Welcome to the System Center Operations Manager Management Pack Authoring Center.  This guide applies to IT professionals who use Operations Manager and have a requirement to create a management pack that includes features beyond the basic scenarios that the Operations console provides.  It provides complete information about the design and implementation of management packs for the following versions of Operations Manager:

Management Pack Authoring Guide

Management Pack Concepts

All of the elements required for monitoring an application with Operations Manager including the service model, health model, views, and reports are stored in management packs. A management pack is an .xml file that conforms to a specific schema. It is installed into an Operations Manager management group and distributed to appropriate agents that use its contents to perform monitoring activities for a particular application.

The topics in this section provide an overview of general concepts required for building a management pack. These concepts are used in the remaining sections of this guide.

(Topics to be completed.)

• Exercises
  • Exercise 1 - Creating a New Management Pack

Service Model

In Operations Manager, all hardware, software, services, and other logical components of different applications that require monitoring are described in a service model. A model is a computer-consumable representation of software or hardware components that captures the nature of the components and the relationships between them. It can be thought of as a simplified representation of the application for monitoring.

The topics in this section provide an overview of the key concepts that must be understood to perform this design, a basic process for designing a service model, and walkthroughs and examples of using different consoles to build the service model..

• Classes and Relationships
  • Viewing Classes in the Consoles
  • Choosing a Base Class
• Discovery
  • Discovery Scripts
• Exercises
  • Exercise #1 - Creating a Class
  • Exercise #2 - Creating a Group
  • Exercise #3 - Creating a Containment Relationship
  • Exercise #4 - Creating a Registry Discovery
  • Exercise #5 - Creating a WMI Discovery
  • Exercise #6 - Creating a VBScript Script Discovery
  • Exercise #7 - Creating a PowerShell Script Discovery
  • Exercise #8 - Populating a Group

Health Model

In Operations Manager, a health model defines the logic used to measure the operational health of the application represented by the classes defined in the service model. This includes monitors for measuring the health state of monitored objects, rules for collecting information for analysis and reporting, and tasks for users to perform on demand activities in their daily operations activities.

The health model is designed after the service model is completed. The service model defines the classes that represent the application, whereas the health model defines how to measure the health of those classes.

The topics in this section provide an overview of the different elements that comprise the health model, a basic process for designing a health model for an application represented by an existing service model, and examples of using the Operations Manager 2007 Authoring console to build different health model elements.

• Targets
• Data Sources
  • Data Variables
  • Events
  • Performance Data
  • Monitoring Scripts
• Monitors and Health State
  • Unit Monitors
  • Aggregate and Dependency Monitors
  • Alerts from Monitors
  • Diagnostics and Recoveries
• Rules
• Tasks
• Defining a Health Model

Composition

• Module and Workflow Basics
• Module Types
• Module Implementations
• Workflow Types
• Cookdown

Other Resources

• Operations Manager Management Pack and Report Authoring Resources