System Center Management Pack Authoring Guide
This guide is part of the System Center Authoring Hub.
Note that a substantial amount of the content in this guide is being migrated from the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Authoring Guide in the TechNet Library. Until this migration is complete, that version of the guide has exercises that are not yet available here.
Introduction
The System Center Management Pack Authoring Guide provides complete information about the design and implementation of management packs for System Center Operations Manager 2007 and System Center 2012 Operations Manager. In the future, this content will be extended to include content for Service Manager.
This content is primarily targeted at the IT Pro and Developer who have a requirement to create management packs beyond the standard features and scenarios that can be created with wizards in the Operations Console. It may also appeal to the System Center customer who simply wants a deeper understanding of how management packs are structured and how they operate. Those users who have more basic requirements or who are new to System Center should refer to the System Center 2012 Operations Manager Authoring Guide to get started with the Operations Console and more basic concepts before moving on to this guide.
This content is located on the TechNet Wiki so that it may be maintained and extended by the community. You are encouraged to modify existing content or add content that is relevant to this topic. The Microsoft System Center team will regularly review any content and provide a statement as to the latest revision that they endorse. This information is intended to provide you with confidence in the quality and accuracy of the content.
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.
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
- Discovery
- 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
- Monitors and Health State
- Rules
- Tasks
- Defining a Health Model
- Exercises
- Exercise #1 - Creating an Event Monitor
- Exercise #2 - Creating an Event Monitor Targeted at Class with Multiple Instances
- Exercise #3 - Creating a Repeating Event Monitor
- Exercise #4 - Creating a Monitor Based on a Script
- Exercise #5 - Creating a WMI Event Monitor
- Exercise #6 - Creating a Consecutive Sample Performance Monitor
- Exercise #7 - Creating a Dependency Monitor
- Exercise #8 - Creating a Diagnostic
- Exercise #9 - Creating a Recovery Based on the Output of a Diagnostic
- Exercise #10 - Creating a Delimited Text Log Alerting Rule
- Exercise #11 - Creating a WMI Performance Collection Rule
- Exercise #12 - Creating a Script Based Performance Collection Rule
- Exercise #13 - Creating a Script Based Event Collection Rule
Composition
Wizards in the Operations Manager consoles allow you to create standard monitoring scenarios without requiring extensive knowledge of how those scenarios are actually implemented in the management pack. By understanding the underlying modules and workflows, you can implement scenarios that are not possible with the standard wizards.
Presentation
Information collected by a management pack in Operations Manager 2007 is presented to the user through the Operations console in views and reports. Views provide detailed information from the Operations Manager database about daily operations. Reports provide aggregated information from the data warehouse about trending and historical analysis. Linked reports enable generic reports included with System Center Operations Manager 2007 to be customized for the specific requirements of an application with minimal work from the author.