Are you running OM 2007 yet? If you do, you have presumably noticed all new features.  When you look in the Authoring pane of the Operations Console you will see a number of new features under management pack objects. In this post I will try to explain some of the news regarding management packs.

 

Attributes
Attributes are almost the same as in MOM 2005, but here are a couple of news that you should know as a OM 2007 administrator. In MOM 2005 a attribute check one registry key or a registry value. In OM 2007 a attribute can check the registry or WMI query, this is controlled by the “Discovery Type”. When creating an attribute an object type must be selected as a target for it. A object type can include a number of attributes, for example a number of registry values. You can then create a group that has a dynamic inclusion rule for servers that only have that object type. In MOM 2005 you did this with a forumla at the computer group object.  

Monitors
What is the main diffrence between a rule and a monitor?

Monitors exists for every instance in the system, rules act independently of one another

Monitors are the only thing that can affect the state of an instance

For example, a monitor can be used to estimate the state of a event (if it exist) or the value of a performance counter. The result of that control the health state of a target and the alerts that are generated. There are three types of monitors:

Unit monitors (created to monitor specific part of a application, device or service)

Aggregate rollup monitors (this type of monitors roll up the health of monitors beneath them according to a defined algorithm.)

Dependency rollup monitors (roll up health state from targets linked by either a hosting or a membership relationship)

Object Discoveries
Object Discoveries are used to find objects in the network that need to be monitored. In a management pack there are a number of types of objects that the management pack monitors. Every management pack also includes object discoveries to find the specific objects on the network that are of the types monitored by the management pack. Under the object discoveries node you will see a list of all object discoveries in the management group.

Rules
Rules are like rules in MOM 2005, used to collect data and generate alerts. Rules can be used for a large number of reasons, the most common scenarios are:

Collect events from Windows event logs

Collect SNMP events, SNMP traps and SNMP Performance

Collect Windows performance data

Collect WMI performance data

Collect event and performance data from scripts

Alert on Windows events and/or SNMP traps

Tasks
Tasks are used to run commands/action on managed machines. A great feature in OpsMgr 2007 is the possibility to combine run-as accounts with tasks. The default account for tasks are the action account.

Views
Views are groups of managed objects that have commonality, which is defined in the view properties. When you select a view a database query is made and the result of the query are displayed in the result pane. There are a number of views that you can access from the opertions console

Alert View (Display alerts that meet specific criteria, for example all SQL alerts)

Event View (Display events that meet specific cirtiera)

State View (Display relationship between components, computers and computer groups)

Performance View (View performance objects and counters, also historical operations data

Diagram View (View a praphical view of a set of objects and how they relate to each other)

Task Status View (Display tasks that meet specific criteria)

Web Page View (Displays a Web page)

Dashboard View (View any data that OpsMgr collect in two diffrent view types side by side on one window, for example logical disk state and logocal disk alerts.)