Microsoft's latest version of MOM has been released to manufacturing, with retail availability slated for October 1. MOM, or Microsoft Operations Manager, is a console for administering Windows servers and applications, with tools for monitoring and analyzing performance. MOM 2005 includes an easier setup, new user interface and improved built-in security.

MOM 2005 takes the product to a whole new level. Pricing and licensing has also changed.

To enhance and extend MOM 2005 even more, there are five MOM Solution Accelerators available to streamline the way MOM works, integrates and deploys. Solution accelerators at Microsoft are generally chunks of code, tools and prescriptive info you can use to design your own custom extensions and to make their products fit more tightly into your environment:

Notification Workflow Solution Accelerator is a Microsoft SQL Server–based Notification Services application that can be used to extend notification functionalities of MOM 2005.
Autoticketing Solution Accelerator provides guidance for automated ticket generation, enabling the automated posting of a request (or ticket) into the Trouble Ticketing (TT) system used for incident management.
Alert Tuning Solution Accelerator helps reduce the volume of alerts when deploying MOM 2005 management packs.
Service Continuity Solution Accelerator helps maintain the availability of MOM 2005 service.
Multiple Management Group Rollup Solution Accelerator allows a business to propagate data from multiple management groups into one data warehouse to create consolidated and aggregated reports.

Check out the animated demo presentation, here, for a high-level explanation of how MOM works. You can also use the MOM 2005 Online Virtual Lab to learn more about the product and how to use it to solve problems in your environment. Looking for more information? Check out the blog published by the Microsoft.com Operations Management team, which did the dog-food work with the product before it was released.

Small businesses with 10 or fewer servers to monitor should check out MOM 2005 Workgroup edition, which is priced appropriately - one flat fee of $499. Nice to see Microsoft taking the needs of the smaller business into account. My company has many more servers than that license would allow, but I know a number of people who will be able to take advantage of it.

[via betanews.com]