OpsMgr Administrator Engaging with the Subject Matter Experts of Monitored Technologies

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I’ve seen over and over again IT organizations assuming the Operations Manager (OpsMgr) admins are subject matter experts (SMEs) in all the technologies they monitor. This creates a false expectation that AD or SQL or Exchange or SharePoint, or… is monitored to the same level and tuning that SMEs in these respective technologies expect.

Two unfortunate situations arise from this:

1) Monitoring gaps: an issue occurs with a monitored technology (e.g., Active Directory or AD) and someone asks, “why didn’t OpsMgr send an alert about this?”

2) False positives: a large number of alerts are generated for a specific technology, but in reality, everything is fine.

Here are some pointers from the OpsMgr perspective that I’ve used with customers that have yielded positive results and reduced the two issues above.

 

Start with the Guide

As an OpsMgr admin, review the Management Pack (MP) guides not only before first importing the MPs, but also look at the changes when importing an updated MP.

To initiate meaningful discussions with the SMEs for the technology being monitored, begin by focusing on the relevant sections from the guide. Focus on the optional configuration and key monitoring sections.

Below is a screenshot of the table of content of the AD management pack, version 6.0.8070.0. We’ll use this one for our discussion, but the same applies to all technologies.

 

 

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The sections within the red boxes are good for discussions, because they contain a lot of AD language. This will give the AD team some insight into the monitoring scenarios that OpsMgr can support—once they’ve been configured. This last point is key: some of these monitoring scenarios need to be enabled and configured.

 

Go Deeper with MP Viewer

Next, leverage the MP Viewer utility to review what rules and monitors are defined and enabled and what their configuration or thresholds are set to. With MP Viewer, you can look at the various components in an MP (rules, monitors, views, etc.) offline and in a format easy to consume:

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I like to center early discussions around monitors and rules as they provide alerts and reporting, the most visible OpsMgr items to the SMEs.

To take this further, create an export of the rules and monitors from the MP Viewer utility to an Excel or HTML file.

From within MP Viewer:

  1. Click on File.
  2. Click on Save to Excel, or alternatively.
  3. Click on Save to HTML.

 

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Below is a screenshot of the Active Directory Server 2008 Monitoring MP exported to an Excel file:

 

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The exported file can be manipulated further to hide information that isn’t relevant to the discussion at this point. Make sure that what is exposed is useful for the technology SMEs who will get a copy of these.

From here, you can have meaningful and effective discussions with the SMEs on rules and monitors that are relevant, missing, or that need adjustments.

 

Final Thoughts

Finally, if you are a Microsoft Premier customer, talk to your TAM about services that are offered where an OpsMgr PFE (like myself) and a technology PFE (AD, SQL, SharePoint, Exchange, etc.) can go onsite and help you and the other technology team better leverage and tune the MP for you environment.

Comments welcome.