Microsoft has done a good job of marketing its management offerings over the past couple of years. The company established Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) as the platform for Change and Configuration Management (CCM) in Windows environments and introduced Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) for operations management and Application Center 2000 for distributed-application management. Microsoft's push to make the OS more manageable yields dividends for Microsoft and for management product vendors. And as a result of all this attention to management, administrators now have better tools to help them keep systems running at peak performance.
Although there's no reason to doubt Microsoft when it says that it wants to have the best managed OS available, that probably isn't the only reason for the company recently bolstering its management products. The management market holds the promise of profits, and a quickly expanding segment of that market belongs to Windows. Like many Microsoft offerings, though, Redmond's management products leave room for cooperating partners to provide enhancements and integration options. These enhancements run the gamut from niche utilities to tools for integrating enterprise-management platforms.
Although Microsoft is picking up steam in the management arena, Redmond is neither first nor foremost in this market. Vendors such as BMC Software, Computer Associates (CA), Hewlett-Packard (HP), and IBM have been in the market for a long time. The maturation of these and other companies' products reflects the maturation of management standards and initiatives industrywide. As a result, products from many vendors can interoperate. The upside of this capability isn't that you can use different vendors' products to piece together a management solution, but that your management solution should be able to integrate with other solutions if the landscape of your IT organization changes through acquisitions or mergers. In addition, if you identify a specific area that your primary management platform doesn't address, you'll be able to integrate a third-party solution into your organization's management product.
In the next several pages, I take you on a whirlwind tour of the upper echelon of management products. I discuss what they do and how they compare. I also explore some alternative products, as well as niche add-ons that strive to provide that can't-live-without-it functionality to your management implementation.
Microsoft's Management Strategy
Microsoft's approach to management is four-pronged. With Windows 2000, the server OS became the primary management enabler. SMS, arguably the most mature Microsoft management technology, delivers CCM. Relative newcomers Application Center and MOM round out the management picture.
Win2K's manageability features include Group Policy, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Active Directory (AD), Windows Script Host (WSH), and Win2K Server Terminal Services. These types of features make the Windows environment easy to manage for third-party tools as well as Microsoft's tools.
SMS is Microsoft's CCM workhorse on Windows-based desktops and servers. Hardware and software inventorying and software metering provide the information administrators need to plan deployments and migrations. Software packaging and distribution dramatically reduce deployment time and thus the total cost of ownership (TCO) for desktop systems. Diagnostic tools such as remote control, network monitoring, and tracing tools can reduce the time required to diagnose and resolve problems. SMS is highly scalable, using a multi-tiered hierarchy and a Microsoft SQL Server back end. You must install the SMS client on each managed device.
Application Center is a tightly focused product for managing high-availability Web applications on Win2K Server. Application Center simplifies deployment of such applications by hiding the complexity of the environment. Application Center's software scaling lets you add servers to increase an application's capacity. The product also ensures that applications remain available when a system is down or experiences a failure.
For operations management, Microsoft licensed management software from NetIQ, added inhouse intelligence, and branded the new product Microsoft Operations Manager. MOM delivers comprehensive operations management for a broad spectrum of Windows servers and applications. MOM's features include event management, proactive monitoring, reporting, trend analysis, and alerting. Overall, MOM is built on a highly scalable load-balancing architecture that is relatively easy to deploy regardless of the size of your organization. Agents that you deploy to managed systems monitor overall system health, and application-specific agents provide detailed application metrics. As you might imagine, one of MOM's strengths is its built-in knowledge. Out of the box, MOM can monitor and manage Win2K and everything else, such as Microsoft IIS, that comes on the OS CD-ROM. MOM's base functionality includes monitoring for SMS, but for other Microsoft servers, such as SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange Server, you need to buy specific management packs. MOM is a fairly robust solution for Windows operations management, but it lacks support for other enterprise computing platforms. However, MOM conforms to management standards to enable integration with upper-level management solutions.