Introduction

The process of operations management is a combination of people, procedures, and tools—all three are necessary, and the absence of one component can put an entire enterprise solution at risk. At a more granular level, operations management is about correlating what may appear to be seemingly unrelated events and data across machines to determine what information is significant to your operational environment versus what is not.

With System Center Operations Manager 2007, Microsoft continues its commitment to providing a solid monitoring and management product. Although Microsoft licensed NetIQ’s Operation Manager technology in 2000, not until Operations Manager 2007 did Microsoft put its finishing touches on reengineering the product. Now in its third major release, the software formerly known as “MOM,” or Microsoft Operations Manager, has been rewritten and rebranded into Microsoft’s System Center product line. Operations Manager 2007 concentrates on end-to-end application monitoring, moving beyond its previous server monitoring focus.