MOM Licensing - feedback works...

I was presenting at a couple of TechNet events the other week in Cork & Galway.  Part of my session was demonstrating how to extend MOM to do "other things".  I'd read the Irish TechNet Newsletter the other week, where Darren Dillon (https://blogs.technet.com/ddillon) wrote about "Extending MOM into non-Microsoft environments".  Basically me demo was how I'd taken Darren's article and learnt how do extend MOM.

One of the little demos I did was to using MOM to ping a non-Microsoft device on the network and report back on success or failure.  This raised a very "interesting" licensing question:  How do I license the non-Microsoft device that I am monitoring (I'm not using any Management Packs)?

In Cork, my answer was "I don't know - but I'll find out".  I couldn't imagine Microsoft charging the same amount to ping a device on the network as we do to manage an Exchange server, for example.  After the event, I found out that we do (or at least "did").

In Galway, when the same question came up, I was able to give the correct answer "You need a MOM Operations Management License (OML) for every device being managed".  The feedback was that this didn't seem too fair.  I took the action of giving that feedback to the product groups and to report back my findings.

So, I've done that and the response was that this is a "very grey area".  I won't take responsibility for this (because it was probably happening anyway), but we have changed the way we license devices (see https://www.microsoft.com/mom/howtobuy/default.mspx).  What we have now is two versions of the OML: an Enterprise version and a Standard version.

The Enterprise OML is for "Full Application and Server Management" and the Standard OML is for "Operating System and Basic Workload Management Only".

I still think it's a bit "grey", but at least we have responded to customer feedback.

The lesson learned is that you should always give feedback - we can't promise to change anything, but it happens sometimes (and if we don't get the feedback, we don't know there is an issue).

Dave.