SCOM: The Management Group

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 is software that helps you monitor services, devices, and operations for many computers in a single console. This section provides a basic explanation of how Operations Manager works. As an operator, your responsibilities won’t include designing or setting up the Operations Manager environment, but understanding the main parts of the environment and how Operations Manager works will help you be more effective.

Installing Operations Manager creates a management group. The management group is the basic unit of functionality. At a minimum, a management group consists of a root management server and the Operations Manager database. 

·         The root management server, which is the first management server created in a management group, is the focal point for administering the management group and communicating with the database. When you open the Operations console and connect to a management group, you connect to the root management server for that management group.

·         The Operations Manager database is a SQL database that contains all configuration data for the management group and stores all monitoring data that is collected and processed for the management group.

If Operations Manager reporting functionality is installed, the management group will also contain a Reporting Data Warehouse database and a Reporting server.

·         The Data Warehouse database is a SQL database that stores monitoring and alerting data for historical purposes. Data that is written to the Operations Manager database is also written to the Data Warehouse database, so reports always contain current data.

·         The Reporting server builds and presents reports from data in the Data Warehouse database.

These core components of a management group can exist on a single server or they can be distributed across multiple servers.