Summary

In this chapter, we covered the following:

• Systems management on the Microsoft platform

• Operations, configuration, and release management

• Dynamic Systems Initiative

By combining health and state with alert information, IT operators no longer have to perform research to understand the organizational impact of alerts. By maintaining awareness of system and service availability, IT staff is better able to identify, address, and resolve IT reliability and performance issues before they become serious problems and negatively affect business applications. Through the use of State Modeling and directly monitoring the event, health, and performance information of Windows Server System, MOM 2005 highlights relevant and important information that can be captured, evaluated, and presented to operators, helping prevent issues from going unseen. Tools such as SMS and Microsoft Update expand the solutions through configuration management capabilities that help administrators to deploy solutions and drive toward desired configuration through automated reporting, software deployment features, and other management capabilities.

Going forward, Microsoft plans to deliver and enable a new category of closed-loop, system-level management solutions that provide new levels of automation in the data center and tie business policies directly to IT systems. By adopting solutions from Microsoft and its partners today, IT professionals can realize reduced costs and gain more time to proactively focus on what is most important to support their organizations. For information technology organizations that are looking to get started with systems management or to become more mature in the approach to managing their systems, products such as MOM 2005, SMS 2003, and Microsoft Update are key components of a well-managed technology environment. In Chapter 2, we take an in-depth look at the features of these products and learn more about how they work together to support systems management.