"I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." - Bill Gates
SCOM (System Center Operation Manager) is used to monitor and alert network administrators when something (a server, workstation, network device, application, and so forth) is not working as expected, such as being offline, in a failed state, or even not running as fast as normal. The SCOM management console provides details about the events and errors of the systems being monitored and managed by SCOM.
In the past, system monitoring was simply monitoring and alerting when something was "down"; however, with System Center Operations Manager, the monitoring is proactive and alerts are triggered before problems cause a system to fail. SCOM proactively checks the operation of systems and devices, and when the devices are performing differently than normal—which many times is a precursor to a pending system failure—SCOM begins the alert and notification process.
Business Solutions Addressed by System Center Operations Manager
System Center Operations Manager helps an organization be proactive about system operations rather than waiting for a server or application to fail, incur operational downtime, and recover from the failure. SCOM helps IT personnel ensure systems are running as expected. SCOM monitors the normal operation of servers, workstations, and applications to create a known baseline on how the systems are operating. When the systems fall out of the norm of the baseline, meaning that something is wrong, and while downtime has not occurred, the systems or applications are not running as they always do and IT personnel are then notified to review the situation and take corrective action.
SCOM also helps the IT department identify systems that should be replaced before others due to reliability issues. SCOM can keep track of system uptime and downtime and generate a report that ranks the reliability of systems based on their ongoing performance. If all things were equal in terms of age or depreciation schedule of systems, yet an organization will be replacing a portion of the systems, the reports can be used to identify which systems should be replaced first.
SCOM also has the ability to monitor applications as if a user is accessing the application and not just based on whether a system is operational or not. A system can appear to be fully operational, yet when users try to log on to the system, they could get logon errors or terrible access performance. SCOM has the ability to utilize automation by having a client system log on to a web server or an application server with stored credentials and validate that systems throughout the enterprise are more than operational and are serving users as expected.
SCOM can also be used to produce reports that help auditors and regulators validate that the organization's IT operations meet regulatory compliance requirements. Automated report generation for information such as password attempt violations, service-level agreement details, encrypted data access validation, and the like makes SCOM more than just a monitoring tool, but an information compliance reporting tool.
The bottom line is that SCOM helps IT personnel identify problems that need to be fixed before the problems create downtime that impacts the operations of the business. This is critical in keeping employees productive for internal servers, and helps an organization maintain business continuity when their servers host applications that help the organization generate revenues. A properly designed, implemented, and configured monitoring tool like SCOM can mean the difference of an organization focused on productivity and continuity versus an organization that is constantly recovering from system failures.
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