SCOM 2007 also is much more effective than MOM at helping IT departments meet stringent auditing requirements. A new user-role feature provides a useful interface that allowed the creation of SCOM 2007 users. In our tests, we used the built-in roles—including administrator, advanced operator, author and report security administrator—to assign access rights to various users.

The new user-role function is a big advance over previous versions of MOM. With SCOM 2007, we were able to assign operators to groups of systems in a least-privileged mode, and we could explicitly enable users to work with approved views to the management interface. This kind of restricted-rights access puts SCOM in line with operations management tools such as BMC's Patrol Enterprise Manager and provides some needed catch-up for the Microsoft platform.

SCOM 2007 also now has the ability to monitor distributed applications that depend on groups of systems. For example, we tested SCOM 2007 with a basic Web application that used SQL Server 2005 on one server and Exchange Server 2003 on another server. The SCOM 2007 authoring view allowed us to easily configure the management packs associated with each of the monitored applications.

We used the new distributed application designer to describe the applications that we wanted to monitor as a group.

SCOM 2007 provides a variety of templates that support nearly all the most common scenarios of distributed applications.

In addition to monitoring server software, we could monitor server hardware devices, SNMP-enabled server hardware, and Cisco switches and routers.

SCOM 2007 is much more friendly than MOM 2005 to big shops that are accustomed to running scripts to perform management tasks.

The SCOM 2007 beta we tested includes a beta version of Monad, a command-line interface shell and scripting language from Microsoft.

When Monad is released, it is expected to be among the main tools used to administer not only SCOM 2007 but also many of the Microsoft server products that SCOM 2007 is designed to monitor.

MOM 2005 offered agentless monitoring capabilities, but they've been greatly expanded in SCOM 2007.

For example, we implemented the application crash information collection capability in our SCOM 2007 system, using crash data from the Dr. Watson for Windows program error and debugging tool included in Windows XP.

We combined the resulting reports (which we had a hard time inducing during testing) with reports from application health monitors on our Windows Outlook clients and Office applications to get a view of what end users were experiencing in our network.

We could have configured the agentless exception monitoring to also forward data to Microsoft.

We generated reports on agentless exception monitoring that showed the top 10 crashes and crashing applications.

These reports, along with many new reports included in the product, should be interesting to IT managers, especially for making decisions about how to allocate break-fix resources.

Technical Director Cameron Sturdevant can be reached at cameron_sturdevant@ziffdavis.com.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.