Monitoring Comes First!

I’ve been having lots of discussions at MTC with customers wanting to increase the quality of infrastructure services delivery (using MOF/ITIL speak), and using System Center as the “technology” part of that people-process-technology triad. Many times they ask my opinion of where they should start first – Operations Manager? Configuration Manager? Just focus on managing physical servers first and worry about virtual instances later?

Good question. And 90% of the time my answer is the same: Start with Operation Manager.

Here’s why: you need to have an excellent understanding of what you have and how it’s behaving before you can be successful with anything else. Use the building analogy: You’ve got to have a rock-solid foundation before you even THINK about putting down a floor or standing up a wall. Let’s take AD for example, something many people have and can relate to. (and this does not indicate any problem with AD. AD is rock solid; tens of thousands of customers love it. But I’ve been working with AD for 10+ years and I still make configuration mistakes)

You want to start putting up a SCCM infrastructure to manage workstations. If your AD isn’t 100% healthy, you’re going to have issues. If you try a Windows 7 deployment and you have DNS lookup issues, you’re going to have problems. Even if you start trying to manage those Windows 7 workstations with GPOs and you have an AD replication island you didn’t know about, you’ve going to have issues. You need to make sure you’ve got the solid foundation first. Can you tell right now if your AD is 100% solid with nothing going wrong? Has it been performing well for past 3 monhts? Having any external DNS lookups? Are you proactively finding and resolving issues before anyone calls helps desk?

I’ve had customers tell me SCOM have saved them hours in both troubleshooting and addressing potential minor issues before they become service-impacting issues.

Now, don’t think this you have to stop whatever project you’re doing and do SCOM first. This does not have to be a full-blown SCOM project with 4 months of planning: Start with it small. Get a SCOM instance up and import the WS08 Base and AD management packs, let it marinade for a while with the out-of-the-box settings, and it’ll start letting you know if something isn’t right. Take advantage of the knowledge from the guys that wrote AD, the guys that live it every day in Premier services.

You may already have a monitoring solution already, and that’s good – something is better than nothing. But SCOM gives you so much more than any other solution, especially as you start mixing physical and virtual serers. And if you go with other System Center products down the road, remember they all take advantage of each other (SCOM + SCVMM and PRO Tips for example for moving VMs around from host to host, Service Manager as your ITIL/MOF CMDB, etc.)