​What is System Center Operations Manager 2012 (SCOM) ?

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The System Center Operations Manager 2012, known as SCOM, is a part of the Microsoft system center product that provides the user with infrastructure monitoring and application performance monitoring.

SCOM monitors:
 
  • Windows or UNIX/Linux
  • Network Devices
  • .Net application (APM)
  • Java application
  • Web Application as well as URLs
  • More monitoring capabilities by using the management packs which help to monitor specific objects or application….
SCOM has the ability to send you alerts when a monitored object is not healthy, providing you with information about the problem and how to resolve it.
 
The main SCOM components and roles are:
 
  1. Management Server
  2. Resource pool
  3. Gateway Server
  4. Operational Database
  5. Data warehouse
  6. Agents
  7. Services
  8. Managemet Packs
  9. Reporting
  10. ACS (audit collection service)
 
  • Managemet Server:
When you want to install SCOM 2012 and during the setup, you will be asked to create a management group. The MG contains the management servers you want to add to your environment. The management server manages the MG and communicates with agents and databases.
 
  • Resource Pool
When you add another management server to your SCOM environment, the management servers will be members of a resource pool, so you can distribute works between the management servers and grant high availability when a management server member is failed.
 
  • Gateway Server
A gateway server will help you to monitor objects in an untrusted domain. For more details see https://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh230684.aspx.
 
  • Operational Database
The operational database is created during setup of your MG. It is a SQL database that contains the management group configuration and monitoring data. By default its retention days is seven.
 
  • Data warehouse database
The data warehouse database is also created when you install your management group. It is a SQL database that stores monitoring data for historical purposes and reports. It retains long term data (400 days and more).
 
  • Agents
The agent is the service that is installed on the computer that you want to monitor. It collects data and communicates with the management server to reflect the health of the objects.
 
  • Services
The agent installed on a computer is considered part of the System Center Management Health service. The system center management health service runs on the management server itself and runs workflow processes like collecting event logs and performance counter data and running scripts.
The System Center Data Access service connects you to the operational database when you open the SCOM operation console to view alerts and manage your environments.
The System Center Management Configuration service is responsible for managing the relationships and the topology of the MG, and distributing Management packs to the agents.
 
  • Management packs
The MP contains a set of object types, rules, monitors and tasks related to a specific application. For example, if you want to monitor your Exchange server, you must import the Exchange server management pack in order to discover your Exchanger server as an Exchange application and monitor it.
 
  • Reporting
SCOM allows you to run reports and get data from the data warehouse, like reports to show you the most common alerts and many many others.
 
  • ACS
The audit collection service allows you to collect security logs from servers and store them in a centralised database, and run reports based on specific collected events, such as a report that shows you the account locked out and which PC is causing the account to be locked based on the events 644 / 4740.
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