When System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (OpsMgr) was released, one of the most interesting new features was the addition of Cross Platform monitoring or, in other words, monitoring non-Windows systems.   It turns out there is a decent amount of monitoring data returned by the Cross Platform agent and it may very well be enough for many organizations. However, any organization that has a reasonably sized Unix/Linux infrastructure is inevitably going to need more from their monitoring solution then what OpsMgr is offering out of the box. It turns out that there is an excellent Cross Platform Authoring Guide available which walks you through the process of creating various monitor types for scripts as well as how to configure them for script based monitoring. The problem is that it is all in XML and not immediately intuitive to anybody who is not familiar or comfortable with creating Management Packs in XML directly.

As a result, Neil Harrison has written an article that addresses this and provides the following:
  1. A simple “starter” Management Pack that includes the basic monitoring types already defined for creating script-based monitoring on Cross Platform agents.
  2. An illustration of  how to create script-based monitoring in the Authoring Console for Cross-Platform agents.
  3. An illustration of how it is possible to use a scripting language like PERL to enhance your Cross Platform monitoring and basically monitor almost anything.

Check out the whole article at http://www.opsvault.com/extending-the-cross-platform-monitoring-agent-in-operations-manager-2007-r2/.