Designing the environment

Before you dive in and begin installing OpsMgr, its best practice to take a step back and think about how you will design the environment. A good design takes into account the overall monitoring requirements of the business, the physical and logical locations of the infrastructure to be monitored and any existing monitoring applications that are currently in place.

Involving members of each business unit/department in the organization is paramount to delivering a monitoring solution that works for everybody and can deliver real benefits and time-saving back to the business.

Here's some advice to get you started with your initial OpsMgr designs:

• Don't run before you can walk: A full enterprise deployment of OpsMgr can be very complex and could span across many geographical locations monitoring thousands of computers and network devices. For this reason, it's recommended to start small and approach your design in different phases. Postpone deployment of advanced features...