Essential Microsoft Operations Manager
Published by O'Reilly : www.oreilly.com
Cost: £18.81 from www.amazon.co.uk
Instead of a long drawn out review, I just want to give a quick summary of this book and my opinion on whether it is worth buying.
The first chapter concentrates on giving you an overview of the components of MOM. Specifically, what MOM is capable of and used for, different ways of accessing MOM (web interface, admin console, etc), how the SQL database is configured, and generally how MOM achieves it's aims. Everything is well explained and the fictional company 'Leaky Faucet' is introduced to the reader; This is your typical multi-site business with a few hundred managed servers and 2 MOM2005 management servers. This section is worth reading as they go on to use Leaky Faucet as an example of how MOM might be deployed throughout the book.
The next few chapters explain how to plan and deploy MOM. One of the books strengths is the section on planning the deployment, as it goes into a lot of detail and gives you a good idea of what overheads you should expect on your management servers, depending on how many agent managed and agentless servers you are managing. Moving on to installing MOM, my thoughts are that actual act of installing MOM is pretty non-eventful, so you might not need to spend so much time reading this section. I skipped forward because the stuff they were explaining was obvious and done already.
The book goes on to explain management packs and how to use the consoles in a good level of detail. However, as I reached the end I started skimming back through the pages to look for the chapter on how to configure rules, and then realised there is no such chapter. The book does give snippets here and there, but in my opinion configuring and creating rules is such a massive and important topic that it should have had a lot more time and space devoted to it. Also, topics such as creating your own events for MOM to monitor are mentioned in brief but not enough for you to use in your deployment.
The last quarter of the book is set aside for MOM reporting, but again I felt let down as I feel they went in at the wrong angle with this. The book discusses how to configure the reporting server, which mostly is a pretty straightforward process. It does not tell you the really useful stuff like how to pull custom reports out of MOM. The default reports installed with the management packs are OK, but this week when my manager asked me for MOM reports showing typical CPU usage, free disk space, number of CPUs and OS service pack level on a subset of servers, this book was no use and I had to turn to the Internet for answers.
So to summarise, the bottom line is this: There is a lot of good content in this book, and it may be useful to you if you are an absolute beginner to MOM and are looking to deploy a vanilla installation of MOM2005 across your network. However, for serious system administrators, I would not recommend reading Essential Microsoft Operations Manager, as some information I would consider to be essential is missing. The book offers a good introduction to MOM, but you will need to do further reading to supplement the book in order to support MOM2005 on a day to day basis.
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