Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM)
Monitoring of windows systems is nothing new. Since NT4 times there are several different third party tools that covers the monitoring of simple services (like "is server X up or not?") to complex environments, however Microsoft did not bring any own product to the market as it has done it with SMS. Instead MS purchased a known product from NetIQ that was also in use within MS for the internal Server Monitoring, the called "NetIQ Operations Manager". At the same time this Product (NetIQ OM) came from the merge of the company "Mission Critical" with NetIQ during beginning of 2000. The original Name was "OnePoint" and was announced during beginning of 1999 (one year before to the merge of Mission Critical with NetIQ). Now you know why the MOM DB is called "Onepoint" and the MOM Agent regkey is under "Mission Critical Software\OnePoint".
Beside of some new Graphics and improvements done by MS Engineers for the stability of the Product, the core functionality were still the same as NetIQ's Operations Manager. The main difference was the new MOM Management Packs developed by MS Engineers with a deep MS product knowledgebase. Many customers switched to MS MOM 2000 due to the Management Packs.
Following the MS "Dynamic Systems Initiative" MOM 2005 improved several issues detected on MOM 2000 and introduced new Features, like a separate Console for Administrators and Operators, the "Maintenance Mode", Cluster "aware" monitoring; in the Operators Console the new Views "State View" or "Diagram View", a better security management with Operator Roles and many features more.
Beside of the Enterprise version of MOM 2005, there is a "minimized" version for small Business environments called "MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition". A detailed comparison between both versions can be found here.
Release History:
| RTM | Mainstream Support End Life | Extended Support End Life | |
| Operations Manager 2000 Enterprise Edition | 1.03.2001 | 11.04.2006 | 12.04.2011 |
| Operations Manager 2000 SP1 | 19.11.2002 | 31.03.2006 | 31.03.2011 |
| Operations Manager 2005 | 25.11.2004 | 12.01.2010 | 13.01.2015 |
| Operations Manager 2005 SP1 | 31.07.2005 | 31.07.2010 | 31.07.2015 |
*Please notice that the Dates above could change. Please check Microsoft web site.
Next expected Release: Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 (MOMv3)
MOMv3 Beta can be downloaded from here.
www.ms-systemcenter.com