SCOM 2007 R2  is the latest version of Microsoft’s Enterprise Monitoring Product and it’s been presented in a $297 package from Train Signal. This product consists of 14 videos and covers installing, configuring and managing SCOM 2007.

The package starts off with a typical introduction video that sets up the course, tells you what machines they’ll be using in their lab and gives you some background information on what SCOM is and what it does.

Video 2 is where we’re provided with an Overview of SCOM and the various components and is more of a “Glossary of Terms’ type video explaining the different roles in SCOM. Not until video 3 do we actually see any installation of SCOM itself. I have 2 problems with this video:

1. It goes for 37 minutes but almost 21 minutes of this video is spent “reading” out hardware and software requirements (one of my biggest beefs with TS videos, it’s clear to me that they read long passages of text to ‘fill’ their videos).
2. At no stage during these videos do they show you how to install the Database (a required part of the installation). They just assume that you already know how to do that. “Here’s one I prepared earlier…” Well that’s great trainer, can you show me how to do it? I guess not!

With that gripe out of the way (and it’s a big one as I tried to follow along with a copy of SQL Server 2008 and I was stuck not knowing what options to install – luckily I guessed right) I moved onto the next video, video 4 “Introduction to the Console”. Obviously again, TS has gone ahead without showing the student what they have done. Straight after the installation we see the TS Operations Console full of events, agents have obviously been installed and management packs already imported. I know they call this a ‘glimpse into the future’ but what good is that? At this point I haven’t learned anything about any of these things…

At Video 5 my gripes continue to escalate. Installing Agents. Clearly the Trainer has gone to his machines in his lab and “Disabled the Windows Firewall”. You see without the correct ports opened, discovery will fail, installation of the agents will fail, everything will fail. Yet the trainers works great with no explanation of why? I’ll tell you why…he either hasn’t got the firewall running, or he’s opened all of the ports behind the scenes without showing you how he did it. I tried it in my lab just the way he did and it didn’t work. Once I open up all of the required ports it works. Bad TS, bad.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that I don’t like this product (although I can understand why you might be thinking that right now). I am saying that at this point if you haven’t got prior knowledge of SCOM 2007 R2, or you haven’t read or have the deployment guide handy, then following these videos will not give you a happy ending. Your installation will have errors plain and simple. When I have a trainer run me through the installation of a product, I don’t expect him to skip critical points just because it was too difficult to show me, or skip them because he doesn’t understand it himself. So either show me those things or get me a more experienced trainer. Another problem I have with this video is that its full of fluff. In fact a few of them in this series are full of fluff. By fluff I mean things that don’t need to be there, things that appear to only be there to make the videos longer. There are many, many times where the trainer goes back to a PowerPoint slide, reads out a few minutes worth of crap, then goes to the Operations Console and shows you the exact same thing and talks about it again going over the same information.  Some of these videos could have (and should have) been half the length.

The Management Pack video is pretty good, goes for a little over an hour, would have liked to seen this broken into 2 x 30 minute videos. But I’m not complaining really, I’m an adult, I can hit stop and come back.

Video 10 presents another stuff up on behalf of TS. We get halfway through the video and the Trainer shows you some nice reports that you can view when using Error Reporting. The problem is that the Reporting Video ( where you set up a Reporting Server) isn’t until video 11 and as such he’s happily showing reports that you won’t see if you’re following along – heck you won’t even have Reporting as an option. In fact when you do get to video 11, we have another video that requires a SQL Server that the trainer has already set up. So again no instruction on how to set up SQL Server ourselves. The actual part on reporting though was fine although he did omit a critical step when he mentioned how to set up emailing scheduled reports – he didn’t tell you to configure the Reporting Services e-mail settings, so again it won’t work.

Video 13 demonstrates using SCOM 2007 to monitor VMware. That’s okay as a lot of people have VMware in their environments, but I would have thought that monitoring Active Directory or SQL Server or Exchange would have been a better choice. Still, I use VMware and most of the companies that I’ve worked with in the past do as well so that’s a nice bonus video.

The bottom line is that this isn’t bad training and I did quite enjoy watching it. However it is marred by too many behind the scenes installations and tweaks and therefore if you follow along with the trainer then you’ll be disappointed. Honestly I’d have to favor the CBT Nuggets product over this one due to those problems even though the CBT Nuggets version only covers SCOM 2007 and not the newer R2 version. Still, if it’s SCOM 2007 R2 training that you’re after, there’s nothing else right now so this is all you have.

Pros:
8 Hours of Training.
Price is a little cheaper than Train Signal’s Standard prices of $397.

Cons:
8 Hours of Training, minus the fluff means more like 5 hours of training. There’s far too much to SCOM 2007 R2 to condense it down to that little training.

The trainer has obviously prepared too much of his lab behind the scenes and if you “follow along and do what he does” then your lab just won’t work. There’s just too many little things done behind the scenes for the average person to be a success at deploying SCOM if you rely on this training alone. Ports, Databases, Certificates and various configuration settings just to name a few.

Company: Train Signal
Product Link: SCOM 2007 R2

Price: $297

Our Rating: 6.5/10

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