System Center Operations Manager

History
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 Software merged with NetIQ in early 2000, and sold the rights to the product to Microsoft in October 2000. 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.

Central concepts
The basic idea is to place a piece of software, an agent, on the computer to be monitored. The agent watches several sources on that computer, including the Windows Event Log, for specific events or alerts generated by the applications executing on the monitored computer. Upon alert occurrence and detection, the agent forwards the alert to a central SCOM server. This SCOM server application maintains a database that includes a history of alerts. The SCOM server applies filtering rules to alerts as they arrive; a rule can trigger some notification to a human, such as an e-mail or a pager message, generate a network support ticket, or trigger some other workflow intended to correct the cause of the alert in an appropriate manner.

SCOM uses the term management pack to refer to a set of filtering rules specific to some monitored application. While Microsoft and other software vendors make management packages available for their products, SCOM also provides for authoring custom management packs. While an administrator role is needed to install agents, configure monitored computers and create management packs, rights to simply view the list of recent alerts can be given to any valid user account.

Several SCOM servers can be aggregated together to monitor multiple networks across logical Windows domain and physical network boundaries. In previous versions of Operations Manager, a web service was employed to connect several separately managed groups to a central location. As of Operations Manager 2007, a web service is no longer used. Rather, a direct TCP connection is used, making use of port 5723 for these communications.

The Command Shell
Operations Manager 2007 includes a new 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. Like Windows PowerShell it is based on object-oriented programming and version 2.0 of the Microsoft .NET Framework. It has a superset of the commands and functionality available in PowerShell that provide administrators with the ability to automate Operations Manager administration.

Versions

 * Microsoft Operations Manager 2000
 * Microsoft Operations Manager 2005
 * Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Service Pack 1
 * System Center Operations Manager 2007
 * System Center Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1
 * System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2