MOM’s Got a Brand New Look

TORONTO — Microsoft has provided a sneak peek of new features in the next version of Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005.

The message: The brand new look with MOM comes with an ability to monitor your systems’ health like never before.

MOM is an application that provides event and performance management, application monitoring and reporting features for the enterprise.

During its Worldwide Partner Conference here, Microsoft’s Marshall Copeland said users will see significant improvements in the 2005 version — throughout the application and in the way it looks and reports on network operations.

One of the first things that users will notice in MOM 2005 is the new user interface. The UI now resembles its Visual Studio and Outlook cousins. As part of the UI console upgrade, a new operator console has been included in MOM 2005 that is more customizable than its 2000 predecessor and provides a complex array of views in order to extend network operators’ view of their networks.

Reporting features in MOM 2005 are now based on SQL Reporting Service and the System Center Data Warehouse, which provide for sophisticated report generation, security and long term data storage. Copeland also demonstrated MOM’s ability to automatically detect and then generate a Visio diagram of a network analysis.

“There are no more excuses for not having the up to date information about Exchange, about Active Directory and where servers are,” Copeland told the audience. “You can take this information, right click and print.”

The ability to automatically monitor individual server health is a
critical part of MOM 2005, which allows network admins to be notified of any potential issues within the tolerance of customizable service level agreements and take the necessary remedial action.

Microsoft knows that MOM won’t do everything out of the box that may be necessary for network admins, which is why Copeland stressed the extensibility of MOM 2005 through third party “management packs” that offer additional functionality.

MOM 2005 is also a lot leaner and more efficient than its predecessors. Latency across a 1,000 node network has been reduced to 30 seconds from over 600 in MOM 2000. Network discovery across 1,000 nodes that used to take up to 15 minutes can now be completed in only 3 minutes. The footprint of the agent application has been reduced from 22 megabits down to a more svelte 3.5 Mb.

According to Copeland, MOM is used and proven by Microsoft’s own IT services that use it across the Microsoft corporate environment.

“You’re getting Microsoft best practices out of the box,” he said.

MOM 2005 is expected to be officially released in the late August early September timeframe. A beta release candidate is currently available on the MOM Website.

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