Cross Platform Monitoring with Operations Manager

A follow up to Interop Connectors is the Cross Platform Monitoring. Finally.. I can blog about it. Being under NDA sometimes is so frustrating :)

At the Keynote on the first day it was announced and you can read about it on MVP Maarten Goet's blog (http://www.techlog.org/archive/2008/04/29/opsmgr_cross_platform__first_s)

Ultimately the plan is to be able to support Linux and Unix platform monitoring out of the box. Support for MAC Server is in the plan.

Some of the features planned for V1:

• Discovering non-Windows System using IP range
• Deploy Agent as part of Discovery Wizard
• WS-Man based Agent channel
• Caching Events in a case of network failure
• Ability to manually install agents
• Discover entities on non-Windows System post Agent deploy
• Unit, aggregate and dependency monitors with Knowledge Articles
• Collect and Monitor Performance counters
• Collect and Moniror Event from non-Windows Systems and store in Live DB and DatawarehouseDB
• Diagnostic and recoveries
• Tasks that execute simple commands and return output to UI
• Support for customized UI pages
• Support for non-Windows entities in Distributed Application Designer
• Reports for data
• Templates for custom monitoring rules and MPs
• Agent Uninstall and Upgrade

The plan.. RTM at MMS 2009 with a dependency on Ops Manager 2007 SP2.

The install will be a single one which would then add the necessary components.. Copying SSH modules, Copy the Transforms, and Copy the Management Pack

A "System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions" folder will be created in the root drive. The Agents are located in this folder

To get it functional with the BETA, the following has to be done:

1. Import Management Packs

1. Create Run As Accounts
2. Associated Run As Accounts with Run As Profiles (Within the Management Pack is the Run As Profiles of Unix Action Account and Unix Privilege Account. The Management Pack will automatically select which profile to use in different scenarios)
3. Import XSL Transforms (must be done after Management Pack as it addresses certain components in the Management Pack)

Right now, configuring will be done through the Monitoring space due to limitations of Ops Manager SP1. Upon SP2, it will be back to normal in the Administration space



The Discovery and Agent Deployment Process

1. First it will discover using the scope (IP, DNS, IP Range)
2. It will then discover whether there is already an agent installed.
3. If its not install, SSH will be used to discover what UNIX or Linux platform, distribution and version the non-Windows system is
4. Once the platform is noted as supported, the package is then deployed
5. Once the Agent is installed, data about the non-Windows system will be inserted into the DB

I was typically impressed with how diagnostics are automatically configured to run and this is all part of the Management Pack

The following are the log files that are monitored:

• SU command execution
• Toor login failures
• Critical authentication errors
• Breakin attempts
• SSH authentication failures
• Custom templates to be used

Here are somemore screenshots on the Health Explorer and Performance Dashboard

I will be doing up a step by step configuration guide to get the BETA working. I'll post it once its done.