Monitor servers

Once you have configured Operations Manager to collect data from the servers in your environment, you will need to configure how Operations Manager displays and interprets that data, including configuring notifications and alerts about important items that should be brought to the attention of the people responsible for monitoring these computers. Managing servers also involves following up on agents that are reporting problems, being able to put monitored objects into maintenance mode, understanding how heartbeat alerts work, as well as configuring health explorer, and audit collection services.

This section covers the following topics:

  Understanding not monitored and gray agents

  Using maintenance mode

  Understanding heartbeat alerts

  Using Health Explorer

  Configuring Audit Collection Services (ACS)

Summary:

• An agent may show a server to be in a not monitored state because the management pack of the host operating it is not installed on the Operations Manager management server.
• Maintenance mode suspends rules and monitors, notifications, automatic responses, state changes, and new alerts.
• An Health Service Heartbeat Failure alert will be triggered if the Operations Manager server fails to receive four consecutive heartbeats from an agent.
• When a Health Service Heartbeat Failure alert is triggered, the Operations Manager server attempts to ping the computer. If the computer does not respond to the ping request, a Failed To Connect To Computer alert will be raised.
• An ACS forwarder is installed on a computer that will forward security event logs to an ACS collector.
• An ACS collector processes data forwarded from an ACS forwarder, and sends it to the ACS database.