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bmengotto -> RE: RE: MOM Admin interview questions... (6/10/2005 5:35:04 PM)
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MOM is still a new and growing product. I' ll throw out some serious questions, but I have to mix it up a bit..Nonetheless, if they wanted a MOM admin/dev I would ask the following:
Q:What monitoring products have you used, what did you like/didn' t like and what shortcomings did you discover?
A:Open ended obviously, but a good primer.
Q:Who is your favorite PM in the MOM team?
A:They wouldn' t have to know this, but if they said: Unsure, I have been blacklisted from emailing them anymore. :o) This answer would inidcate that the person you are interviewing may know very little and spams the PM' s all the time with setup questions (/looks at self in mirror), or possibly has an infactuation with one of the PM' s - STALKER!
Q:What was your first experience with Operations Manager.
A:If you get an answer from the person that goes back before MSFT picked up the product, then this could be a very valuable candidate.
Q:Why is MOM better at monitoring MSFT/Wintel then the other players in the market. If it is not, then why do you feel this way, share some examples.
A:Product teams develop the MP' s. Easy to deploy and maintain. Toolset, not just a monitoring tool. Out of the box reporting. User friendly for .Net programers and developers comfortable with MS Scripting languages and WMI. Etc., etc. Pretty colors. ;o) MSFT intergration in furture product releases (Longhorn will have a MOM agent installed as a service - perhaps? E2K3 has parts of the E2K3 MP bits in place when you roll E2K3, less work for you when deploying agent).
Q:Can MOM integrate into other frameworks, and if so how?
A:Connectors, and 3rd party vendor connectors. Ticketing systems, HPOV, CA, Tivoli, BMC.. Then of course eXc and their slew of connectors for various platforms.
Q:Is it ok to deploy MOM into production with out of the box management packs? If not why and what should you do?
A:NO. Alert storms, perf storms, performance will suffer defeating the purpose of a monitoring system. You should do MP tuning and collect what is important and needed, anything else turn off and use only when troubleshooting that particular issue.
Q:Our Corp Security hates IIS. They have condemned IIS servers to live alone on their own servers. Our SVP wants a web console to view MOM alerts. Can we tell our SVP this will happen?
A:NO. Web console has to sit on the management server. This requires IIS, but I have worked out a way to get it to work with Apache on a virtual machine running on the management server using RedHat 5.0 and Vmware. (just for mentioning Apache, despite the fact that CIS hates IIS, this person was fired before even being hired, then later picked up by the unix mail gateway team). ;o)
Q:Sally from the Exchange operations team tried to view reports from the reporting server. She goes to the web console but only sees HOME and gets some issue about access denied. You tested reporting after you installed it and it worked. What step did you miss?
A:Forgot to set up access to the SQL Reporting web site from the site access page. Go to the home page, and grant a AD global group access to view and run reports. This should be the SC DW reader group.
Q:How can you limit views to certain applications so that Exchange admins see only alerts for Exchange servers, AD sees only alerts with AD servers?
A:Console Scopes.
Q:Base salary for a MOM admin/developer is?
A:Not enough. Please sell more copies!
Q:How many configuration groups can report to a top tier config group?
A:10.
Q:If your server side hardware support team is telling you there are no issues with hardware and your servers are A-OK, how can you show them they are wrong?
A:Create a new notification group, create a new operator. Add their DG email address as the email address of the operator. Create a Rule group. Create an alert notification rule in that rule group for Error or higher. Associate that rule group with the Windows 2000 Server computer group. Push changes and turn off your cell phone and set out of office on Outlook. Then go on paternaty leave for 8 weeks.
Q:Do you have to use the E2K MP Config wizard to create mom test mailboxes?
A:NO, but you do have to use it to store the credentials locally to the server for the mailbox access account.
Q:Can managers read MOM reports now?
A:Yes, they come in a variety of pretty colors. There are line and bar graphs, pie charts, and..unfortunately..some reports with just text. We are working on eliminating those. One DCR was submitted to the MOM team that requested a customizable color swatch to be available when running reports, so managers who hung them on the walls could do so without causing a problem with the color scheme of their office. ;o) There are talks about a plan to incorporate some sort of wizard or office assistant that will pop up after you run a report that will play " Where is the performance bottle neck in this report?" . Managers will compete with other managers and the winner at the end of the week will get the ability to subscribe to a report of their choice (no more phone calls to the Exchagne team asking for an increase in his/her mailbox size).
Ok, that' s enough of my goofing around. Keep in mind I was trying to spice it up a bit, so don' t take some of those answers for being correct..had to add some comic relief. Does McDonalds use MOM to monitor the fry machine? If my management reads this post I might be looking for a new job!
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