Why is System Center Operations Manager 2007 different to everything else? You’ve already heard about management packs: how they use state models instead of just traditional triggers and how they use the monitored products vendor expertise. The other big difference is that SCOM recognises that IT is their to serve a customer. Think of this from the ITIL or MOF point of view. IT provides services to a customer, either someone in the same organisation or a client who subscribes for the service. That customer doesn’t care about IIS sites, disk utilisation or CPU interrupt time. They care about the uptime and performance of their service, e.g. the user who complains about there "being no Internet" doesn’t care if a network switch is dead. Their service enables their business. SCOM gives you the ability to model that service using a distributed application model. Up to now, to give the customer visibility to their service was messy.
Microsoft has just released the Service Level Dashboard Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007. This allows you to use an accelerator to present the availability and performance of the service to a customer in a more accessible manner.
You can watch a video on the subject on MSN. There’s also an executive summary on TechNet (note the MS link are mostly dead for this one so use my link).
Here’s what Microsoft has to say:
"The Service Level Dashboard Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 assists you in tracking, managing, and reporting on your line-of-business (LOB) application service level compliance. It displays a list of applications and their performance and availability against a target SLA.
The application or service is defined using the Operations Manager distributed application model. This model allows the user to define all components of the application or service that affect the health state and SLA calculation. When an application does not meet the defined performance or availability thresholds, it is placed into a warning or error state within Operations Manager. This state shows the current status of an application relative to its defined thresholds.
The Service Level Dashboard report uses the history of the state of an application to calculate the time the application was in each state over the duration of the report. Based on this information, the report derives a performance and availability percentage for the time period that the report covers".