During many Operations Manager installations at customers two things really struck me – the lack of naming conventions and good coffee – You guys have really good coffee machines which for sure make a consultant daily life easier and even better. Back to Naming Conventions – SCOM is just easier to maintain when you have good references aka Naming’s for all of your Object Reference. Sometimes companies writes a 28 pages long documents about the naming’s – like Microsoft’s (From MSDN) pretty good explanations where one of the first statement is: Do not use Hungarian Notations, – Ohhh no – so everything we learnt about notation have been changed – no, not at all – you just use the Notation that is easiest for your organization, and perhaps not the one written down – SO Change it…..

On the long track a good naming is priceless – and if it’s really easy even your colleagues will adapt it and perhaps even follow you in your Naming Quest- Think About: IBM.SAP.Monitor.Event.AppLog.200 – this is so easy – The company IBM is using SAP and have created a monitor which are looking for an event 200 in the Application Log. Or ACME.Oracle.Rule.Script.ActiveSessions again very easy to see what’s about – One issue though – a dot notation like the samples – cannot be used in APM (A reason for using underscore) – yes a underscore is considered ok.

Samples:

ACME.SynTran.TCP.161.Router.Au
ACME.Oracle.DistApp
ACME.Attr.Rg.Location
ACME.SAP.MP.Overrides
ACME.View.Dashboard.DBA

You could also add a scope – like ACME.FS.Defrag.Disable.LocationSeattle

From now on all of your searches regarding Target/Class, objects, overrides, discoveries etc works like a dream – You could even guess the name of a new Performance Monitor – Static, Single, Delta Threshold on Process, Explorer, WorkingSet – hehe: ACME.OS.PerfMon.Static.Process.Explorer.WorkingSet

Have a great Naming Conventions which gives you at least two days off each year.

See you