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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
A beginner's guide to help you design, deploy and administer your System Center Operations Manager 2016 and 2012 R2 environments
About This Book
- Discover how to monitor complex IT environments with System Center Operations Manager using tips, tricks and best practice recommendations from industry experts.
- Learn how to create eye-catching dashboards and reports to help deliver a tangible return on investment back to your organization.
- Optimize, troubleshoot and perform disaster recovery in Operations Manager using step by step examples based on real-world scenarios.
Who This Book Is For
The target audience for this book is the IT Pro or System Administrator who wants to deploy and use System Center Operations Manager but has no previous knowledge of the product.
As a Getting Started' book, our primary objective is to equip you with the knowledge you need to feel comfortable when working with common monitoring scenarios in OpsMgr. With this in mind, deep-diving into less-common OpsMgr features such as Audit Collection Services (ACS), Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM) and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) has been intentionally omitted.
What You Will Learn
- Install a new System Center 2016 Operations Manager Management Group
- Design and provision custom views to relevant support teams.
- Understand how to deploy agents
- Work with management packs
- Monitor network devices
- Model your IT services with distributed applications
- Create dashboards and custom visualizations
- Tune, optimize, maintain and troubleshoot System Center Operations Manager
In Detail
Most modern IT environments comprise a heterogeneous mixture of servers, network devices, virtual hypervisors, storage solutions, cross-platform operating systems and applications. All this complexity brings a requirement to deliver a centralized monitoring and reporting solution that can help IT administrators quickly identify where the problems are and how best to resolve them.
Using System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr), administrators get a full monitoring overview of the IT services they have responsibility for across the organization - along with some useful management capabilities to help them remediate any issues they've been alerted to.
This book begins with an introduction to OpsMgr and its core concepts and then walks you through designing and deploying the various roles. After a chapter on exploring the consoles, you will learn how to deploy agents, work with management packs, configure network monitoring and model your IT services using distributed applications. There's a chapter dedicated to alert tuning and another that demonstrates how to visualize your IT using dashboards. The final chapters in the book discuss how to create alert subscriptions, manage reports, backup and recover OpsMgr, perform maintenance and troubleshoot common problems.
Style and approach
A beginner's guide that focuses on providing the practical skills required to effectively deploy and administer OpsMgr with walkthrough examples and tips on all the key concepts.
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Seitenzahl: 486
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Getting Started with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager
Getting Started with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager
Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: June 2016
Production reference: 1240616
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78528-974-3
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Credits
Author
Kevin Greene
Reviewers
Abhilash V Menon
Randall Smith
Sridhar Vishwanatham
Commissioning Editor
Amarabha Banerjee
Acquisition Editor
Vinay Argekar
Content Development Editor
Mamata Walkar
Technical Editor
Nirant Carvalho
Copy Editor
Sneha Singh
Project Coordinator
Kinjal Bari
Proofreader
Safis Editing
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
Graphics
Kirk D'Penha
Production Coordinator
Shantanu N. Zagade
Cover Work
Shantanu N. Zagade
About the Author
Kevin Greene is a Microsoft MVP in the Cloud and Datacenter Management space and has been working in the IT industry since 1999. He is employed as a Cloud Technologies Consultant at Ergo in Dublin, Ireland; in this role, he works with clients to deliver enterprise grade solutions using System Center, Windows Server, and Azure.
On the Microsoft certification track since the nostalgic days of Windows NT 4.0, he holds qualifications that include MCSE, MCSA, MCITP, MCP, and MCTS. Kevin is an active participant in the System Center and Cloud OS community through his blog at http://kevingreeneitblog.blogspot.com and he can also be found hanging around Twitter as @kgreeneit.
A regular speaker at local and international events, he has also co-authored a number of books including Mastering System Center 2012—Operations Manager (Sybex, 2012) and Mastering Windows Server 2012 R2 (Sybex, 2013).
Kevin lives in Sallins, Co. Kildare, Ireland with his wife, Laura, and his two sons, Matthew and Dylan. When he's not working on his laptop, he spends his free time with his family and supporting Manchester United. He also holds a second-degree black belt in freestyle kickboxing and although he is not as involved in the sport as he used to be, he's still an avid follower of the martial arts.
About the Reviewers
Abhilash V Menon was born in a beautiful village called Puthuvely in Kerala, India. From childhood, he was curious about everything came into his way. He was crazy about exploring them until he could solve the puzzle. One day, a desktop computer came into his way. He started exploring it as usual. He noticed that whenever he put a piece of puzzle in its place, there are hundreds of other new pieces popping up around him. He is still putting them together, every day, hoping one day he could design a piece by himself.
He wanted to become a programmer when he was doing his graduation, but when he saw the industry closely, that changed his mind.
He realized that spending entire life in doing programming in a certain language is not what he likes. He wanted to learn something new, and entirely different every day. So he elected Infrastructure Monitoring as his career, as there is a wide opportunity to learn both latest and oldest technologies every day.
He enjoys sharing knowledge a lot. He believes that hiding knowledge is a crime. He learns new things till late night and share them to his friends and colleagues in the day time.
He had worked on a number of leading infrastructure monitoring tools like Microsoft SCOM, BMC Proactive Net, CA Spectrum, HP OpenView and Nagios. Now he is a Senior SCOM Engineer and Management Pack Developer at Datacom New Zealand. He could literally monitor anything from the status of your server to the brightness of your bedroom lamp through SCOM! He introduced a term called SCOMification which he defines as "The process of discovering and monitoring a mission critical real world business scenario in Microsoft SCOM.
In such a way that it can be discovered automatically, monitored flexibly, notified to different technical towers, presented to different business level people in different format which make sense to them, and the data could be stored in data warehouse for historical analysis and business intelligence."
He recently started a blog for upcoming SCOMifiers, which is intended to help them SCOMify anything they want for FREE.
You can access the blog at http://scomifyit.com.
You can read more about him at http://abhie.me or contact him directly through his email <[email protected]>.
I would like to thank my beautiful wife, Asha Puthusseril and our little bundle of joy Advik Menon, for their endless motivation and support.
I would also like to thank my parents Viswanadhan and Usha, brother Akhilesh Menon, my uncle Biju and my mentor Ajish Kumar Sir, for making me like this.
Finally I would like to thank You for buying this book and making our effort worthy.
Randall Smith is a Sr. Systems Administrator for Adams State University. He has been administering Windows, Linux, and BSD systems since 1999.
Randall has been active in helping other SysAdmins solve problems and making their jobs easier though his blog, IRC, and social media. He has presented at the Colorado Higher Ed Computing Organization and Educause conferences, on topics such as Linux KVM, and the Ceph storage system.
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Preface
System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) is Microsoft's flagship solution for monitoring private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Its a best-of-breed monitoring tool for Microsoft operating system and application workloads; it also has the ability to monitor datacenter hardware components, such as servers, network devices, SAN's, UPS's, and even air-conditioning units, along with a wide range of cross-platform UNIX and Linux operating systems.
Without a proper understanding of how all these monitoring capabilities can come together centrally within OpsMgr, you will find administering it becomes a complex challenge. The aim of this book is to address that challenge and break down the barriers of complexity to help you get up and running with your monitoring scenarios within a relatively short space of time.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introduction to System Center Operations Manager, aims to provide an overview of the System Center suite of datacenter management components, including an introduction to OpsMgr and its core features.
Chapter 2, Installing System Center Operations Manager, covers the design and deployment of your first OpsMgr management group.
Chapter 3, Exploring the Consoles, walks you through the various views and settings that can be found across the different workspaces in both the Operations console and the Web console.
Chapter 4, Deploying Agents, focuses on deploying and managing Windows agents in single or multiple management groups. This chapter also demonstrates how to deploy cross-platform agents to your UNIX/Linux computers.
Chapter 5, Working with Management Packs, includes an overview of what a management pack is, some tips on where to download them from as well as walk-through's to show you how to import, export, and manage them.
Chapter 6, Managing Network Devices, provides information about the out-of-box network monitoring capability of OpsMgr, which can use SNMP or ICMP communications to monitor your network devices.
Chapter 7, Configuring Service Models with Distributed Applications, takes an often under-utilized feature of OpsMgr and provides step-by-step information to help you create models of your IT services for maximum monitoring visibility.
Chapter 8, Alert Tuning the Easy Way, presents process-driven methods and real-world tips to ensure excessive alert noise is kept to a minimum and your alert views stay manageable.
Chapter 9, Visualizing Your IT with Dashboards, shows how to configure and populate built-in dashboard templates with the various widgets on offer as well as introducing you to some hidden dashboard treasures that will maximize the visibility of the IT services monitored within your organization.
Chapter 10, Creating Alert Subscriptions and Reports, covers the creation of alert notification channels, subscribers, and custom subscriptions. In this chapter, we also dive into the powerful reporting feature of OpsMgr to help you create and customize the type of reports that your senior-level IT managers and teams request on a regular basis.
Chapter 11, Backing Up, Maintenance and Troubleshooting, focuses on backing up and optimizing your OpsMgr environment. You will also discover how to work with Maintenance Mode, deploy update rollups, and troubleshoot common OpsMgr issues.
What you need for this book
To complete all the exercises in this book, it's preferable to have access to four servers (virtual or physical) along with downloaded copies of the latest supported media versions of OpsMgr and SQL.
The four servers will be configured using the step-by-step examples discussed in Chapter 2, Installing System Center Operations Manager and will end up with the following roles:
If you're working through this book with limited server resources at your disposal, then for testing purposes, feel free to co-locate the roles from Servers 1 - 3 on a single server and then deploy the Gateway Server role on a second server.
Who this book is for
The target audience for this book is the IT Pro or System Administrator who wants to deploy and use System Center Operations Manager but has no previous knowledge of the product.
As a Getting Started book, our primary objective is to equip you with the knowledge you need to feel comfortable when working with common monitoring scenarios in OpsMgr. With this in mind, deep-diving into less-common OpsMgr features such as Audit Collection Services (ACS), Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM) and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) has been intentionally omitted.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Copy the MOMCertImport.exe utility to a location on your C drive."
A block of code is set as follows:
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "The last thing you need to do now is to enable the Server Proxy setting on the new Gateway server."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Questions
If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at <[email protected]>, and we will do our best to address the problem.
Chapter 1. Introduction to System Center Operations Manager
Thank you for purchasing this book and we hope that it will help you through your journey of getting started with System Center Operations Manager. In this chapter, we will give you an overview of System Center and introduce you to Operations Manager, its capabilities and the minimum system requirements that you need to have in place before you begin deployment.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
System Center overview
System Center is a suite of enterprise cloud and datacenter management tools from Microsoft, developed and structured on the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework. The concept behind MOF and ITIL is to deliver IT service excellence for your organization through a process-driven guidance and team structure. You can learn more about MOF by referring to http://tinyurl.com/mofintro and for ITIL you can refer to http://tinyurl.com/itilintro.
The goal of System Center is to help deliver centralized monitoring and management of your applications, virtual environments, physical environments, and cloud-based workloads.
Operations Manager is one of the most popular components of System Center and before we dive into that, let's take a look at some of the other components in the suite:
A few years back, in early 2012, Microsoft announced a major change in how they licensed and supported System Center. This new change meant that customers could no longer license an individual component from the System Center suite (there were eight components to choose from at the time); instead, the license model changed to view the whole of System Center as a single product. The thinking behind this shift wasn't to simply make more money from a higher license cost but to position System Center as a fully integrated cloud and datacenter management solution, where each of its components can be interconnected to deliver an enterprise-grade IT Service Management offering.
Introducing Operations Manager
Now that you have an understanding of the other key components of System Center, it's time to introduce you to Operations Manager (OpsMgr)—the core monitoring solution from Microsoft for over a decade. OpsMgr built its reputation in infrastructure monitoring of Microsoft workloads before expanding its capabilities to cover cross-platform monitoring of Unix/Linux distributions. The first OpsMgr 2012 release branched out to include monitoring of physical network devices as well as cloud and fabric environments, through its integration with Virtual Machine Manager and Microsoft Azure.
On top of all this, Microsoft has given us the opportunity to truly deliver full 360 degree monitoring of our applications by modeling them as IT services in OpsMgr and gaining code-level visibility with Application Performance Monitoring (APM). With OpsMgr 2012 R2 and the release of OpsMgr 2016, we get deep integration into Microsoft's cloud-basedOperations Management Suite (OMS) - which gives us enhanced capabilities for log analytics, alert remediation and best practice recommendations.
If you have a requirement to report back to senior management in your organization on how available your IT services are, then OpsMgr has that covered too. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can be tracked and reported on easily to determine the overall level of SLA compliance.
Tip
With everything that OpsMgr can do, if you find yourself constantly troubleshooting issues in your environment or not knowing where to start looking when a problem arises, then this will be a formidable tool to add to your box of tricks.
IT as a Service explained
Here's a scenario that might sound familiar, it's Friday afternoon (because these things always seem to happen before you clock off for the weekend), an end-user in your organization notifies you of an outage to an application and it's the first time you've heard of the incident.
Suddenly, you find yourself scrambling to find a solution to the application outage by trawling through the many e-mail alerts that your monitoring tool has kindly filled your inbox with and you're not even sure where to begin. Then your boss starts demanding to know when exactly everything will be back up and running again.
Finally, it's close to midnight and everyone's gone home except you. You've eliminated most of the noisy alerts in your inbox and narrowed the problem down to a bunch of alerts referring to network connectivity. Eventually, you find the network cable that the new junior admin earlier mistakenly disconnected from one of the many switches you manage in the datacenter! Once the cable is plugged back in, everything comes back online and you get to start your weekend.
This is a classic example of reactive monitoring—wherein, even though you had a monitoring tool in place, due to the constant stream of alerts you've been receiving, you missed the alert about the cable being disconnected and only reacted after the end-user logged an application outage incident. Even if you had picked up the network connectivity alert, there's still a good chance that you don't understand the overall impact of it on the business and it might not even be considered to be a valid reason for end-users complaining about their application outages.
What you really need in this situation is a monitoring solution that can bring all of the related components of an application together in the form of an IT service to help reduce your Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), which translates to you resolving incidents quicker and keeping your end-users happy.
This is where OpsMgr comes in very useful. With OpsMgr, you can create comprehensive maps of your IT services based on your IT service catalog. With your IT services mapped out, you can then begin to understand all the components that make up each service.
If we apply this strategy to our example scenario, the next time someone disconnects a network cable, red lights will start to appear on a dashboard monitoring the IT service. It then becomes very easy to quickly identify the root cause of the outage. In Figure 1.1, you can see an example of an IT service modeled in OpsMgr that has been affected by someone disconnecting a cable from a network device.
Figure 1.1: The Operations Console
Adopting a similar monitoring strategy will enable you to focus on the IT services that run your business from a holistic management perspective, instead of on an individual component-by-component basis. This model is defined as IT as a Service (ITaaS).
Note
Using ITaaS you can manage your services in the same way that your end-users consume them—essentially viewing each complex IT service as a single entity with a green, amber, or red health state, similar to a traffic light status!
As you progress through this book, you will learn more about how to use the ITaaS model. This will not only help you reduce the amount of time you spend trying to identify the root cause of problems, but it will facilitate you to move closer to delivering a proactive monitoring approach for all your IT services and one where you can catch possible incidents before they become bigger problems.
Operations Manager core features
In this section, we will cover some of the most common features used in OpsMgr. It's important that you have a high-level understanding of these features before installing OpsMgr. This will assist you during the planning and design phase of your deployment.
Management group
Created during the initial installation of OpsMgr, a management group is a unique logical administrative unit that defines the security boundaries of your monitoring environment.
When choosing a management group name, you must ensure that the name is unique within your Active Directory forest and also understand that whatever name you choose, it's case sensitive. It's also recommended that you refrain from using any unsupported special characters in the name and stick with letters and numbers.
You can have multiple management groups running concurrently in the same domain without a problem (this is useful for pre-production and production environments) and all configuration changes and customizations that you make will be contained inside each unique group.
Operational database
A SQL database that forms the central component of every Management Group, the Operational database installs with a default name of OperationsManager. It contains all your OpsMgr customizations along with configuration and monitoring data for all managed objects. A dedicated Operational database is required for every OpsMgr management group you deploy.
Data is retained in the Operational database by default for seven days - think of this as OpsMgr's short-term memory store. This retention period can be modified for different types of datasets by configuring database grooming within the Operations console.
Data Warehouse database
The data warehouse is a SQL database that can be either dedicated or shared by an OpsMgr management group. This database has a default installation name of OperationsManagerDW.
All historical alerting and monitoring data is stored here and with retention period of up to four-hundred days, this can be considered OpsMgr's long-term memory store. Having the ability to retain data for such a long period means OpsMgr can use the data warehouse to generate rich reports that will help you to better understand the availability and performance of your IT services.
RMS Emulator
Installed by default onto the first management server that you deploy, the Root Management Server (RMS) Emulator exists to support backward compatibility with legacy OpsMgr management packs that specifically target the RMS role. If there are no legacy management packs that contain rules targeted at the RMS role, then essentially, the RMS Emulator is not required and all management servers are considered equal.
In early releases of OpsMgr, the RMS role was arguably the most important role within the management group and unless you deployed Failover Clustering across two servers, it was also a single-point of failure. Since OpsMgr 2012, the single-point of failure RMS role was removed and out-of-box high availability was made possible using a new feature called Resource Pools. These pools are a collection of management servers that distribute the workload and ensure that monitoring continues in the event of a management server failing.
Tip
Using the Operations Manager Shell (which is the PowerShell module that gets deployed during the installation of OpsMgr), you can easily move the RMS Emulator role between management servers using the following line of code:
Management Server
The Management Server role is responsible for managing and communicating with agents, maintaining management group configuration, communicating with the OpsMgr SQL databases, and facilitating console connections.
After installation of this role, you will find five new Windows services installed on your server. Out of the five services, three are configured with a service start up type of Automatic and two of them are set to Disabled.
These management server services and their startup types are detailed in the following table:
Service name
Startup type
Description
Microsoft Monitoring Agent
Automatic
System Center Data Access
Automatic
System Center Management Configuration
Automatic
Microsoft Monitoring Agent Audit Forwarding
Disabled
Microsoft Monitoring Agent APM
Disabled
Reporting Server
The OpsMgr Reporting Server role integrates with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and gives you the ability to generate and schedule reports from an intuitive user interface inside the Operations Console. You can choose from ready-made reports that come bundled with the various management packs you deploy or you can generate your own custom reports using some of the generic templates on offer.
Good reporting enables you to visualize the monitoring data generated from your IT infrastructure and provide exactly the kind of high-level information that senior management teams request on a regular basis. You also have the option to e-mail reports on a specific schedule or simply export them into various easy-to-read formats, such as Word, Excel, PDF, CSV, and TIFF to name a few.
Gateway Server
The primary role of a Gateway Server is to act as a go-between for monitored agents that are located in untrusted domains and networks - DMZ's are a great example of where to use this role in your environment.
When located in an untrusted domain, a Gateway Server must use certificates to authenticate with the main OpsMgr environment. It communicates with management servers over TCP port 5723 and cannot connect directly to the OpsMgr databases.
A Gateway Server also acts as a data compressor and can be used to compress monitoring traffic from agents to the management servers by up to 50% in certain scenarios.
Agents
The OpsMgr agent is used for server and client monitoring of Windows and Unix/Linux operating systems. A push installation can be initiated from management servers and gateway servers to make the deployment nice and easy. It can also be deployed manually or added into computer images and packaged as an application for deployment with a tool such as System Center Configuration Manager.
On a Windows computer, after the agent has been installed, three new windows services are created. These new services and their startup types are detailed in the following table:
Service Name
Startup Type
Description
Microsoft Monitoring Agent
Automatic
Microsoft Monitoring Agent Audit Forwarding
Disabled
Microsoft Monitoring Agent APM
Disabled
The agent's job is to communicate with management and gateway servers, discover objects, execute workflows, and run diagnostic tasks on monitored computers.
If you have deployed multiple management groups, the OpsMgr agent can perform a feature called 'multi-homing' whereby it can communicate with up to four different management groups at any given time. This feature will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, Deploying Agents.
Consoles
There are a number of consoles that you can interact with when you are working with OpsMgr. The most common one is the Operations Console, which is essentially the main console that you will use when administering OpsMgr. In Figure 1.2, you can see the Operations Console in action monitoring some Windows computers.
Figure 1.2: The Operations Console
During installation, you can choose to deploy the Web Console, which is a lighter and scaled-down version of the Operations Console. This console will be deployed as an IIS website on whichever server you choose to run it from. Although you can't perform any administration or reporting tasks here, the Web Console is useful if you want to give your OpsMgr users read-only access to the monitored environment.
Tip
The maximum recommended number of concurrent Operational Console connections per management server is limited to 50. If you go over this number, then you will encounter performance issues. The Web Console however, has no limit to the number of concurrent connections you can make.
When you deploy the Web Console role with the installation wizard, you get an automatic installation of the Application Advisor and Application Diagnostics consoles - both of which are used in conjunction with the APM feature for code-level monitoring of your applications.
Management packs
If you want to get any monitoring value at all from OpsMgr, then you are going to need to install some management packs. These are small files based on XML that can be imported into OpsMgr and which hold information about how to monitor a specific application or hardware product set.
Management packs can contain some or all of the following objects:
In Chapter 5, Working with Management Packs, you will learn much more about management packs and how to use them to get the most out of your OpsMgr deployment.
Application Performance Monitoring
Another optional and very useful feature of OpsMgr is Application Performance Monitoring (APM). When configured, this gives IT Operations teams the ability to help troubleshoot problems inside applications at the code-level, similar to the world of a Developer. This synergy has become known as 'DevOps', and it's something that has gained a lot of traction in the last few years.
A real benefit of deploying APM in OpsMgr is that, not only do you get to dive deep into your .NET and Java application code; you can also see the health of the underlying infrastructure that runs those applications.
Network device monitoring
If you're going to monitor the full breadth of your IT services, then you will no doubt want to include network device monitoring in your designs. With a choice of ICMP or SNMP (v1/v2c/v3) monitoring, you can take advantage of the built-in Network Node and Vicinity dashboards to give you rich visualizations on the health of your network infrastructure. Chapter 6, Managing Network Devices, will get you up and running with this feature in no time.
Audit Collection Services
Audit Collection Services (ACS) is an optional feature used to collect security event logs from monitored systems and bring them together in a central SQL database for auditing and compliance purposes. ACS uses its own SQL database (named OpsMgrAC by default), which is kept completely separate from the OperationsManager and OperationsManagerDW databases.
To enable ACS, you must deploy a management server and configure it as an ACS Collector. The ACS Collector then receives and processes the audited security event logs from targeted computers and passes that information into the OpsMgrAC database.
Specific computers running the OpsMgr agent can be targeted with ACS audit policies to enable them as an ACS Forwarder. When Windows computers are enabled as ACS Forwarders, the Microsoft Monitoring Agent Audit Forwarding service is started on those computers and configured with an 'Automatic' start up state. When this service is running, the ACS audit policies are applied and security events will be sent to the ACS Collector for auditing.
Agentless Exception Monitoring
Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM) is an optional feature that centralizes the collection of hardware, operating system, and application crash information from selected computers. If you're familiar with the old 'Dr. Watson Debugger for Windows' tool that collects data from your computer when it crashes, then AEM is a centralized version of this which feeds the crash data into OpsMgr.
Minimum installation requirements
When the time comes to perform your first installation of OpsMgr, it's important to understand all of the minimum requirements that must be in place before you begin.
OpsMgr Sizing Helper tool
The OpsMgr Sizing Helper tool is an interactive Excel document designed to assist you with planning and sizing your deployments. As shown in Figure 1.2, you can choose from a number of different configuration scenarios and all you need to have is a rough idea of what it is that you actually need to monitor.
Figure 1.3: OpsMgr Sizing Helper Tool
This should be the go-to tool that you use prior to every OpsMgr deployment that you do. Although the information it feeds back to you is to be used purely as a guide, it goes a long way to ensure that your designs are aligned as close to best-practice recommendations as possible. You can download the tool from http://tinyurl.com/opsmgrsizing.
Virtualization support
All OpsMgr features are fully supported by Microsoft to run in a virtual environment that meets the minimum requirements outlined in the OpsMgr Sizing Helper tool. Purely for performance reasons, Microsoft recommends running the OpsMgr SQL databases on physical disks rather than on virtual disks but this is only a recommendation and there is no issue if you want to deploy the databases in a virtual environment, assuming of course, that you have configured the underlying storage where your virtual disks are located according to best practice recommendations for SQL workloads.
You also have the option of running some or your entire OpsMgr environment on Microsoft Azure for the following three recommended scenarios:
Database requirements
If you're running OpsMgr 2012 R2, then the following versions of SQL Server are supported to host the databases:
If you're running OpsMgr 2016, then your SQL choice is slightly more limited:
Operating system requirements
The following operating systems are supported to run OpsMgr 2012 R2:
OpsMgr 2016 can be deployed on these operating systems:
Web console requirements
If you deploy the OpsMgr 2012 R2 Web Console role, the following Internet Explorer and Silverlight versions are supported:
The OpsMgr 2016 Web Console has the following requirements:
Firewall requirements
In the following table, we can see the TCP port numbers and outgoing directions that the various OpsMgr features require. This information can be useful when configuring communication across firewalls in your organization.
From feature
TCP port number and direction
To feature
Management server
1433→
Operational database
Management server
1433→
Data Warehouse database
Management server
5723,5724→
Management server
Reporting server
5723,5724→
Management server
Reporting server
1433→
Data Warehouse database
Gateway server
5723→
Management server
Operations console
5724→
Management server
Operations console (Reports)
80, 443→
SQL Reporting services
Web Console browser
51908→
Web Console server
Windows agent
5723→
Management server
Management server
135→
Windows agent
(RPC for push install)
Management server
445→
Windows agent
(SMB for push install)
Management server
139→
Windows agent
(RPC for push repair)
Management server
1270→
UNIX/Linux agent
Management server
22→
UNIX/Linux agent
(Remote management)
Connector framework source
51905→
Management server
Connected management server
(Local)
5724→
Connected management server
(Remote)
AEM data from client
51906→
Management server AEM file share
ACS collector
1433→
ACS database
ACS forwarder
51909→
Management Server ACS collector
Although the majority of firewall ports required for OpsMgr are TCP-based, the following table lists the UDP port numbers and the direction they should be enabled for:
From feature
UDP port number and direction
To feature
Management server
137→
Windows agent
(push install)
Management server
138→
Windows agent
(push install)
Management server
445→
Windows agent
(push install)
Management server
1434→
Operational database
Management server
1434→
Data Warehouse database
SNMP network device
161→
Management server
Management server
161→
SNMP network device
SNMP network device
162→
Management server
Management server
162→
SNMP network device
Windows agent requirements
If you need to deploy an OpsMgr 2012 R2 agent to your Windows estate for monitoring, then the following is a list of supported server and client operating systems:
For OpsMgr 2016 agents, the following Windows server and client operating systems are supported:
UNIX/Linux agent requirements
A wide range of cross-platform operating systems are supported and the following list details the versions you can monitor with both OpsMgr 2012 R2 and OpsMgr 2016:
Summary
In this chapter, we first learned about the System Center suite and its associated components before diving into an introduction about Operations Manager and its core features. After that, we discussed ITaaS using a real-world example to help you understand what it is.
At the end of the chapter, we introduced the OpsMgr Sizing Helper tool and provided you with information about the supported operating systems that you can run OpsMgr and its associated features on.
In the next chapter, we will show you some examples to help with the design and planning of your deployments before diving into installing OpsMgr for the first time.
Chapter 2. Installing System Center Operations Manager
Building on the knowledge gained in Chapter 1, Introduction to System Center Operations Manager, you should now have an understanding of the core components of Operations Manager (OpsMgr) and its minimum installation requirements. In this chapter, we will walk you through designing and then deploying a new OpsMgr environment.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
Designing the environment
Before you dive in and begin installing OpsMgr, its best practice to take a step back and think about how you will design the environment. A good design takes into account the overall monitoring requirements of the business, the physical and logical locations of the infrastructure to be monitored and any existing monitoring applications that are currently in place.
Involving members of each business unit/department in the organization is paramount to delivering a monitoring solution that works for everybody and can deliver real benefits and time-saving back to the business.
Here's some advice to get you started with your initial OpsMgr designs:
Design examples
In the consulting world (depending on customer requirements), the design for each OpsMgr deployment varies from one instance to the other. There are however, several general designs that share the same characteristics, which can always be applied as a design foundation to get you started.
The following designs are some of the most common examples of how to deploy OpsMgr and each one assumes that there is already a working Active Directory domain and DNS environment configured and available.
Single server design
This is the most basic OpsMgr design and one that should only be used as a lab or testing environment. With no focus on performance or high-availability, this design enables you to get up and running quickly by co-locating the SQL and OpsMgr roles onto a single physical or virtual computer.
Although this design should satisfy the majority of basic testing scenarios, it's worth remembering here that you cannot install the OpsMgr Gateway server role onto a server that is already designated as a Management server. If testing the Gateway role is required, you will need to deploy an additional server to host it.
There is no scenario in the OpsMgr Sizing Helper Tool to give you guidance on disk, CPU and memory allocations for a single server design so ensure that you have enough resources on your test computer to run all roles at an acceptable speed.
Figure 2.1 shows what a single server OpsMgr design would look like.
Figure 2.1: Single server design
Small distributed server design
The smallest OpsMgr design recommended for a production environment separates the SQL and OpsMgr roles across two different computers. This design is ideal for small-sized production environments and can be deployed relatively quickly - however, it has limited scalability and no high-availability. If either computer is unavailable, then monitoring will not work.
Figure 2.2 shows how this small distributed server design would look.
Figure 2.2: Small distributed server design
Using the OpsMgr Sizing Helper Tool to scope this design for monitoring up to approximately 100 servers in a small organization, it's recommended to configure the memory and CPU on your management server as shown in the following table:
Component
Description
Server role
Management server, Web console
Memory
8GB
CPU
4 Cores
For the SQL server, you can configure it as shown in this table:
Component
Description
Server role
SQL Operational database, Operational Data Warehouse, Reporting server
Memory
16GB
CPU
4 Cores
The OpsMgr Sizing Helper Tool also gives us the following recommendations for sizing our SQL databases:
Component
Description
Number of monitored servers
100
Operational database data retention
7 days
Operational database size
2.5GB
Operational Data Warehouse data retention
365 days
Operational Data Warehouse size
71GB
Medium distributed server design
Expanding on the small distributed server design, this one adds high availability and better performance by adding an additional Management server and further separating the SQL and OpsMgr roles onto different server computers.
When you get to this type of design, you're beginning to build for scale and although all of the OpsMgr roles are fully supported to run within a virtual environment, it's a good time to start seriously thinking about the underlying hardware that the SQL databases are sitting on. It's not uncommon to deploy the SQL components of this design on physical hardware to ensure that the best possible performance gains are achieved and for designs where the SQL components are running on virtual machines, high-end disk storage for the database and log volumes is always a good recommendation.
By deploying two Management servers in this design, we can take advantage of the built-in high availability Resource Pools feature of OpsMgr. We can also ensure that our monitored agents are divided equally between each server - providing a basic form of load balancing.
In Figure 2.3, we can see how the SQL and OpsMgr roles are deployed in a medium distributed server design.
Figure 2.3: Medium distributed server design
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