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Are you considering deploying or upgrading to System Center 2012 Operations Manager? Benefit from the lessons learned by many other companies. This paper will cover some important topics to consider, help you outline your plan, and provide practical and useful pointers to save you time and frustration. In this white paper, Savision and Catapult outline the top 10 things you need to consider in preparing for Operations Manager.
groups?
Establish trust boundaries between domains and workgroups. Segment multiple network environments using firewalls. Provide greater availability. Deliver a scalable monitoring solution. You also can take advantage of partitioning, which separates services across multiple management groups. Multiple management groups are needed if you have more than one installed language, or to provide a single, consolidated view of your environment. You may also need to have separate groups according to function, such as preproduction for testing Management Packs and new servers or production for monitoring daily business processes.
349 5th Ave, New York, NY, United States of America www.savision.com, sales@savision.com Sales and Support: +1-800-311-2399
349 5th Ave, New York, NY, United States of America www.savision.com, sales@savision.com Sales and Support: +1-800-311-2399
Proper tuning of OpsMgr to match the requirements of your organization takes time; tuning through the use of groups is one way you can make the process more efficient. Consider the following best practices for group creation: Use proper naming convention Create a group only when there is a business need Keep a reasonable number of groups Keep dynamic membership criteria simple Try avoiding the use of specific entity names in the dynamic group criteria
For example: Here are some examples of actionable alerts using groups:
Front-end web servers Mid-tier application servers Back-end SQL servers Alert when a website is offline Alert if the service doesnt start Alert for exceeding memory allocation
You can use a format such as Overrides - <MP Name>, so that the Management Pack used to store overrides for Windows 2008 should be named as Overrides Windows 2008 OS. You can put overrides at the end. You can append _Overrides to the Management Packs.
To include the Management Pack (MP) version in the name of your override MP; when creating the MP in the OpsMgr Console you will need to: 1) Create the MP, 2) Export this created MP, 3) Delete the MP from OpsMgr, 4) Rename the exported MP file Name, 5) Edit the MP in notepad and update the two MP named areas to match the file name, 6) Re-import this MP. Custom Management Pack naming becomes extremely important when providing OpsMgr as managed services
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and if you are managing OpsMgr in a multi-tenant scenario, it must be addressed. The right procedure requires a bit of thought to your particular situation. See section #7 below for additional details. A handy tip for uniform naming standards: Store your standards in a document library in SharePoint, make it centrally available, and put a link on your Ops Manager console called Ops Documentation. This makes it easy to find and use the standards you have defined for your environment.
and make them readily accessible. Store your standards in a document library in SharePoint, make it centrally available, and put a link on your Ops Manager console called Ops Documentation (see the figure below). This makes it easy to find and use the standards you have defined for your environment.
Using SharePoint allows you to: Enhance document management Promote better collaboration Improve reporting Automate business processes Incorporate any changes into the current change control and processes Integrate with existing tools: OpsMgr was not designed for multi-tenancy, making a multi-tenancy monitoring and management solution difficult. To avoid this situation, adopt a unique customer code for each customer. This makes the custom Management Packs purpose and target customer well known to the service provider. For example, choosing C01 for Customer 1 and C02 for Customer 2 will help you to identify a service provider easily.
349 5th Ave, New York, NY, United States of America www.savision.com, sales@savision.com Sales and Support: +1-800-311-2399
ensure a smoother transition. Levels of alert priority for OpsMgr: High (2) Medium (1) Low (0) Levels of alert severity for OpsMgr: Critical (2) - Red Warning (1) Yellow Information (0) Green When adding Management Packs, be sure to select the Replace Existing Management Pack option. This will preserve the integrity of the Management Pack and help prevent complications. For a smooth transition when phasing in a Management Pack, create a pilot testing report that includes test results and configuration changes. After importing the Management Pack, you should also verify that agents are installed and added to the appropriate computer groups. Also note that phasing in Management Packs should be preceded by the design phase i.e., determining the level of monitoring you need. For example, use Level 1 for minimum features, Level 2 for recommended features and Level 3 for advanced features. Gather and prioritize all of your customer requirements, and then write the functional and rules specifications. The two most important considerations are to 1) find the type of management instrumentation that will be used, including a summary of what could potentially monitor each of the software components in your product; and 2) evaluate the Management Pack Components contained within your Management Pack. For example, it might list the number of computer groups, computer attributes, processing rule groups, processing rules, public views, knowledge base content, and notification groups that will be included in your Management Packs. The rules specification includes a complete list of each of the Management Pack objects, and what is required to implement them.
OpsMgr provides alerts for each level based upon the state of the component or distributed application that OpsMgr is monitoring. For different levels of severity, OpsMgr uses colors to explain the state of a system. However, what OpsMgr sees as critical may not be critical for your environment. Determine for yourself what should be critical, warning or informational in your environment. For example, a Critical situation (e.g., a network is down) needs to be addressed immediately, while you wouldnt need to set aside your current work for a Warning (e.g., high processor utilization). Information alerts most likely wouldnt need any particular action taken.
9. Get A Win
Pick one group within your organization that can see the benefits to Operations Manager, and make them your starting point. Give them everything they need to log in and see only their servers and their customized dashboards. Empower them, and they become your OpsMgr advocates and internal reference customers, helping you secure additional groups and departments. A group review is a key component in understanding the benefits of OpsMgr. Since it is entirely voluntary, this approach depends on the willingness of your group to participate in the exercise. Once the review goal is set, the participants can exchange their experience on good practices that facilitate intended tasks using OpsMgr. Your group can provide a strategic assessment of their OpsMgr experience in terms of functionality, goals, and outcomes. Participating in an exercise such as using customized dashboards is fundamental in ensuring proper evaluation and credibly assessing outcomes for your business.
Summary:
We hope that our Top 10 list above has provided some tips that you find useful for your own OpsMgr deployment! For more good tips and tricks, check out our blog links: http://blogs.catapultsystems.com http://blog.savision.com
Credentials:
Paul C. Johnson, Senior Lead Consultant, Catapult Systems Cameron Fuller, Principal Consultant, Catapult Systems Dennis Rietvink, Lead Sales Engineer, Savision
About Savision
Founded in 2006, Savision is headquartered in the Netherlands and is privately held. Savisions founders and executives bring years of enterprise systems and application management experience from large IT service companies. Savisions software is currently used by over 500 enterprises worldwide, including many Fortune 500 companies. Key in their choice were Savisions experience with passion for, and knowledge about, Microsoft System Center.
349 5th Ave, New York, NY, United States of America www.savision.com, sales@savision.com Sales and Support: +1-800-311-2399