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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

Naturally it is to be expected that MOM integration should, and will, become a hot topic for application vendors, especially those that run on servers. And some vendors are stepping up to the mark already. Veritas, vendor of backup software, has released a free MOM pack for its software that promises to alert you to Backup Exec Service paused, stopped, and failed states; to backup and job failures and errors; problems with device and media failures/errors and so forth. And I hear that hardware vendors are going to be supplying MOM packs for their servers too.

So what is my overall view? I think MOM 2005 is a killer product for the IT professional. The price tag is laughably low for the Workgroup Edition. The full version costs more but still is not expensive. It brings a huge amount of capability to the system administrator, who can now see through the fog of event logs, Perfmon and the other raft of stuff that they have to deal with. There is no reason why MOM 2005 shouldn't help you to achieve Sysadmin Nirvana, namely dealing with problems as they arise rather than when someone complains about them.

If you have even one Windows 2003 server in your organisation, then go and buy MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition and try it. At the price, you have nothing to lose. But do be prepared to find out all sorts of things about your network and servers that you didn't have a clue about before. Getting to an all-green status bar might take some work you weren't expecting, but your servers will be all the better for it.

MOM for VARs
I have to round-off this column by mentioning a discussion I had recently with Michael Emanuel, director of the Windows and enterprise management team at Microsoft in Redmond. A quietly spoken Englishman, he has a passionate vision for the whole management and system configuration problem area. I described to him the need for a new product, which we tentatively called 'MOM for VARs'.

The problem goes something like this: there are lots of small- and medium-sized consultancies and VARs (value added resellers), which have a customer base numbering a few dozens of companies. Each site might be running Small Business Server, or a few servers running Windows 2000/2003 Server. Often they will have no on-site technical capabilities to speak of. Wouldn't it be great to have a version of MOM that integrated all of the information from each company into one clientbase-wide view containing everyone? That way, the technical people at the VAR's offices could have an instant oversight of all of their customers' networks, and be able to respond immediately as problems arose. Indeed, wouldn't it be great if they could fix problems before anyone on the client site even noticed they had one?

At the moment, MOM does not have quite the right sort of plumbing to allow it to easily do this, but Michael assured me that it wasn't a lot of work to add it, and that it was a suggestion his team would take on board and try to come up with a solution quite quickly. Obviously the VAR wouldn't want to have to pay a huge licensing fee for this facility. Dropping a VAR-optimised version of MOM Workgroup onto each client's network would be just fine, but there needs to be a way of aggregating this together at the VAR site. If you think this is a good idea, let me know and I will continue to champion it.