Who loves MOM?

Rob,
My former job was consulting and my primary focus was with proactive server monitoring. I've personally implemented 4 locations with MOM2k & multiples of NetIQ AppManager. Microsoft even flew me to Redmond to be one of the first 50 people trained on this product. Microsoft bought the code from NetIQ a couple of years ago to make MOM. They have created a very complex product since. My only complaint, and why I seriously recommend NetIQ over MOM, is that with the MOM product by defaultALL possible alerts / event watchers are activated. This causes some SERIOUS event storms on your network. On average I've seen on as little as 10 servers 75K events per day, with MOM2K SP1! You can pare this back, but it is a very long process.NetIQ on the other hand, only alerts on the events that you tell it to look out for. These can be grouped type of events so your not haveing to input each one individually. Which makes it a lot nicer to administrate, and a lot less time involved maintaining the management of the system:-)

Either choice is well worth the work and peace of mind having early warnings of problems, and many problems can be self-healing with the proper fore-thought.

Good luck,
Rex

As far as a day to operations go MOM is just okay... I lacks in many areas as far as ROI and time it takes to deploy the technology. The MOM system relies on NT Performance counters and really doesn't offer the robustness behind the scenes as some of the other Systems Mgmt software out there. I have seen BMC, CA, HPOpenview's technology, but by far the easiest and the best bang for your buck is NetIQ's AppManager. It's quick and easy to deploy, has great reporting and response time modules and give you a single pane of glass. Check out Control center... its gives you a great Service level management tool...

EventSentry has much the same functionality as MOM - notification, monitoring and reporting to MSDE or SQL and is a lot cheaper - $299 for 10 server licences. The lite version is free but doesn't have the database reporting. I've used it on several sites and it performs well if $$$$ are a factor in your purchasing decisions.

We are using MOM2005 to monitor 95 servers, some of them 700 miles away. This version of MOM seems to be a big improvement over MOM 2000. With the SDK you can build your own managementpacks. We aready have 4 homegrown mp's. It can be customised the way you want. Started with over 100 alerts a day with tweaking MOM and solving errors on our servers we are now down to 2 or 3 errors a day. (these errors need downtime to solve)
Try MOM for a month and you will like it for sure. It has still a need for improvement and needs 3rd party tools to monitor non MS products for example cisco gear. I give it 4 out of 5 stars.