by Greg Shields

In all the IT projects I’ve implemented or assisted with in a consulting engagement, those that absolutely provide the quickest return have always been related to monitoring software. Whether that software comes directly from Microsoft itself with its System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) or through any of the third-party alternatives such as SolarWinds ( www.solarwinds.com ), PowerAdmin ( www.poweradmin.com ), NetIQ ( www.netiq.com ), TNT Software ( www.tntsoftware.com ), or others, the result is a near-overnight return on the relatively small purchase price.

The advice being imparted in this tip is simple: Go buy monitoring software. Install it, and watch it every day. The return from such products is immediate, actionable, and can be directly related back to the original purchase. Yet, what’s ironic is in how few organizations actually have such software in their administrative quivers. Even more confusing are those who implement it but forget to watch it on a daily basis.

The best way to show the power of this software is through two personal stories. In the first, I was called into a financial services institution to assist with an Exchange corruption problem. This problem stymied the local administrators, causing regular outages again and again, with each outage costing the company thousands of dollars in lost productivity as tools such as ESEUTIL and ISINTEG were run on the Exchange database.

For this client, I suggested an implementation of OpsMgr 2007 to assist. OpsMgr’s instrumentation plugs into essentially every part of your Windows environment, creating monitors for all sorts of behaviors that no single human can watch at once. In this environment, the cost for software and consulting assistance was only a few thousand dollars. The installation, initial configuration and tuning, and training for the local IT administrators required a day’s worth of work. Leaving for the day and returning the next morning, I found a set of bleary-eyed administrators sitting at their desks with very happy expressions on their faces.

It turns out that this OpsMgr implementation notified them of the exact problem later that evening. Before its database was able to again corrupt, causing yet another outage, the administrators were able to log in and fix the problem. Literally, the OpsMgr installation paid for itself within less than 24 hours.

Now, this example would have remained an outlier if the same situation hadn’t happened a second time with a different client and a different problem. This second client was in a completely different industry and had a completely different problem, this time with a custom sales database running atop SQL Server. The results from the installation were, however, similarly immediate: Within less than 24 hours, the second client discovered a problem with their database configuration that was the culprit behind their repeated and costly outages.

Solutions such as Microsoft’s OpsMgr leverage instrumentation across the servers, applications, hardware, and network components of your environment. The monitors from each point of measurement aggregate to create a kind of statement of health for a server or distributed application. In the case of OpsMgr, its various monitors can be combined through a designer console to create a hierarchical model of some IT service.

If, for example, that IT service requires the functionality of an Exchange server, a file server, and a Web server to accomplish its mission, OpsMgr’s Distributed Application designer enables each to be connected. When one element on one server fails a test, that failure rolls up to reflect the state of the entire system. Individual monitors can be based on resource utilization, such as % Processor Utilization or Memory Usage, or based on a particular behavior. Even Event Log entries are monitored to look for pre-failure conditions.

With so many monitors in place being judged by so many business rules that you customize yourself, tools such as OpsMgr enable you to peer deep into your IT infrastructure to discover root causes to otherwise-complex problems. No individual person can watch so many statistics and behaviors at once, so the end result of the implementation of such a tool is the reduction of “gut feelings” and “band-aids” from the traditional IT problem-solving approach. Environments who implement tools such as OpsMgr or any of the others discussed earlier will benefit from a more-healthy environment, faster resolutions to common problems, and a direct impact on productivity and the bottom line.

Need to save money over the long term? Go buy this software today.

About the Author

Greg Shields is an independent author, speaker, and IT consultant, as well as a Partner and Principal Technologist with Concentrated Technology. With 15 years in information technology, Greg has developed extensive experience in systems administration, engineering, and architecture specializing in Microsoft OS, remote application, systems management, and virtualization technologies. He is a Contributing Editor and columnist for TechNet Magazine and Redmond Magazine, and serves as the Series Editor for Realtime Publishers, the world’s leading provider of high-quality content for the IT market. Greg is a highly sought-after and top-ranked speaker for both live and recorded events, and is seen regularly at conferences like TechMentor Events, Microsoft Tech Ed, VMworld, and more. He is a multiple recipient of Microsoft “Most Valuable Professional” award.