best practices.

  • The Application Programming Interface (API) is available on the Root Management Server (RMS). It is exposed as a managed code API using Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0. Some of the functionality can be exposed as a Web service, which uses the Windows Communication Framework, and depend on .NET framework 3.0. The Operations Manager 2007 Operations Console and web console use the managed class library of our API. As a result, if an operation can be performed in the Operations Manager 2007 Operations Console and web console, then it can also be done programmatically.

  • Operations Manager 2007 makes Windows PowerShell cmdlets available for many of these operations. The Operations Manager API can be called remotely, therefore clients are not required to run on Operations Manager RMS. If the managed code API is used, the Operations Manager 2007 Operations Console will need to be installed on your system before you can communicate with the RMS.

  • The SDK includes descriptions and examples that show how to automate and extend Operations Manager features.

  • SQL Reporting Services Report Building Tools (Microsoft Visual Studio 2005) are used to build reports in management packs.

  • The Runtime Scripting API, a common tool used in management packs, is used for local discovery and to send discoveries to Operations Manager 2007, to do local monitoring and process the results, in tasks, and many other areas.

Connectors

Sometimes, when there is another existing monitoring system in an organization with extensive knowledge about a specific application or system or device, using connectors for integration may be desirable. In this type of scenario, there are two different, but essential functions of connectors:

  1. A connector that takes alerts or other information from Operations Manager 2007 and does something with it; for example, to send the information to a help desk, an Enterprise Monitoring system application that functions for notification and escalation. The Operations Manager 2007 SDK will need to be used, and if there are any requirements around keeping the alerts synchronized, then the Operations Manager Connector framework (OMCF) should be used.

  2. A connector that inserts data (for example, events, performance data, discovery data) into Operations Manager 2007 so that it will display. An example of this type of data, a network monitoring tool that is looking to integrate its networking discovery and state into Operations Manager 2007. A management pack will need to be built prior to the connector, which extends the schema with new classes that model your applications or systems or devices and contains the correct management pack logic for state. The OMCF will be used to actually do the discovery insertion and state updating.