Capabilities and Benefits of System Center Operations Manager with Lync Server

System Center Operations Manager is a comprehensive monitoring solution by Microsoft. SCOM is deployed at many organizations to monitor servers and networking equipment. SCOM operates on a model of Management Packs, which are a collection of monitors, rules, and configuration criteria that define how to monitor a service. SCOM includes Windows Server and network equipment monitoring by default. Many organizations also use SCOM to monitor applications such as Exchange Server, Active Directory, SQL Server, and other third-party applications.

Microsoft also provides a management pack for Lync Server 2013. When deploying the Lync Server 2013 Management Pack for SCOM, organizations can proactively monitor the end-to-end Lync Server environment. Essentially, all topics discussed previously in this chapter, including Performance Monitor, event logs, and synthetic transactions, are wrapped into a monitoring package with the Lync Server 2013 Management Packs for SCOM. The benefits of using SCOM for Lync Server 2013 monitoring are as listed here:

• Scenario Availability Using Synthetic Transactions—The Lync Server 2013 Management Pack allows synthetic transactions to automatically be run for a number of scenarios. SCOM also supports running synthetic transactions from outside the corporate network to test Edge Server scenarios.

• Rich Transaction Logging—The rich logging available with synthetic transactions is available in SCOM as well. Administrators can access the HTML logs to determine why the transaction failed.

• Call Reliability Monitoring—SCOM monitors the data from the Lync Monitoring server to monitor and alert on the real-time call quality for users. In Lync Server 2013 this also includes IM and conferencing scenarios.

• Monitoring Downstream Components—The health of Lync Server relies on many different components, even inside the Windows OS. The Lync Server 2013 Management Pack for SCOM checks several critical dependencies and alerts administrators on their impact as it relates to Lync.

• Historical Reporting—All data that is collected by SCOM can provide historical reports that help administrators with scenario availability, capacity planning, and the overall health of the environment.

SCOM combines the detailed Windows OS performance and health monitoring with enhanced Lync functionality such as synthetic transactions, call reliability alerts, media quality alerts, service and component health, and dependency health. Figure 13.15 shows an example of a monitoring view in SCOM, monitoring the critical services for Lync Server 2013.

Figure 13.15. Example of the SCOM monitoring console for Lync Server 2013.