Marios Philippopoulos (4/20/2009)

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Drew,

Thanks for the article. Looking forward to the upcoming installments.

When I first saw the title of your article, I actually thought it was about using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) for SQL Server monitoring. It seems though that, except for the first 4 letters of your acronym, and the common mandate for centralized monitoring, your approach has nothing to do with that other SCOM. What a weird coincidence! 🙂

In our organization we are using SCOM for system monitoring and we harness the reporting capabilities of SCOM for some of our reporting. For the rest of our monitoring and reporting we use SSRS and some in-house solutions.

I always find it interesting to learn about different ways of monitoring SQL environments. Every approach has its own strengths, and I think your approach's greatest strength is its versatility, something lacking to some degree in canned products like SCOM, SSRS etc.

I have always maintained that DBAs need to keep training their development muscles - myself being a former developer turned DBA some time ago. It is approaches like yours that help in this direction.

Keep up the good work!