Hope for SCOM Users

TravisGreene — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:18:00 GMT

If you haven't heard the news yet, NetIQ has announced IT Process Automation (ITPA) support for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) with a specific adapter for NetIQ Aegis. According to the analysts at Gartner, Forrester and EMA that I've spoken with, Microsoft has no plans for an ITPA platform, as the System Center team is focused on getting their service desk/ticketing platform out the door. Yet, in our research, we found that SCOM users generally have a wish list of functionality to integrate, automate and extend the functionality of SCOM.

Now you might wonder if NetIQ, as a Microsoft competitor, really has credibility to claim that there is such a need for SCOM customers. Many of you know that NetIQ sold the Operations Manager platform to Microsoft in 2000. In all fairness, Microsoft has made a lot of changes, but much of the platform operates the same way it did back when we sold it. Add to that, the fact that we provide a competitive product that is a recognized leader in Windows systems management and it seems fair to claim that NetIQ understands what it takes to offer effective IT process automation in conjunction with SCOM.

But, we also decided to talk to current customers of SCOM to really understand the need today. We did that in a number of ways, through partners, services organizations, and even our own SEs who recently left Microsoft and joined NetIQ. What we found was that SCOM users are looking for easy ways to:

Integrate with third-party tools such as ticketing systems, other monitoring tools, provisioning tools, and so on, to reduce integration costs and increase operational productivity.
Automate alert enrichment to provide additional information, such as custom server information, to help reduce the time needed for troubleshooting.
Perform validation checks for alerts from Exchange, Biztalk and others to verify them. If they turn out to be false alarms, then the alerts are set to auto resolve and no human support is required.
Reset the priority of events based upon end-user impact as identified by SCOM or other tools, steering focus to high-impact events.
Automate SCOM administration, such as agent integrity checks to reduce administrator workload and the total cost of ownership for Operations Manager.
Drive alert resolution through progressive escalations, state changes and authorizations, reducing unplanned downtime due to missed alerts.

If you use Microsoft SCOM in your IT environment, you owe it to yourself to check out what NetIQ has to offer to address these needs, and we also invite you to attend a web seminar on May 13th to learn more about ITPA and this adapter, and see automation in action. Or you can find me speaking on IT Process Automation at Interop in Las Vegas on May 19th at 2:45pm in the IT Automation track.

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Hope for SCOM Users