Of Instrumentation and Management Packs
Why should you care?
What is a Management Pack? What about Health Models? What's instrumentation good for? And, finally we should you care about all of it? ......
Let's take the last of my rhetorical question first: Why should you care? As an IT pro implementing Microsoft server products or 3rd party products running on Windows you need all the help you can get. I know how this sounds, but trust me, I'm not pointing fingers at any one, nor am I trying to patronizing anyone. With all the variables of setting up a server environment, it's complex enough, the last thing you need is to further add complexity by adding multiple server applications from both Microsoft and others to the mix. And, in case it's not completely clear, I'm referring to managing these applications.
Recent studies have shown that administration and management of server applications is increasing at a whopping 8 times the annual spend on the servers themselves. Some of that complexity comes from the fact that achieving scale (across many users and servers) is inherently complex, some of it comes from the fact that we all trying to solve these problems using whatever Shinny New Ultimate Technology that comes along. A good example of this is Virtualization. We are starting to see that our customers are using Virtualization as a means to consolidate the number of physical servers that they have in their datacenter onto bigger boxes. Now, using Virtualization doesn't necessarily solve the underlying problem (of managing many physical boxes) it simply consolidates many (virtual) instances of OS's and applications onto a smaller number of boxes. Unless you add Virtualization Management tools (such as the recently announced System Center Virtual Machine Manager) to the equation, you still have to care and feed the individual OS's and applications with regards to patches, etc. In other words, you have realized none of the benefits of scale and all of the issues, and you now have a potential single point of failure to boot!
So, you ask, what do we do to solve the issue? The real answer is instrumentation. Making sure that the applications themselves are more intelligently aware of their environment and are able to communicate the root cause of whatever problem arises to IT operations (through a management console). This leads us to my remaining two rhetorical questions around Management Pack and Health models.
Management Packs
Systems Center Operations Manager utilizes management packs to provide intelligent operations management for a wide variety of your server applications. Management packs monitor a wide array of server health indicators which enable them to call attention—often preemptively—to many critical events that require administrator intervention. Monitoring is augmented by in-depth knowledge base content associated directly with the relevant alerts included in the management pack module, providing prescriptive guidance for the administrator to quickly resolve outstanding alerts.
To provide the best possible management of your infrastructure, we encourages management packs to be developed by the application providers who have the knowledge to embed the necessary operational intelligence to aid you in maintaining your system.
In the Management Pack Catalog, you will find not only management pack provided by Microsoft, but a number of non-Microsoft management packs that allow MOM to manage a variety of other applications as well.
Management Packs in Operations Manager 2007 are XML based and use the Service Modeling Language (SML) language to define health models and store knowledge documents in XML.
Health Models
Health models define what it means for a system and its components to be healthy or unhealthy, and define how a system and its components move in and out of these states. Good information about a system’s health is necessary for maintaining, diagnosing, and recovering from errors in applications and operating systems deployed in production environments. Health models capture system events and instrumentation for your software.
Providing the right view of an application, what it looks like when it is and isn’t functioning normally, and providing the right knowledge to help you troubleshoot system and application issues.
As you can probably see, Health models and Management pack go hand-in-hand to allow you to meet your service level agreements (SLAs) to your own customers, whether they are internal or external to your business.
Lastly, let me conclude with what we are doing to ensure the adoption of this model based approach across Microsoft infrastructure server products (also know as the shameless "plug"):
Common Engineering Criteria Infrastructure Management
Let me point out what we done so far using the Common Criteria:
2005 Criteria
MOM 2005 Management Pack Support at Launch
To help businesses reduce the cost of managing infrastructure, all server products will have a MOM Management Pack available at launch. The management pack will be serviced on the same schedule as the core product. MOM packs will provide:
- Event and performance processing alerts.
- Basic views that graphically map performance and event trending information.
- State Monitoring view (green/yellow/red) state for managed entities.
- Tasks.
Recently, we've updated the Management requirement to include v3 Management Pack capabilities and added the new Health Model capabilities to the requirement.
2008 Criteria
New Health Model to improve Troubleshooting
IT often have to perform an "information treasure hunt" when presented with events and trying to troubleshoot them. The documentation of events is often inconsistent between product documentation, the Windows Event Viewer, and documents on the web.
To solve this problem, all server products must create and maintain a health model based on the standard Service Modeling Language (SML) including relevant operational events and performance counters, in addition to identifying potential failures and define diagnose and recovery information.
Improved Management Pack(s)
The new version of the Management Pack specification released as part of System Center Operations Manager 2007 offers significant improvement in system monitoring, availability, and health through centralized and proactive management. In order to ensure that IT can continue to support existing products in addition to implementing new products by taking advantage of the new Health Model and Management Packs, all server products will continue to also ship Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Management Packs.
If you would like to know more about Health Models and Management packs, here's a couple of relevant links:
Common Engineering Criteria Homepage
Microsoft Dynamic Systems Homepage
Microsoft System Center Homepage
How To Develop A Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007
