News

Next Version of MOM Coming in 2004

• By Scott Bekker
• 03/18/2003

Microsoft Operations Manager 2004 made its debut at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

MOM focuses on operational aspects of enterprise administration such as event management, proactive monitoring and alerting, reporting and trend analysis. MOM is also currently extensible by a Microsoft Application Management Pack and by additional extension packs from NetIQ.

MOM 2004 will be designed to deploy more quickly through automations and tools to discover the deployment environment and optimize the management tool for it. "We want to make sure you can deploy this product in hours rather than weeks," says David Hamilton, a senior executive in Microsoft's enterprise management division.

The next release should bear the imprint of Microsoft's trademark ease-of-use engineering in a more intuitive user interface. The new UI is scheduled to include integrated alert views, diagnostics, topology views and reporting.

A new reporting engine, based on work done by the SQL Server team for the 2004 "Yukon" release will give operators the ability to trace performance, identify patterns, analyze trends and pinpoint problems from the console. At the same time, the reporting engine will provide the infrastructure for the reports to be generated and sent to people and applications elsewhere in the organization.

The MOM 2004 release will mark a change in the way add-on management packs are developed for MOM. "Up to this point, the management packs were developed by the management team," Hamilton says. "Now, each of the management packs is being developed by application owners [within Microsoft]." The approach will make the packs more useful because the application teams within Microsoft are more familiar with the types of support issues that customers most often run into while using those specific applications, Hamilton says.