When you combine the last day of a conference with that same day being the 'morning after'   that event's main party, it could easily be cause for miss out on some great sessions.  Those who did attend the Tools and Best Practices for Management Pack (MP) Authoring session on Friday morning at MMS 2008 were treated to a great demonstration by David Aiken who introduced the newly released Team System Management Model Designer (TSMMD).

TSMDD is a Power Tool for Visual Studio that allows architects to build heath models for .NET applications.  Through TSMDD, users can generate code to implement a health model through events and performance counters, use the tool to automatically validate the model, and then generate a fully operational MP - and all without having to see XML!! 

Once your MP is created you can then choose to import it directly into your Operations Manager 2007 deployment, or develop it further.  Some of the other features provided include:

• A familiar graphical user interface.
• Wizard-driven guidance to define the structure of a health model and the required instrumentation.
• Discovery of existing instrumentation in an application.
• Support for dependencies between components in an application.
• Instrumentation modeling, ensuring that end users of the MP see instrumentation appropriate to the needs of the application.
• And much more!

To learn more about this new Power Tool you can read about it on MSDN, download the Power Tool, as well as see it in action in David's upcoming web seminar scheduled for 10am PT on May 15th.

Another great authoring tool now available is the new System Center Operations Manager Authoring Console, which you can immediately download in either the 32-bit or 64-bit edition.  This powerful tool delivers true offline authoring capabilities, without the need to actually interact with any XML, allowing you to:

• Create new MPs from scratch, or import existing MPs from your management groups.
• Quickly develop service models (by creating classes, identifying relationships between those classes, and referencing MP objects in other MPs) and health models (including discoveries, monitors, rules and tasks).
• Define views and console tasks, as well as create your own language packs.
• Develop work flows for rules, tasks and monitor types with data source, condition detect, probe or write action module types.
• Use monitor types to define a set of monitoring states, and the workflow for each state.
• Use the Best Practice Analysis capability to verify your MP's integrity.
• Export MPs to your management groups from within the tool. 

By now I'm sure you are asking which one you should use.  As mentioned, TSMDD is ideally suited for quickly building health models for .NET applications - and I mean really quickly.  The Authoring Console provides a lot more 'whistles and bells' for MP development, allowing you to customize and optimize existing MPs, or create a fully functional MP in a much shorter timeframe than writing pure XML.  Ultimately I say give both a try and see which works for you.  They're available for free download through the links indicated above - and you may find you end up using both!

As you try these out, also keep an eye out on TechNet where we'll be posting more information, including webcasts, on how to use our new authoring solutions to optimal effect.

Happy authoring!

Sacha Dawes
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center