Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Using System Center Operations Manager

The brief introduction possible in this tutorial cannot, of course, cover all the details about using System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr), even in an Exchange environment.

A native-mode management pack (MP) was introduced for Exchange Server 2007 in 2009. Before then, all MPs for Exchange Server were based on Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM, which was the precursor product to OpsMgr), and the OpsMgr MP was migrated from the MOM MP. The MP available for Exchange Server 2010 is native-mode only and an MP for MOM has not been released.

Earlier in this tutorial, you learned about several dozen key test points for Exchange Server 2010, based on performance counters. These key pieces of data are the most important items to monitor, but they are only the beginning. As you may have surmised, literally hundreds of factors can come into play when examining performance issues on Exchange servers - many more than can reasonably be tested either manually or built into a manual testing application.

Enter management applications such as OpsMgr. For Exchange alone, OpsMgr will generate over 50 reports and examine 1,000 test points. Once you include test points for Active Directory, Windows Server, Internet Information Services (IIS), and the DNS, OpsMgr will look at more than 2,500 items to ensure that your Exchange environment and its associated infrastructure is healthy. And when it isn't, it ensures that you know about it.

There are two separate MPs for Exchange Server 2010:

• The Core MP, Microsoft.Exchange.2010
• The Reports MP, Microsoft.Exchange.2010.Reports

The Reports MP is dependent on the Core MP (that is, you can install the Core MP all by itself, but you can't install the Reports MP all by itself). You can download the MPs from the Microsoft Download Center (head over to http://microsoft.com/downloads and search for ''Exchange 2010 Management Pack'').

When you install the MP on your OpsMgr server, it will go into a different folder than you are used to: C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Bin. Check that folder out in Windows Explorer. If you note the two files of type ''MP File,'' those are the actual MPs. All of the other files are supporting DLLs, configuration files, and documentation.

Before Importing the Management Pack

Before you import the MP, you should be aware of a few idiosyncrasies that affect the MP and actions that you should take:

• Agentless monitoring is not supported. The Exchange Server 2010 MP does not support agentless monitoring. Every Exchange 2010 server to be monitored must have an OpsMgr agent installed.
• You must use Local System. All monitored Exchange 2010 servers must use Local System as the Agent Action Account. Low-privilege monitoring has not been tested by Microsoft and is not supported.
• All DAG servers must be monitored. If you are monitoring any servers that host a DAG, you must monitor all servers that host that DAG. Otherwise, you will receive incorrect alerting and performance measurements.
• Agent proxying is required. All monitored Exchange 2010 servers must have agent proxying enabled.
• Hotfixes are required. System Center Operations Manager 2007 with Service Pack 1 is the minimum version of OpsMgr supported for the Exchange Server 2010 MP. You must install the hotfix described in Knowledge Base article 971541 if that is the version of OpsMgr you are using. Your only other version option is System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. You must install the hotfix described in Knowledge Base article 974144 if that is the version of OpsMgr you are using. You can access these knowledge base articles at http://support.microsoft.com.
• Install the Correlation Engine. A feature of the Exchange 2010 MP is called the Correlation Engine. It attempts to aggregate many detected errors and alert on only the most important ones, to minimize the number of alerts that may be generated when something fails. Installing this as a part of the MP installation is recommended (on the root management server), but is not required.
• Additional management packs may be needed. As discussed previously in this tutorial, Exchange Server does not stand alone. For any monitored Exchange server, you should also consider monitoring Windows Server and IIS. For other servers in your Exchange infrastructure, consider monitoring Active Directory and the DNS.

Importing the Management Pack

Before you can begin to use the capabilities of the Exchange Server 2010 MP, you must do two things:

• Deploy an agent to each Exchange server.
• Import the MP into OpsMgr.

Deploying agents is a normal part of using OpsMgr, so we won't cover it here. However, the detailed list for importing the MP follows this list:

1. Open the Operations Console.
2. In the lower-left pane of the console, click Administration.
3. In the upper-left pane of the console, right-click the Management Packs node, and select Import Management Packs from the context menu.
4. In the Select Management Packs To Import dialog, find the MP folder discussed earlier, then multiselect both of the Exchange MP files, and then click Open.
5. In the Import Management Packs dialog click Import.
6. In the warning dialog, click Yes (this warning dialog is caused by the MPs using agent proxying).
7. Allow the import process to execute-depending on the speed and power of your OpsMgr and SQL servers, it may take as long as 25-30 minutes for the import to occur.
8. Click the Close button in the Import Management Packs dialog.

Now, you will see the Exchange Server 2010 Management Packs in your Operations Console display. Note that the version of the MP is 14.0.639.21 - this is the same as the version of Exchange Server 2010 RTM.