We've now got official Management Pack support for R2 and the newer things in R2 such as EDI and RFID.
I've had many students come up to me and say "Mick - what in the world are you talking about?"
(mind you I get that at home as well - but let's not go there)
Have you ever asked the question:
I wonder how our BizTalk (et. al.) servers are going?
(this is where you could send the work experience kid around to all the servers gathering details and report back to you by lunch.....but not all of us have work experience kids)
The answer to this is relatively complex - as you'll need know things like:
- Services - stopped, started, uptime. BizTalk Services, SQL Services, WCF/IIS Services etc.
- Database sizes, Spool table lengths
- Queue Lengths - disk etc.
- Memory details
- BizTalk Orchestration details
- Messaging Details
- .... and the list goes on.
SCOM2007 with the management pack gives you that - in near enough realtime with all sorts of graphs and charts.
One of the *best* things I like about SCOM2007 is that you install the Management Pack(s) only on *one* machine - usually the SCOM2007 Central Administration machine, and as more applications are installed on servers on the network, the appropriate management bits are 'auto-deployed'.
Grab it here -
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=389FCB89-F4CF-46D7-BC6E-57830D234F91&displaylang=en&displaylang=en