Overview of Operations Management Suite (OMS)

In this post I’d like to give an overview of what Operations Management Suite is and what it can be used for. First, Operations Management Suite, or OMS, is a collection of management services designed for Azure cloud. As new services are added to Azure, more capabilities are being built into OMS to allow for integration.

OMS allows you to collect things in one central place like the many Azure services that need deeper insight and manageability, all from one portal, as well as being able to set up different groups and different ways of viewing your data. OMS can also be used with on prem resources with Window and Linux Agent, so you can collect logs or backup your servers or files to Azure, for example.

The key Operations Management Suite services are:

• Log analytics allows you to monitor and analyze the availability and performance of different resources including physical and virtual machines, Azure Data Factory and other Azure services.
• Proactive alerting for when an issue or problem in your environment is detected, so you can either take corrective action or have a preprogrammed corrective action.
• Ability automate manual processes and enforce configuration for physical and virtual machines, like automating clean-up operations you do on servers for instance. You can do this through Runbooks which are based on PowerShell scripts or PowerShell workloads where you can programmatically do what you need to do within the OMS.
• Integrate backups so the agent and integration allow for backing up a service, a file level; whatever you need to do for critical data and run those stores, whether they are on-prem or cloud-based resources.
• Azure Site Recovery runs through OMS and helps you provide high availability for apps and servers that you’re running.
• Orchestrate running your replication up into Azure. This allows you to do it from physical servers, Hyper Vs or VMware servers using Windows or Linux.

Mainly, it provides management solutions. These are prepackaged sets of templates provided by Microsoft and/or partners that help implement multiple OMS services at one time. One example is the Update Management Solution which creates a log search, dashboard and alerting inside log analytics, but at the same time creates an automation runbook for installing updates on the server. This will tell you when updates are available, when they’re needed and then let you automate the install of those updates.

There is a lot of power and capability that comes with the Operations Management Suite. It’s a great centralized management solution within Azure that is quick to configure and start using. But if you need help getting started, that’s what we’re here for. For questions or more info on OMS or anything Azure related, click the link below or contact us—we’d love to help.