Monitoring Failover Cluster with Operations Manager

This article explains how to use System Center Operations Manager to monitor computers that are in clustered configurations. For information on monitoring failover clusters, see the guide for the management pack you're using.

To begin monitoring computers in a cluster, perform the following steps:

1. Install an agent on all cluster nodes (computers).

2. Enable agent proxy on all cluster nodes. For more information, see How to Configure a Proxy for Agentless Monitoring.

In the Administration workspace, cluster nodes will be displayed in Agent Managed, and the cluster will be displayed in Agentless Managed. The cluster will show as "not monitored" unless a management pack contains monitors that specifically target the cluster object. The agent on the active cluster node will perform all monitoring. If the node fails, the agent on the cluster node that clustering fails over to will begin monitoring, but the agent on the failover node will have no awareness of anything the agent on the other node had monitored previously, such as alerts, state changes, and so forth. The agents are independent.

When you're monitoring virtual servers on a cluster, you must deploy agents to the cluster nodes, configure them to be managed as a proxy, and then monitor the virtual servers as you would monitor an agentless-managed computer.

The Windows Server Operating System Management Pack provides discovery and monitoring of cluster shared volumes.

Note

You might see alerts from Cluster discovery connect functionality monitor and Cluster state connect functionality monitor when the Action Account uses low privilege credentials. To resolve this problem, assign higher privilege credentials to the Windows Cluster Action Account. For instructions, see the procedure "To modify Run As account properties" in How to Create a Run As Account.

Next steps

• In the Operations console, you view monitoring data, manage monitoring configuration, create your own custom views and dashboards that are personalized for your experience, and perform management group configuration administration by Using the Operations Manager Operations console.

• To understand how alerts are generated and how to manage configuring, tuning, and viewing alerts generated by monitored objects in order to effectively prioritize, escalate, and remediate issues detected, review Manage alerts.

• Create an Alert Notification to email, text message, or instant message you if an important alert is generated that requires immediate attention.