For businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area and cities throughout the United States, Progent's Microsoft-certified support team provides network help and information technology expertise for System Center Operations Manager and for the expanding family of Management Packs that extend the power of Operations Manager to a broad range of mission-critical functions. Progent can help you get the most from Microsoft Operations Manager by offering requirements analysis, deployment, configuration, customization, local and remote technical consulting and troubleshooting, Help Desk services, security consulting, and outsourced services for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007.

What Is System Center Operations Manager?
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 is an advanced network management solution that monitors the availability, throughput, and security of your IT system by proactively identifying problems and trends taking place on critical computers throughout your entire environment.

Operations Manager operates by automatically examining event logs from designated servers, then filtering, consolidating, and analyzing these network events based on a comprehensive built-in knowledge base. When Microsoft Operations Manager detects trouble or a possibly damaging tendency, it can execute special repair scripts or generate alerts to warn designated IT people. For example, System Center Operations Manager could automatically take off line an infected server to stop the spread of a detected virus. System Center Operations Manager also generates trend data so you can monitor the health of your information system and make sure that trouble warnings have been appropriately resolved.

Operations Manager 2007 incorporates important improvements over MS Operations Manager 2005 including rich new reports and a simple to modify reporting environment, plus minimization of false alarms via new expert tracking parameters that learn and adjust alerting triggers to the normal production operation of programs and hardware. Microsoft Operations Manager 2007 also introduces model-based management. By defining the network setup as models, MS Operations Manager 2007 can better learn the relationships between the various software and hardware that represent your information technology services. These models, profiled in the System Definition Model (SDM) that is the foundation for the industry standard Services Modeling Language (SML), allow for more fine-grained detection of network components and the ability to monitor not just the servers but the whole end-to-end service as a unique object.

System Center Operations Manager Management Packs
Management Packs are the building blocks which bring Operations Manager management capabilities to OS platforms, applications, and other technology components. A Management Pack (MP) includes best practice expertise to discover, monitor, analyze, chronicle, and resolve problems for a specific network component. Operations Manager Management Packs contain health models based on the Systems Definition Model to analyze the performance, reliability, set up and security data, as well as the health of related components, to decide the overall condition of components. Management Packs are available for Microsoft and third party OS platforms, software products, and devices.

Microsoft has created System Center Operations Manager Management Packs for more then 60 Microsoft products and software components. Microsoft's MPs are written by the same teams who built the products so the experience and information included comes from the most knowledgeable authority. All Microsoft MPs are offered for licensed users of MS Operations Manager 2007. MPs available from Microsoft include:

Third-party and Custom MS Operations Manager 2007 Management Packs
System Center Operations Manager 2007 MPs for many third party products including Linux, Oracle, and SAP, and for a variety of network hardware, are produced and available from Microsoft Partners. There are over 100 Microsoft Partner Management Packs created for the majority of technologies utilized by organizations today.

Microsoft has published a number of tools for developing or modifying Management Packs for Operations Manager 2007. The Distributed Application Designer is a graphical wizard for helping network administrators to produce performance profiles and MPs for their IT Services. Microsoft's Management Pack Authoring Console is a graphical tool used to help network administrators and programmers to create MPs for their specialized business programs and other network components. The Operations Manager 2007 SDK provides software interfaces so programmers can more deeply control and regulate Microsoft Operations Manager 2007.

Benefits of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007
Microsoft Operations Manager 2007 increases the availability of mission-critical servers by automatically detecting and helping to resolve problems before they can crash a network. For an example of how Microsoft Operations Manager has benefited a San Francisco Bay Area business, read the MS Operations Manager Case Study.

Microsoft Operations Manager can optimize network performance by monitoring specified performance criteria and usage patterns on critical servers, allowing network support personnel to be more proactive in adding performance-related products and to eliminate problem areas before they cause significant network bottlenecks.

Microsoft Operations Manager reduces IT staffing costs by streamlining the procedures of network management. Because Microsoft Operations Manager can efficiently monitor and consolidate enormous amounts of information gathered from many servers, fewer system managers are needed to take care of operations. In addition, the ability of MS Operations Manager to perform without human intervention in response to alerts makes it feasible to design expert scripts that can take sophisticated corrective actions which would otherwise call for the manual intervention of technical staff.

By automatically creating alarms and sending them via e-mail or wireless pagers to predetermined IT personnel, Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 makes it easier for support groups to meet SLAs. MS Operations Manager's Knowledge Base helps resolve problems faster, and MS Operations Manager's reports make sure that job tickets don't fall through the cracks. Automatic 24x7 monitoring and alarm generation also allows businesses to allocate their IT staff more efficiently so that more tasks can be accomplished without compromising system support.

In a nutshell, Microsoft Operations Manager 2007 offers small and midsize businesses the benefits of 24x7 system monitoring plus expertise in problem resolution without having to pay for a large, in-house service group.

How Progent Can Show You How to Get the Most from System Center Operations Manager
Setting up System Center Operations Manager's, sophisticated monitoring software can be a difficult. With more than five years of background with the NetIQ product upon which Microsoft Operations Manager is based, Progent's network support engineers can help you to select appropriate Microsoft Operations Manager features, deploy and set up Operations Manager, and write custom rules, procedures, analytics, and alerts for your business. Progent can also document Operations Manager's application monitoring rules and protocols.

For technical problems detected by Operations Manager, you can outsource problem response to Progent's Microsoft-certified consulting experts. With years of network support background, these IT professionals have the know-how to respond effectively to the data produced by System Center Operations Manager to keep business-critical systems running smoothly. By analyzing trend reports and responding appropriately to alerts, Progent can eliminate incipient problems before they result in downtime and fix critical problems immediately after they appear. In the majority of instances, Progent can solve problems remotely, saving time and money. For serious problems requiring onsite service, Progent can promptly send a service consultant to the site of any small or medium-size company in the San Francisco Bay Area or in select locations nationally.

Progent's large team of IT experts makes it possible, if necessary, to solve tough problems by tapping the talents to some of the San Francisco Bay Area's most experienced computer consultants.

To learn additional information about System Center Operations Manager and how Progent can enable your small or midsize business achieve enterprise-class IT support by deploying this powerful platform, pick one of these topics:

To ask Progent about technical help for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, call 1-800-993-9400 or send email to operations-manager-help@progent.com.

Progent's Professional Support Services for Microsoft-based Technology
For small companies in the Northern California Bay Area or elsewhere in the United States, Progent's Microsoft-authorized experts can provide low-cost online network help and professional consulting support for the entire array of Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers, Microsoft Windows 2008 Server, and Windows Server 2003. Progent's planning, installation, optimization, and consulting services include system design, configuration, and administration help for project management and documentation, local and off-site technical support and system diagnosis, Help Desk Outsourcing Support, certified security consulting, full-service outsourcing, and application server hosting services.

If your company needs immediate remote support from a Microsoft certified consultant, refer to Progent's Urgent Online Technical Help.















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