As an Operations Development Team we are task with a myriad of problems to solve in the most efficient manner possible while adhering to the tenets of our group, organization and company.  To that end we often find ourselves in a quandary of direction when one or more facets of need are diametrically opposed to purpose.

Collection is an excellent example of this situation.  As an enterprise operations group, we have the need to collect performance statistics and event data across the enterprise at the machine, operating system and application levels.  Logically, and in support of Microsoft technologies (a tenet of the group, organization and company) we chose to use the performance counter and event logging facilities inherently provided by the operating system.

No problem so far right?

But what method will we use to collect these counters and events, sort them, store them, manage them, route them and report on them?  The need is simple, its the purpose that complicates things.

Now as a tools team we could, of course, create a custom application framework using either remote pull techniques or local agents with pushing techniques to collect the information we need.  We would still need a repository, plus backend systems for routing, applications for managing the data and a reporting system.  On top of that, the frameworks could prove useless outside of our environment and does not promote any of the tenets of the group, organization or company.

Microsoft does sell a product to meet some of that purpose, Microsoft Operations Manager, or MOM.  MOM has facilities for grouping servers into different Processing Rule Groups (PRGs) that can collect detailed lists of events and performance counters specific to that group.  For instance, you could define a group of SQL Servers running Analysis Servers and collect only the events and performance counters specific to Analysis Servers.  MOM also provides a data push technique using locally installed agents and management servers plus a data repository.  There is event a UI based on MMC for managing then environment and data.

As good corporate citizens and in keeping with the tenets of the group, organization and company, we deployed MOM into our environment as the core of our collection architecture.

DOH!

Will