SCOM – Monitoring a Service – Part 6 Other options

This is the last post in the series on how to monitor a service in SCOM. There are a lot of options and I have tried to touch upon the most common and simple in this series. This last post will try to give some directions on further options and links to resources. This will not be complete and suggestions are always welcome.
First of all the list of posts in this series:

And now on to the conclusions and resources.
So what other options are there to monitor services and other stuff?
Well, the most simple things to keep in mind are of course… Is there already a management pack for this? Try the catalog for Microsoft products, but also for references to third party solutions to monitor other products. In some cases these are created by the manufacturer of the software and in some cases by third parties who are specialised in creating management packs for several products. A number of these will be mentioned below. Also check out the community contributions – there are many of those around and many of those can be found through systemcentercentral.com . The community is a valuable source.
If these do not cover what you want you will move on to simple management packs with a few monitors for instance as mentioned in several posts in this series or make it a bit more complicated as I have shown in part 4 or move on to completely writing a management pack in the Authoring console (separate download) for instance.
There are a lot of resources already available on the net and I will include a number of those in links below. Contributions to the list are welcome through email bob @ the domain in the address bar above :). Sorry to have disabled comments on this blog, but I got blasted by stuff that was not on topic and in amounts I could not moderate anymore.
Alright guys and girls, I am sorry, but as I am going off to the MMS 2011 tomorrow morning I am not able to finish the links list. I will add those to this post on a later date and make a posting referring back to this one.
Links:
System Center Online product documentation (with MP authoring console online help, mp authoring console scenarios, mp authoring guide, cross plat mp authoring guide, mp module reference, report authoring guide).
How do I videos by authoring superman Brian Wren.
Brian Wrens blog with links to resources.
System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Authoring Resource Kit
A series of posts on tasks from my friend Marnix Wolf. Is a must read.
Enjoy authoring and monitoring!
Bob Cornelissen