I can’t help it; I’m a System Center Operations Manager junkie. I’ve preferred Operations Manager over other products since I started using the beta of MOM 2005 for monitoring production servers back in 2004. I’ve use CA Unicenter, BMC Patrol and evaluated HP Openview and they just couldn’t stack up.
One of the criticisms of SCOM was that is was "just for MS networks". You know, it was best of breed in MS centric networks but you could use thrid party extensions (some of them being free, e.g. Citrix, Dell and HP) to manage other platforms. But it’d still be best if we could monitor more with SCOM without sing 3rd party products, some which add complexity and costs.
Some time last year (I think) MS acquired one of those 3rd party firms that developed solutions for monitoring non-MS products. And at MMS this year, it was announced that MS launched the public beta of Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions. With it and SCOM 2007 SP1 you can monitor:
- Solaris 10
- HP-UX 11iv3
- Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 Server
- Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1
Now you’re getting monitoring of more of your network with just one solution. Pretty cool, eh? The Cross Platform Extensions beta is available for download from Microsoft Connect.