Brent, We have MOM 2000 monitoring our empty root domain with plans to include our main user domain in the near future. From what I have seen the AD health checks are very robust and fairly useful. The real value that I have seen so far with MOM is in performance monitoring and reporting. If you remember the AD sizer tool, one of the questions it asks you is the "number of logons per second"... Well with MOM that number is easily available and shows up in a nice report that you don't have to dig for.
I heard a talk last year at TechEd from the MOM program manager who discussed the use of MOM on Microsoft's internal network and the work and collaboration between the MOM team and the MS internal support team. The gist of the spiel was that with the AD management pack you are basically getting a set of rules, health checks, and alerts that were proofed, developed, and tweaked through use on MS's production network. The gotchas I found with MOM is the amount of planning, testing, and learning you need to do before deploying it. This is one of those products where the more you put into it the more you will get out it. MOM is really easy to install but the "okay what next" part is much harder. If you have a large distributed DC environment and/or plan to use MOM for other Windows systems, then you really have to plan out things like configuration groups, event forwarding, database archiving, and server sizing. We have a fairly simple AD environment and can accommodate it with a single MOM configuration group and two dedicated MOM servers (one DCAM/reporting - one SQL). If AD health is all you are really after and don't need the event alerting, performance monitoring, reporting that comes with MOM, then look at the health check scripts from the Microsoft Branch Office Deployment Guide (see http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/technologies/ac tivedirectory/deploy/adguide/default.mspx) HTH -Stuart -----Original Message----- From: Brent Westmoreland [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 19, 2004 1:35 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [ActiveDir] Microsoft Operations Manager I am busy researching the Microsoft Operations Manager software, specifically for AD health. Does anyone have any real world experience messing with this? I am specifically wondering how much value this could add to an organization, any gotchas, etc. Brent List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/
