OM/OMi Monitoring Tips
The tips below will help you with monitoring outcomes, I have used these steps to ensure the deployment and ongoing process of monitoring is successful, I hope these will help you.
These were based on OM (Operations manager deployments)
- Define the monitoring strategy and its lifecycle
- Establish the operating model, ensure roles and responsibilities has been assigned, ensure two (minimum) administrators have been trained.
- Provide OM formal training – the tools are comprehensive and require good education
- Employ service management process (incident and problem) to help refine the solution.
- Apply strict governance to the solution, adding/ removing nodes, policy life cycle management, threshold tuning, ongoing documentation, patch management and agent updates
- Enhance and customise the solution – OM / OMi is not a tool that can be deployed and then left alone, it requires for the first couple of years ongoing tuning and maintenance.
- Enforce change controls, explore business as usual vs major changes.
- Have a development environment to test patch, agent and SPI updates.
- Slowly adopt smart-plug-ins (SPI) – test and refine in development before deploying to production.
- Discuss the SPI’s / Management Packs with subject matter experts and monitor what’s important to the business. Tune the thresholds, this is an ongoing process and can take months to years sometimes.
- Build in as many standards as possible, example severity levels etc. This will help with threshold baselines.
- Policy lifecycle – develop, test, deploy and refine the SPI policies and then when they expire remove.
- Keep track of all manage nodes, (use excel/RTSM). If nodes are de-commissioned then remove from OM/OMi.
After following these key steps, you will have a mature monitoring solution.
iOpsMon 