OpsMgr 2012 Unleashed Book

I've just arrived home from the commute to work today (still can't believe it's snowing at the end of March!) and found that this had arrived by post for me

As someone who has been working on pretty much nothing else but SCOM/OpsMgr for the past 3 years, the two previous versions of this book - System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed and System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Unleashed - played a massive role in helping me understand how to deploy and administer this complex monitoring and management tool.

When I heard that the latest version for SCOM 2012 was available for pre-order months ago, I wasted no time in getting out the credit card and purchasing it in both 'dead-tree' and then kindle formats. This blog post isn't a review of the book in any way, shape or form but simply just some quick observations along with some advice to anyone out there who's working on SCOM.

The book is a massive 1500 pages of front-to-back content that gives you expert tips and advice in every chapter. As someone who has tried their hand at writing a SCOM 2012 book that came close to 700 pages, I can assure you it's no mean feat to put together this amount of good high-level content.

When you check out the members of the authoring team whose efforts combined to bring us this book, it's a "who's who" of the SCOM and System Center world:

Lead Authors

Kerrie Meyler - System Center Cloud and Datacenter MVP
Cameron Fuller - System Center Cloud and Datacenter MVP
John Joyner - System Center Cloud and Datacenter MVP

With

Pete Zerger - System Center Cloud and Datacenter MVP
Jonathan Almquist - Scomskills.com
Alex Fedotyev - AppDynamics.com
Scott Moss - System Center Cloud and Datacenter MVP
Oskar Landman - System Center Cloud and Datacenter MVP
Marnix Wolf - System Center Cloud and Datacenter MVP

Technical Editor

Kevin Holman - Microsoft TSP (owner of probably the best SCOM blog on the internet!)


So with this kind of SCOM authoring firepower bursting out of the 1500 pages, I don't even need to read through this book to tell you that it's a quality resource that you absolutely have to add to your library if you're serious about SCOM.

Side Note (and slight groupie story...)

I've just noticed that a link to one of my posts on SCOM 2012 APM got a mention and plug in the "General Resources" section of the OpsMgr 2012 Unleashed book and wanted to say a huge and sincere THANK YOU to whoever it was from the writing team above that took the time to read over my post and feel it worthy of a mention. It wasn't that long ago that I attended MMS 2011 and won a signed copy of the OpsMgr 2007 R2 Unleashed book from Cameron Fuller whilst attending (what still is so far for me) the most fun and interesting SCOM presentation I've ever seen. Reading that book on the plane back to Dublin, I never thought a few years later I'd have a mention in it's successor and it's an honour to be included.