Why use System Center 2012 Operations Manager for X-Platform Monitoring

System Center 2012 Operations Manager provides the monitoring component of the System Center 2012 suite of products for cloud & data centre management, and delivers extremely flexible monitoring of the entire data centre. Operations Manager provides a level of monitoring beyond server health, and ensures the availability of critical applications.

As well as providing best of breed monitoring for Microsoft technologies, Operations Manager also performs deep monitoring of UNIX/Linux operating systems and the applications that run on them, to enable complete data centre management. With all server operating systems being monitored, business-critical applications can be completely modelled in Operations Manager, irrelevant of the operating systems hosting the application components.

Operating systems other than Windows are treated as first class citizens in Operations Manager, and this is shown by the consistent approach to monitoring. Everything from discovering a computer to be monitored, through specifying accounts for safe and secure monitoring, to extending and customizing what is being monitored is performed in the same way. This common platform makes it easy to monitor everything in the data centre, and to connect the relevant components in distributed application models for complete monitoring of all types of applications.

All information collected from UNIX/Linux operating systems is also displayed in the same normalized way as it is for Windows.

This provides an additional benefit as an operator of Operations Manager can easily find information on the objects being monitored, and the health of what’s being monitored, as all the monitoring details are always presented in the same way, in the same place, and in a way that a product expert is not required to understand it.

Another big advantage of Operations Manager is the in depth product knowledge it brings to monitoring, and this level of deep product knowledge is included with monitoring of non-Microsoft technologies. Whether it is just a UNIX/Linux operating system that is being monitored, and/or a JEE application, the knowledge is there to assist with finding the cause of the issue and how to resolve it.

Further to supporting cross-platform operating systems out of the box, Operations Manager also has native support for JEE applications across multiple operating systems. With a simple deployment of an application called BeanSpy to the JEE application server, deep level monitoring of MBeans can be enabled which will provide all the information needed to monitor and track the availability and performance of the application.

So, why use System Center 2012 Operations Manager for cross platform monitoring?

1. A single management tool for the entire data centre.
2. Normalized data for everything being monitored.
3. Consistent approach to monitoring.
4. The provided knowledge.
5. Ability to customize and extend monitoring.
6. And, continual improvements that will be delivered by Microsoft.

All this put together makes it possible to have a single pane of glass into the data centre or cloud being managed, and to get real insight into the availability of all components that make up an application.

Further Information

With Service Pack 1 for System Center 2012 Operations Manager came the support for a wider range of Linux operating systems. The full list of supported non-Windows operating systems is:

• AIX 5.3, 6.1 & 7
• HP-UX 11iv2 PA-RISC, 11iv2 IA64, 11iv3 PA-RISC & 11iv3 IA64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4, 5 & 6 (x86/x64)
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (x86), 10 SP1 & 11 (x86/x64)
• Solaris 9 (SPARC), 10 & 11 (SPARC & x86)
• CentOS 5 & 6 (x86/x64)
• Debian 5 & 6 (x86/x64)
• Oracle Linux 5 & 6 (x86/x64)
• Ubuntu Server 10.04 (x86/x64)
• Ubuntu 12.04 (x86/x64)

The supported JEE application servers and the operating system on which monitoring is supported is defined in the table below:

For more information on monitoring Unix and Linux computers, visit https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/hh212754.aspx.

And, for community advice and knowledge, visit https://www.systemcentercentral.com.

If you have an interesting story around using System Center with Open Source technologies and are based in the UK let us know by dropping us an email.

About the Author

David Allen is an IT Professional who works with all System Center products and has done since 2007.  David has also authored System Center books, presented at large Microsoft events such as TechEd and MMS, and has been awarded the Microsoft MVP award for five years running.

Twitter:  @aquilaweb

Blog:  https://www.systemcentercentral.com

Company:  https://www.infrontconsulting.com