System Center 2012 Operations Manager: Configuring and Managing

Managing Management Packs
Hello, welcome to TrainSignal. This is the Managing Management Packs Lesson in the System Center Operations Manager 2012 Training Course. Let's talk a little about what management packs actually are. When you first install Operations Manager, it's just a framework, it doesn't know anything, and I've mentioned that before and I want to make sure I stress that. And as you saw in previous lessons, there's still some open circles we've got to resolve. Operations Manager looks at these areas and says, yeah I know there's something there, but I really don't know what. It's only once you start deploying management packs that Operations Manager starts to get its brains. The business goals associated with deploying management packs are numerous, but here's three primary ones. It allows you to extend Operations Manager monitoring to all mission-critical IT services; to ensure that the business services remain available and healthy; and you have the ability to tune monitoring parameters to meet organization-specific needs. Not every organization is the same, as you well know. They all have different business goals, they all have different technology goals. Operations Manager provides you with the ability to granularly modify how things operate in order to build to match operational needs with your business.

Creating and Managing Groups
Hello! Welcome to TrainSignal. This is the Creating and Managing Groups lesson in the System Center 2012 Operations Manager training course. Why would you want to use Groups in Operations Manager 2012? Well, believe it or not, there are some very good reasons, starting with, it can make IT more efficient in its overall operations. After all, managing something as a single entity rather than a whole bunch of the same kinds of objects can save significant time in administration over the course of a year or even a month. You're also able to maintain object consistency in Operations Manager. In other words, you're managing similar objects in similar ways because you're managing them as a Group. And because there are fewer objects to manage, it's just easier to adhere to company policy with regard to those objects. It's less likely that you'll find a reason to create an exception out of one of the objects in your environment. A Group is just a combination of objects in Operations Manager that you can then manage or monitor as a single entity. There are simply times when you need to be able to view the status of or perform operations against a variety of related, or even not related, objects in Operations Manager. For example, suppose you want to be able to closely monitor hard drive space for all of your servers. In this case, you could create an Operations Manager Group to make it easier and simply add all the hard drives to the Group. Or, perhaps you want to delegate specific monitoring duties to someone else, and you want to limit what he or she's able to see in Operations Manager. This is this place where Groups can come in handy and help you both operationally and from a security perspective.

Reporting
Hello, welcome to TrainSignal. This is the Reporting lesson in the System Center 2012 Operations Manager training course. When it comes right down to it for just about any solution that's going to be monitoring or taking any kind of significant part in your infrastructure, reporting is a key element. It provides you with actionable intelligence about what's going on in the environment, and with Operations Manager, can provide you with historical trending information that you can use in future decision making. Operations Manager comes with a ton of reports, and every management pack that you add adds yet more reporting capability to the overall environment.

Troubleshooting Operations Manager
Hello. Welcome to TrainSignal. This is the Troubleshooting Operations Manager lesson in the Systems Center 2012 Operations Manager training course. Now you may be sitting here thinking, "Wait a minute. Why am I troubleshooting a tool that's supposed to be helping me troubleshoot my environment? " Well, there's a good reason for it. Unfortunately, the sad fact of great nature is, that Operations Manager can and will suffer the occasional failure, and you'll even see error messages from time to time. Because Operations Manager plays such an important part into maintaining your environment and maintaining the business, it's really important that you understand some of what you may run into and how you can start going about correcting some of the issues you may encounter. This will keep your business monitoring in business, and help your bottom line tremendously over time. In fact, I think monitoring is so important, that it should be considered a mission critical system, right up there with your ERP, your Customer Relationship Management systems, email, the whole nine yards.