SCOM 2007 R2 How to start

Several times I was asked "What to do first to learn how to work with SCOM". Basing my experience I can suggest the following list of actions to do first:




- First of all you should make a decision for yourself if are you interested in such part of IT-infrastructure as monitoring, operating, making decisions on statistics, creating maintenance plans and creating proactive actions that should be done basing on alert/performance/events trends. If you are interested in working as SCOM administrator, remember, that there's always a place for analysis and logic chains.

- I'd like to advise to watch some kind of CBT Nuggets videos about SCOM infrastructure, take a particular attention to SCOM design and implementation phase. Basing on this knowledge you can understand its architecture, internal mechanisms of data transfer, how it works in overall.

- The next phase is to move your energy to virtual test lab. In one of my previous posts there's a link for SCOM vhd files that are 180-trial free, you should download it to learn interface, try basic functions, import several management packs, run console and agent tasks, make some overrides.


- The next step in to install the SCOM to bare metall. There're implementation and design guides with several implementation scenarios available at Microsoft site(links can be found here). Please be patient on this step, implement SCOM carefully, don't use the "enterprise admin" account to install everything. Try to use the SCOM accounts matrix to give only needed permissions to accounts for your actions.

- After all previous steps, it's a time for a "heavy artillery". At this step I advise you to read the following books:
System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed
System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2007 R2 Unleashed: Supplement to System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed






- Test your SCOM skills by passing the 70-400 Microsoft exam (you shouldn't use testkings and other stuff if your aim is to test your knowledge of a product)

- Practice, practice and practice... and reading SCOM blogs like Kevin Holman's, Cameron Fuller's and http://sys-man.blogspot.com/ blogs :)