Hello, my name is Vlad Joanovic and I'm a program manager at Microsoft working on the System Center team focused on the Operations Manager 2007 product.  I have been working closely with partners leveraging the OpsMgr monitoring platform to monitor their applications or integrate monitor data from another system into OpsMgr for a few years now.  This is going to be the focus of my blog.  I plan to share the best practices we know today and learn along the way around building OpsMgr management packs and would love to hear from you on how we can improve the monitoring platform to better support these types of scenarios in future versions.

Lets start at the beginning - so you want to build a management pack or understand how to integrate with OpsMgr.  Maybe you have heard from your customers that having a management pack would be useful or you already have a product that provides monitoring data for your own systems and you'd like to integrate this data into OpsMgr so customers can see your monitoring data along with OpsMgr objects in 1 console?  Whatever your scenario you will need to get up to speed on OpsMgr and get a development environment setup so you can start to build a prototype and get feedback from those customer's asking for you this MP or integration in the first place.

here are some useful docs and references that will come in handy:
Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack Authoring Guide:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/4/d/74deff5e-449f-4a6b-91dd-ffbc117869a2/OM2007_AuthGuide.doc
The report authoring guide for Operations Manager 2007:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/4/d/74deff5e-449f-4a6b-91dd-ffbc117869a2/OpsMgr2007_RprtGuide.doc
http://www.authormps.com
http://www.opsmanjam.com/default.aspx

Books:
System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed
Mastering System Center Operations Manager 2007

OpsMgr SDK links:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb437575.aspx

System Center Catalog listing all the System Center "packs" for OpsMgr includes all the available Microsft and 3rd party MPs
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/systemcenter/cc462790.aspx

Building a Management Pack Powerpoint Presentation:
http://www.opsmanjam.com/OpsManJam%20Library/Featured%20Articles/OpsMgr2007MPDevelopment-VladJ.pptx

Now for setting up your environment.  You'll likely want to run this on a virtual machine and there aren't any problems with doing that.  Make sure you use OpsMgr 2007 SP1 as this is a slipstreamed release so no need to install RTM and then upgrade to SP1.  Install is here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C3B6A44C-A90F-4E7D-B646-957F2A5FFF5F&displaylang=en
This is the 120 day eval version. If you have MSDN there is a full version in there that you can use for development purposes.

You will need to install SQL first.  Standard is fine for your demo environment and I would recommend having everything installed on 1 machine. 

Here is where you can get the latest authoring console:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/4/3/f438d6a0-290c-42b8-8f9c-c6660f89e1aa/OpsMgr07_x64_AuthConsole.exe
http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/4/3/f438d6a0-290c-42b8-8f9c-c6660f89e1aa/OpsMgr07_x86_AuthConsole.exe

Next it is useful see the product in action monitoring itself so I would recommend importing a number of MPs including: SQL 2005, IIS and Windows (based on the version you installed).  Find the latest version in the catalog link above (there are some on the installation media under the ManagementPack folder but the ones in the catalog are more recent).  Download the files from the catalog and install them.  This will create a System Center Management Packs folder.  Then from the adminstration console of OpsMgr console import the management packs (.ie. the .mp files).  After a while you'll see some data collected and will be able to see how management packs add value through knowledge by looking at the computer state view, health explorer for the computer and the all alerts view.  Use the all alerts view as the primary way tell if your demo machine is healtly.  If you can another great way to learn OpsMgr is by monitoring a real IT environment (will be really useful once we get to the testing phase) so if there are a set of real servers that real users depend on try using OpsMgr there.

Finally you should export the MPs into XML format so you can pop into the XML for certain MPs depending on the patterns that you use.  Here's a blog article on how to do this from powershell.

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