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Progent's team of Microsoft-certified consultants offers in-depth expertise for System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager (SCOM 2012) and for configuring the Management Packs that extend the power of SCOM 2012 to a wide range of business-critical applications. Progent can help you maximize the business value of SCOM 2012 by offering requirements analysis, system design, pilot testing, deployment, tuning, local and remote consulting and technical support, Help Desk services, security consulting, and outsourced support services for SCOM 2012. Progent can also help you migrate efficiently from earlier releases of SCOM to System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager. For details about Progent's planning and support services for SCOM 2012, see SCOM 2012 consulting. For hybrid cloud infrastructure monitoring and analytics, Progent offers SCOM 2016 consulting services.

What Is System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager?
Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager is a network management solution for monitoring and reporting on the availability, performance, and security of your critical IT resources by proactively identifying problems and trends and alerting you about issues that could eventually impact productivity. SCOM 2012 can monitor resources across local and off-site datacenters as well private and public clouds, including Microsoft Azure. (Learn about Progent's Microsoft Azure planning and cloud integration consulting services.) Among the resources you can monitor are physical servers and client computers, virtual machines, Windows and Linux-based operating systems, services, Microsoft and third-party applications, and network infrastructure (fabric).

System Center Operations Manager 2012 continually examines event logs from designated servers, applications, and services and then filters, consolidates, and analyzes these network events based on a comprehensive built-in knowledge base. When SCOM 2012 detects trouble or a potentially disruptive tendency, it can execute special repair scripts or generate alerts to warn designated IT staff. For example, SCOM 2012 could automatically take off line an infected server to stop the spread of a detected virus. SCOM 2012 also generates reports that allow you to track the health of your network and make sure that alarms have been appropriately resolved.

SCOM 2012 includes major enhancements over earlier releases of SCOM including private and public cloud support, close integration with Microsoft Azure, fabric monitoring, advanced application performance monitoring, extended Linux support, improved availability for pooled resources, and browser-based management. SCOM also offers unified management with other components of System Center 2012 R2 including System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), and System center Data Protection Manager. For detailed information about SCOM 2012 enhancements and the other components of System Center 2012 R2, and to learn about how Progent can help you incorporate them into a high-value management solution, see System Center 2012 R2 consulting services.

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 many dozens of Microsoft products and software components. These can be downloaded for free. In addition, third parties offer a wide variety of SCOM Management Packs. MPs are typically written by the same teams who built the products being managed by SCOM, so the experience and information included in an MP comes from the most knowledgeable authority. Some current MPs available from Microsoft and supported by Progent include:

• BizTalk Server
• Dynamics AX
• Dynamics CRM
• Dynamics NAV
• Exchange Server
• Java Application Performance Monitoring
• Lync Server
• Microsoft Azure
• Office 365
• SharePoint Foundation
• SharePoint Server
• SQL Server
• SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)
• SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
• System Center Configuration Manager (SCOM)
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager Host and Virtual Machine Dashboard
• UNIX and Linux Operating Systems
• Windows Operating System
• Windows Server Active Directory (AD)
• Windows Server BranchCache
• Windows Server Cluster
• Windows Server DHCP
• Windows Server DNS
• Windows Server Hyper-V
• Windows Server Network Load Balancing 2012 R2
• Windows Server Remote Desktop Services 2012 R2
• Windows Server Update Services 2012 R2 (WSUS)

Another important feature of SCOM 2012 is its extensible design, which allows SCOM 2012 to be used as a platform for developing customized monitoring solutions for virtually any IT environment. A rich assortment of Management Pack authoring tools are available. The SCOM 2012 Operations console simplifies the creation of rudimentary Management Packs by providing access to MP templates, the Distributed Application Designer, and a library of authoring wizards. Silect Software's MP Author is a free wizard-driven management pack authoring tool that can be used with Visual Studio Authoring Extensions. For more technically proficient users, the older SCOM 2007 Authoring console allows you to create MPs for System Center 2012 R2 and provides access to more options than the SCOM 2012 Operations console. For advanced users, the Visual Studio Authoring Extensions let you work with a Management Pack's native XML code directly and provides XML templates and IntelliSense for various MP elements. The SCOM 2012 SDK provides powerful tools including a connector framework, API, and script library that allow programmers to create sophisticated Management Packs and to control many features of SCOM 2012.

Progent's SCOM 2012 consultants and application programming experts can show you efficient ways to modify or create SCOM 2012 Management Packs to meet your individual monitoring requirements and can develop custom Management Packs based on your specifications.

Benefits of System Center Operations Manager
System Center Operations Manager can improve network uptime by automatically identifying and helping to resolve potential issues when they first appear and before they can disrupt network operations. To see how SCOM helped a small business in the business, refer to the System Center Operations Manager Case Study.

SCOM 2012 can improve system performance by monitoring and reporting on specified performance counters and thresholds as well as patterns of use on key servers and applications. This allows administrators to spot trends and reshuffle or add resources to ward off imminent disruptive performance bottlenecks. SCOM 2012 curbs IT staffing overhead by simplifying and automating key network management tasks. Because of SCOM 2012's ability to consolidate and analyze vast amounts of data collected from many servers, clients, applications, services and fabric, less management time is required to assess network health. SCOM 2012's continually expanding knowledge base enables automatic problem mitigation or expert recommendations for best-practice solutions, saving time for IT managers and technicians. SCOM 2012's automated alarms sent to designated support staff help organizations meet service-level agreements and avoid penalties associated with missed SLAs. In addition, SCOM 2012's ability to track the resolution of alarms helps make sure that issues requiring manual intervention are addressed and resolved within an acceptable timeframe.

Progent can help you configure and manage your SCOM 2012 ecosystem so that it delivers these benefits, allowing you to realize maximum business value from your investment in advanced monitoring.

How Progent Can Help You Plan and Deploy Your SCOM 2012 Solution
Planning and deploying System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager to take full advantage of its rich feature set requires a broad background in multiple practice areas. Progent's Microsoft-certified team of consultants have been supporting and using System Center Operations Manager and its precursors for more than a decade and are well qualified to help you to plan, configure, test, tune, and troubleshoot SCOM 2012. Progent can help you define a scalable topology for SCOM 2012, select or customize Management Packs and reports for your critical workloads, document your SCOM 2012 environment, and integrate your local datacenter monitoring with private and public cloud monitoring for a consolidated hybrid solution. Progent can also help you migrate efficiently from an earlier version of Operations Manager to SCOM 2012.

When SCOM 2012 detects issues and generates alarms, you have the option to outsource SCOM alarm response to Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC). Progent's online consultants have the experience and knowledge to analyze the monitoring data generated by SCOM 2012 and to respond efficiently. In the vast majority of cases Progent can resolve issues online without requiring an onsite visit. When necessary, Progent can escalate problems to a certified subject matter expert. For problems that call for onsite support, or for organizations that prefer in-person service, Progent can dispatch a consultant to most metropolitan areas throughout the U.S.

For more information about SCOM 2012 and to find out how Progent can help small and mid-size businesses get enterprise-class IT support at budget-friendly prices, select one of these topics:

• Progent's Network Monitoring Packages based on Microsoft Operations Manager
• System Center Operations Manager in Practice: A Case Study