Essential Microsoft Operations Manager

Basic MOM Structure

The functional unit of a MOM 2005 implementation is a management group. All management groups consist of an operations database , one or more management servers, one or more managed computers, the Administrator console, and the Operator console. Figure 1-1 shows the minimum components of a MOM 2005 management group.

Figure 1-1. A basic MOM 2005 management group

The operations database maintains all the settings that define the configuration of the management group. It also stores the live or operational data that has been collected by the agents until it is groomed out by automated SQL jobs when the data is no longer useful or to free-up database space. The database can be Microsoft SQL Server 2000 with SP3A or MSDE—the desktop version of the SQL database for smaller test installations.

The management server performs all the centralized tasks for the management group. It deploys and manages agents, and it proxies communication between the database, the agents, and the user consoles. In addition, all configuration tasks for the management group are performed on the management server, including rule management.

Managed computers are machines that are monitored by the management group and most of them will have agents installed. But MOM 2005 can also monitor a limited number of computers in an agentless fashion, which means that the monitoring of a remote computer is performed by the agent on the management server. This means an increase in the load on the management server and on the network between the two machines. As such, Microsoft has limited the number of agentless-managed machines to 60 per management group.

You will not need to make modifications to these components on a daily basis. In fact, with proper planning these components are set up during installation and not modified again until you dismantle the management group.

The specific health rules and thresholds will be adjusted during the tweaking period of your MOM 2005 deployment; but again, once they are producing the type of information that you want, you should leave them alone.