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MOM knows best

Posted on 18 Jan 2005 at 11:31

Jon Honeyball discovers just how essential Microsoft's latest management software will be to system administrators the world over

The user interface for MOM is very simple, once you understand how it works. It could almost be described as 'Outlook for Server Management', because of how the various panes and panels work. There are three main areas on the display. The left-hand column features eight big buttons, as with Outlook: Alerts, State, Events, Performance, Computers & Groups, Diagram, My Views and Public Views. The upper half of this column is a View window that displays the tree for the currently selected button, allowing you to drill down. So if you press the Alerts button in the lower half and then choose the SQL Server branch in the upper half, you can drill into the Alerts part of its tree.

The next main panel, the centre section, displays the drilled-down information for any Alerts that are outstanding on any of the machines, the upper half showing the overview by machine, the lower half showing detailed drill-down for the selected machine. The right-most panel shows a set of tasks listed by service area, so you can choose a specific task to be launched. For example, I could go to the Active Directory Tasks, and then choose Network Statistics/Display Active Connections, which brings up a wizard that confirms a few details, then the remote report is run. The results are dropped into the Task Status panel.

The level of information you get from MOM is frankly quite staggering. Just about everything you could want to know is right there in front of you, and unlike some measurement systems such as Perfmon or Task Manager, it has a whole set of history information stored away too. So you can, for example, look at what was happening to the processor loading half an hour ago, when some users said that your website had become unresponsive.

All of this is most excellent, and the enterprise version builds on this by allowing for a fully layered and tiered model too. Plus, this version exposes just about everything through a set of Web Services, so you do not even have to bring up the Management Console to see what is going on - why not view everything through a set of rich web pages? Or use the data feeds to push information into other monitoring systems? Maybe you have a large existing HP OpenView system in place for your Unix servers, and it would be just great if your PC server monitoring could feed straight into that. Now it can, as it is all there in the full version.

But that's not all. Obviously, having a management pack for MOM is a hugely effective starting point for a major application or piece of hardware, but what happens when you want to monitor a custom application that you have written yourself? Is it hard to write a full management pack? Well, the good news is that you do not have to write a full MOM pack unless you want to - you can create MOM definitions today, within the product, that hook straight into applications that were written 'pre-MOM'. For example, your little Visual Basic application might well write some status information into the Registry or some other file. MOM can monitor this for you and generate a full MOM interface for that data. It even goes further than that: if you expose interfaces on your DLLs then MOM can snoop those for you, looking for messages flowing around inside your application and triggering things accordingly. The interface for setting this up is not for the faint-hearted, but I had no problems setting up a comprehensive MOM interface for an anti-virus application that had no knowledge of MOM or management interfaces at all.