In so doing, Opalis’s tools gain more detailed looks at the workings of Windows servers. Compared to Microsoft’s previous operations management tools, which tracked specific physical assets like servers, SCOM can logically group resources and attach diagnostic data.
As a result, Opalis’ tools gain the ability to directly monitor a logical server group, and distinguish if the problem is occurring in an Exchange mail server or in a SQL Server transactional database.
Previously, Opalis’s tools could have only orchestrated the alerts. But with the tie in to SCOM, diagnostic data for a logical grouping of resources can be correlated to the alert. And, using the orchestration capabilities of Opalis tools, a fix can be automatically dispatched if the cause and effect have been codified in a rules base.
In other words, it provides a degree of the kinds of self-healing capabilities for Windows that have been developed for mainframes.
The new Opalis integration pack for Microsoft SCOM 2007 is now entering beta, and will be released some time after Microsoft itself releases SCOM 2007.
