A class represents a certain type of object that is discovered and monitored by Operations Manager. This type of object could be anything from an application to a network device or a distributed application. The fundamental purpose of Operations Manager is to discover objects within the environment and monitor those objects. 

For those of you familiar with MOM 2005 you may not realize that we did have the concept of a class in that release. These appeared in the console as server roles in the state view and objects you saw in topology diagrams. Defining new classes and relationships in MOM 2005 was a secret art limited only to partners who were members of the Microsoft Management Alliance. You needed to get tools such as ACE (Attribute & Class Editor) to author new classes and we restricted distribution of these tools mainly because they could be very destructive if mistakes were made. Writing service discovery scripts once you had created new classes and relationships was also very difficult with limited debugging and tools to help you.

While there were classes in MOM 2005 these were not used for targeting rules and we had no concept of inheritance or other class concepts such as abstract classes and singletons. Classes were really a bolt on to the product to enable server role monitoring in a stateful way. Computers and computer groups were the way we really monitored and targeted rules.

Classes are a fundamental concept in Operations Manager 2007. Operations Manager has been totally re-architected to deliver on service orientated monitoring. Part of this re-architecture is to move away from just monitoring at the computer level and using groups of computers to target monitoring. Now we base our product around defining, discovering and monitoring applications, components, devices and services. The foundation of this is the concept of a class.

This section provides a walkthrough of everything you need to know about classes, inheritance, our class library, objects, identity and lifetime.

You may have noticed that in the Operations Console we never use the term class. This was actually a deliberate decision as we did not want to introduce developer type concepts to the majority of Operations Console users. Classes do appear in the console and you see these in a number of places. For example:

If you ever want to see instances of a class you can use the discovered inventory view.  Go to this view and change the target class to the class you want.  You will see all instances that have been discovered of that type.  This is a very useful view during MP development before you create your own views.