System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is an infrastructure-monitoring product in the Microsoft System Center family. It collects availability, performance, configuration and event data from Windows, Linux and Unix computers and presents health states and alerts through centralized consoles. Monitoring logic is packaged in reusable management packs for particular operating systems, applications and devices. The current release is System Center Operations Manager 2025 UR1.
The product began as a network management system called SeNTry ELM, which was developed by the British company Serverware Group plc. In June 1998 the intellectual property rights were bought by Mission Critical Software, Inc. who renamed the product Enterprise Event Manager. Mission Critical undertook a complete rewrite of the product, naming the new version OnePoint Operations Manager (OOM). Mission Critical Software merged with NetIQ in early 2000, and sold the rights of the product to Microsoft in October 2000. It was later renamed into Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) - in 2003, Microsoft began work on the next version of MOM: It was called Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 and was released in August 2004. Service Pack 1 for MOM 2005 was released in July 2005 with support for Windows 2003 Service Pack 1 and SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4. It was also required to support SQL Server 2005 for the operational and reporting database components. The development for the next version—at this time its codename was “MOM V3”—began in 2005. Microsoft renamed the product System Center Operations Manager and released System Center Operations Manager 2007 in March 2007. System Center Operations Manager 2007 was designed from a fresh code base, and although sharing similarities to Microsoft Operations Manager, is not an upgrade from the previous versions.
2009
In May 2009 System Center Operations Manager 2007 had a so-called “R2” release - the general enhancement was cross platform support for UNIX and Linux servers. Instead of publishing individual service packs, bug fixes to the product after System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 were released in the form of so-called cumulative updates (CUs).
Architecture
Major components of System Center Operations Manager
The basic administrative unit in SCOM is a management group. A management group contains one or more management servers, an operational SQL Server database and a data-warehouse database. The operational database stores configuration and recent monitoring data, while the data warehouse retains longer-term information used for reporting. Multiple management servers can form resource pools so that monitoring work is redistributed if a server becomes unavailable.
An agent installed on a monitored computer collects events, performance counters and configuration data. It evaluates the health of monitored objects, can run diagnostic or recovery actions, and sends its results to a management server. Gateway servers proxy communications for computers in untrusted domains or across firewalls. Agentless monitoring can also be used for some network devices and systems on which an agent cannot be installed.
Management packs define discoveries, rules, monitors, tasks, dashboards and knowledge for a particular workload. The management server distributes the relevant workflows to agents and records the resulting health data and alerts. Microsoft and other vendors publish management packs, and administrators can author or tune their own for organization-specific applications.
Integration with Microsoft Azure
To monitor servers which are running at Microsofts Cloud Infrastructure Azure it is possible to enable Log Analytics Data Sources which are collecting and sending their data to on premises SCOM Management Servers.
In November 2020 Microsoft announced the plan to make SCOM a fully cloud managed Instance at their Azure Environment, Codename was "Aquila".
The Command Shell
Since Operations Manager 2007 the product includes an extensible command line interface called The Command Shell, which is a customized instance of the Windows PowerShell that provides interactive and script-based access to Operations Manager data and operations.
Management Pack
SCOM can be extended by importing management packs (MPs) which define how SCOM monitors systems. By default, SCOM only monitors basic OS-related services, but new MPs can be imported to monitor services such as SQL servers, SharePoint, Apache, Tomcat, VMware and SUSE Linux.
Many Microsoft products have MPs that are released with them, and many non-Microsoft software companies write MPs for their own products as well.
Whilst a fair amount of IT infrastructure is monitored using currently available MPs, new MPs can be created by end-users in order to monitor what is not already covered.
Management Pack creation is possible with the System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Resource Kit, Visual Studio with Authoring Extensions and Visio MP Designer.
↑Deuby, Sean (20 December 2011). "The Evolution of Microsoft's System Center Suite"(html). ITPro Today™. Archived from the original on 2 January 2018. Retrieved 10 November 2018. Microsoft entered the operations management field in 2000 by purchasing the rights to Mission Critical Software's Enterprise Event Manager.
↑Deuby, Sean (20 December 2011). "The Evolution of Microsoft's System Center Suite"(html). ITPro Today™. Archived from the original on 2 January 2018. Retrieved 10 November 2018. Microsoft renamed the product Microsoft Operations Manager 2000 (MOM—thus providing IT pros with a rich supply of jokes) and marketed the product through at least 2006.
↑Deuby, Sean (20 December 2011). "The Evolution of Microsoft's System Center Suite"(html). ITPro Today™. Archived from the original on 2 January 2018. Retrieved 10 November 2018. The product was rewritten from scratch and released in 2007 as System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), the name and architecture it holds today.
↑Sprague, Roger (18 April 2007). "Command Shell Introduction Video". Official Blog: System Center Operations Manager Command Shell. MSDN. Archived from the original on 19 November 2007. Retrieved 14 July 2007.
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