Site Names with SC Op Man

Using Site names makes it a lot easier to work out where alerts are coming from

The System Center Operations Manager team at Microsoft has posted some good advice on their blog showing how to use Site names when deploying the Operations Manager gateway role. If you tag the gateway with a Site name, any alerts that are sent from an agent reporting to this gateway will include the name of the Site in the "Site" property. This means you can build specific alert views and send notifications that include the name, making the information much more understandable.

The general steps for deploying a gateway with a site name are as follows:

1. Request certificates for any computer in the agent, gateway server, management server chain
2. Import those certificates into the target computers by using the MOMCertImport.exe tool
3. On the Management server you plan to have the gateway report to, run the gateway approval tool.
4. Install the gateway software on the gateway server.

You can then create a new alert view in the monitoring space and configure "from a specific site" to the name of the site you configured when running the tool.

In addition, Operations Manager R2 you can configure notifications to use the "from a specific site" alert criteria from the Subscription wizard.

You can read more at the System Center Operations Manager blog. There's a detailed description of how to deploy a gateway with a site name on TechNet.