Earlier this summer two tools for developing Management Packs in Operations Manager was released from Microsoft.
Visual Studio Authoring Extensions
Visual Studio Authoring Extensions or VSAE is a add-in that allows development or Management packs is Visual Studio 2010 Professional or higher.
From the Microsoft Technet WIKI:
- Work directly with the XML of the management pack allowing you to create any management pack element and monitoring scenario.
- Provides XML templates and IntelliSense for different management pack elements so that you don’t have to have detailed knowledge of the schema.
- Allows you to create XML fragments containing different management pack elements. The fragments can be copied within the management pack, to another management pack, and combined to build the final management pack.
- Allows multiple authors to work on a single management pack project at the same time.
It can be downloaded from here.
Visio Management Pack Designer
This add-on enables the possibility to design Management packs in Visio and export your it. Visio 2010 Premium is required to use this add-on.
From the Microsoft Technet WIKI:
When not to use the VMPD
- If your monitor is based on a script. The monitoring shapes that are part of the VMPD provide a wide range of monitoring features but do not support script-based monitoring at this time.
- If your monitor requires logic that is not available in an existing shape. For example, you may want an event monitor that checks an application log at specific intervals and looks for a heartbeat event. If that event does not appear for a certain period of time, you’d want to raise an alert. There is not currently a missing event monitor in the VMPD.
It can be downloaded from here.