Putting the Ops in OpsMgr

This article provides an overview of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)—its purpose, core components (Management Group, Operational and Data Warehouse databases, Management/Reporting/Web servers, Agents), consoles, and common topologies (single, small distributed, medium distributed)—and outlines recommended service accounts and security group practices. It then introduces a modular Ludus/Ansible collection to automate building SCOM lab environments for testing and research, with roles for SQL setup, Operations Console, Reporting (SSRS), Management/Web servers, additional management servers, service account creation, agent deployment, and optional firewall disabling; repository: https://github.com/Synzack/ludus_scom.