1. OpsMgr Lync Server 2010 Monitoring
Operations Manager 2007 R2 includes one of the best
management packs for monitoring and maintaining Lync Server 2010. This
management pack was developed by the product group and includes
information about the product.
The Lync Server 2010 management pack monitors all the
Lync Server 2010 server roles and has separate views for each of the
roles to enable targeted monitoring in the console. The Lync Server 2010
management includes the following features:
Automatic Lync topology discovery through the Central Discovery script—
The Central Discovery script is a PowerShell script that runs on an
automatically selected Central Discovery Watcher Node. This is the Front
End pool where the Central Management Store is installed. The script
automatically discovers and initiates monitoring of all Lync roles,
components, and services.
Automatic monitoring of pools—
Front End and Edge pools are discovered automatically and monitored for
a variety of availability, configuration, performance, and security
conditions.
Automatic alerting—
The Lync Server management alerts on thousands of different conditions,
enabling the administrator to immediately be aware of any potential
problems in the infrastructure.
Synthetic transactions to simulate user traffic— The management pack leverages the built-in Lync Server synthetic transaction PowerShell cmdlets.
The Microsoft Lync Server Management Pack monitors
all aspects of the Microsoft Lync Server infrastructure. The management
pack structures the monitoring into the services paradigm used by Lync
Server. These services include
On
all these services, administrators can generate availability reports to
ensure that the servers and systems are meeting the Service Level
Agreements (SLAs) set by the organization.
For each of the services, the management pack has views for
Service alerts
Service performance
Service state
In addition, the OpsMgr platform monitors the Lync
Server 2010 dependencies to ensure that the Lync Server 2010
infrastructure doesn’t fail due to a failure of the dependent systems
such as the operating system, Active Directory, DNS, and IIS. The
features of the management packs for the following major systems include
Windows Operating System Management Pack—
Monitors and alerts all the major elements of the Windows server that
Lync Server 2010 runs on, including processor, memory, network, disk,
and event logs. It gathers performance metrics and alerts on thresholds,
and critical events.
Active Directory Management Pack—
Monitors and alerts on Active Directory key metrics such as replication
latency, domain controller response times, and critical events. The
management pack generates synthetic transactions to test the response
time of the PDC emulator, LDAP, and other domain services.
DNS Management Pack— Monitors and alerts on DNS servers for resolution failures and latency, and critical events.
IIS Management Pack— Monitors and alerts on IIS services, application pools, performance, and critical events.
2. What Is New in OpsMgr R2?
System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 released in
spring 2009 and includes many new improvements on the previous version,
Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1. Some of these improvements
include
Cross platform support—
This supports non-Microsoft platforms such as UNIX and Linux. This
enables administrators to have a single-pane view of their entire IT
environment in OpsMgr.
Integration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008—
This integrates with the VMM 2008 and enables synergies such as
Performance Resource and Optimization (PRO) Tips, which provide virtual
machine recommendations based on observed performance and the capability
to implement the recommendation at the click of a button.
Notifications— The
notification system has been revamped and now includes an Outlook
rule–style interface. Notifications can be generated for specific
alerts, and notifications can be sent out as high-priority emails.
Overrides view—
Rather than hunt for overrides within all the management packs, OpsMgr
R2 has an authoring view that shows all the overrides defined in the
system.
Improved management pack maintenance—
OpsMgr 2007 R2 enables Microsoft management packs to be browsed,
downloaded, and imported directly from the console. It even includes
versioning, dependency checks, and the capability to search from
management pack updates.
Service level monitoring—
Applications can be defined from various monitored objects and the
service level of the application, and be monitored and reported on
against defined target SLAs.
Better scaling of URL monitoring— The URL monitor now scales to thousands of websites without undue performance impact.
Improved database performance— The overall performance of the database and console has been dramatically improved.
These improvements bring the platform to a
new level of performance and interoperability while retaining the look
and feel of the original Operations Manager 2007 tool.
3. How OpsMgr Works
OpsMgr is a sophisticated monitoring system that
effectively allows for large-scale management of mission-critical
servers. Organizations with a medium-to-large investment in Microsoft
technologies will find that OpsMgr allows for an unprecedented
capability to keep on top of the event log messages that occur on a
daily basis. In its simplest form, OpsMgr performs two functions:
processing monitored data and issuing alerts and automatic responses
based on that data.
The model-based architecture of OpsMgr presents a
fundamental shift in the way a network is monitored. The entire
environment can be monitored as groups of hierarchical services with
interdependent components. Microsoft, in addition to third-party vendors
and a large development community, can leverage the functionality of
OpsMgr components through customizable monitoring rules.
OpsMgr Functionality
OpsMgr provides for several major pieces of functionality as follows:
Management packs— Application-specific monitoring rules are provided within individual files called management packs. For example, Microsoft provides management packs for Windows server systems, Exchange Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, DNS,
and DHCP, along with many other Microsoft technologies including Lync
Server 2010. Management packs are loaded with the intelligence and
information necessary to properly troubleshoot and identify problems.
The rules are dynamically applied to agents based on a custom discovery
process provided within the management pack. Only applicable rules are
applied to each managed server.
Event monitoring rules—
Management pack rules can monitor for specific event log data. This is
one of the key methods of responding to conditions within the
environment.
Performance monitoring rules—
Management pack rules can monitor for specific performance counters.
This data is used for alerting based on thresholds or archived for
trending and capacity planning. The performance graph in Figure 1
shows IM Performance Latency data for the LS1 Server. There was a brief
spike in latency at approximately 6:15 a.m., but the latency is
normally under less than 0.05ms.
State-based monitors—
Management packs contain monitors, which allow for advanced state-based
monitoring and aggregated health rollup of services. Monitors also
provide self-tuning performance threshold monitoring based on a two- or
three-state configuration. Figure 2 shows the health explorer for the LS1 Server. The Lync Server Application Sharing service is stopped.
Tip
The
health explorer drills down to the states that are unhealthy, leaving
all the other states collapsed for ease of troubleshooting.
Note
The health explorer in Figure 2 also shows the state change events over time. This enables reoccurring or intermittent problems to be tracked. In Figure 2, the service was stopped on 10/11/2010 and 10/13/2010 as well as 10/17/2010.
Alerting—
OpsMgr provides advanced alerting functionality by enabling email
alerts, paging, short message service (SMS), instant messaging (IM), and
functional alerting roles to be defined. Alerts are highly
customizable, with the capability to define alert rules for all
monitored components.
Reporting—
Monitoring rules can be configured to send monitored data to both the
operations database for alerting and the reporting database for
archiving.
End-to-end service monitoring—
OpsMgr provides service-oriented monitoring based on System Definition
Model (SDM) technologies. This includes advanced object discovery and
hierarchical monitoring of systems.
Processing Operational Data
OpsMgr
manages Lync Server 2010 infrastructures through monitoring rules used
for object discovery, Windows event log monitoring, performance data
gathering, and application-specific synthetic transactions. Monitoring
rules define how OpsMgr collects, handles, and responds to the
information gathered. OpsMgr monitoring rules handle incoming event data
and enable OpsMgr to react automatically, either to respond to a
predetermined problem scenario, such as a failed hard drive, with
predefined corrective and diagnostics actions (for example, trigger an
alert, execute a command or script, and so on) to provide the operator
with additional details based on what was happening at the time the
condition occurred.
Generating Alerts and Responses
OpsMgr monitoring rules can generate alerts based on
critical events, synthetic transactions, or performance thresholds and
variances found through self-tuning performance trending. An alert can
be generated by a single event or by a combination of events or
performance thresholds. Alerts can also be configured to trigger
responses such as e-mail, pages, Simple Network Management Protocol
(SNMP) traps, and scripts to notify you of potential problems. In brief,
OpsMgr is completely customizable in this respect and can be modified
to fit most alert requirements.
A sample alert is shown in Figure 3. The alert indicates that the Lync Server Application Sharing service is not running.
Tip
The alert details show the cause of the alert and
recommended resolutions. This helps guide new administrators to quickly
solve the problem, even if they are not familiar with the application in
question. This alert corresponds to the unhealthy state shown in Figure 2.
The alerts are dynamic and automatically resolve
themselves if the condition that generated the alert is resolved. After
starting the Lync Server Application Sharing Service on LS1, the alert
was closed automatically and the state transitioned to healthy. Figure 4 shows the health explorer state, including the time the service was started at 11:05 a.m. on 10/17/2010.
