New Year = Models, Code Discovery and Management Pack Generation

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Some of you may have already seen the existing Management Model Designer from https://www.codeplex.com/dfo or seen the channel 9 screen casts The DFO Show - Designing a Health Model with the Visual Studio Management Model Designer or The DFO Show - Implementing a Health Model with the Visual Studio Management Model Designer.

Well we've been working hard on a new version which will CTP in the next few weeks.

Remember the previous version of the tool allowed you to design a health model, then generate the instrumentation code that implemented it. The new version has some pretty significant new features.

Discovery of Existing Instrumentation Code, will allow you to bring into the model any instrumentation code you already have in your application. It doesn't matter if its event log messages, performance counters, WMI events or even Enterprise Library. The designer will find it. You don't even need the source, as the scanner uses the IL!

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Generation of a System Center Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack means you no longer have to hand craft a management pack for your model. You simply hit a button and out drops a management pack. You can import this management pack directly into Operations Manager and without change Operations Manager will find all instances of your application and begin monitoring.

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The new designer also defines more meaningful entities such as web sites, services, etc. which links to the automated discovery in Operations Manager.

Designer Surface Screenshot

Couple the 2 new big features together, and you end up with the capability of discovering instrumentation in your app, mapping this into a health model, and generating a fully operation management pack. With the existing instrumentation generation, you can now turn your application into something that can easily monitored and maintained once deployed.

Watch out for an update and link to download when its released in a few weeks time.

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