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MOM, the MOM Resource Kit and BizTalk Management Packs

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I have been spending a lot of time on my current project working on the operations and monitoring phase of the project life cycle.

 

During discussions about the differences between MOM 2000 and MOM 2005 there have been many questions and a bit of confusion about the support for the different BizTalk Management Packs.

 

There are two management packs for BizTalk.  One that targets BizTalk 2004 and the other that targets BizTalk 2006.  These two management packs are not completely interchangeable between MOM 2000 and MOM 2005.

 

The compatibility is:

MOM 2000 will provide monitoring of BizTalk 2004 through the BizTalk 2004 Management Pack

MOM 2000 will NOT provide monitoring of BizTalk 2006 as the Management Pack is not compatible with MOM 2000

 

MOM 2005 will provide monitoring of BizTalk 2006 through the upcoming BizTalk 2006 Management Pack.  This is now available out on BetaPlace.

MOM 2005 will provide monitoring of BizTalk 2004 through the BizTalk 2004 Management Pack using MOM 2005's backward compatibility.

 

In addition to the Management Packs, the other tool that I found is in the MOM 2005 Resource Kit.  There are a number of tools in the Resource Kit but the one that I found the most interesting (since it relates to BizTalk of course) is the Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) Wizard.

 

This wizard creates a management pack to monitor business processes.  It uses BAM performance indicators (KPIs) and will raise alerts when the KPIs change from the desired operating conditions.

 

Lastly, Scott Colestock wrote a whitepaper titled Advanced Microsoft BizTalk 2004 and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Scenarios.  This white paper provides a great walkthrough on using the BizTalk Management Pack.  I was glad to see that this whitepaper also has a section about developing a custom management pack for your custom applications titled Developing Your Application-Specific Management Pack.

 

After working on the operations side it has opened my eyes to how great the need is for us to be developing our own management packs for our custom applications.  I encourage all of you to read the whitepaper and take a look at creating your own custom management packs.