Authoring

Authoring is the process involving the development by an author work of a Management Pack to expand SCOM capabilities to monitor an application or a system.

Process
The authoring is a process made of several phase during a project.
 * 1) Analysis. It involves gathering the business requirements, the specifics of the monitoring wanted by the project sponsor and information about the application or system.
 * 2) Development. The actual writing of the first versions of the MP. At this stage the MP is still a beta and might require changes.
 * 3) Testing. It usually involves importing the MP in a development environment and testing its features on a small scale version of the organization production environment.
 * 4) User Acceptance Testing. A demonstration of the MP in a testing or dedicated environment to the project sponsor. This phase allows all the party involved to provide feedback on the version and sign-off when the MP is considered ready for production deployment.
 * 5) Deployment. Importing the MP into the production environment of the organization and all the execution of any configuration tasks that might be required by the MP.
 * 6) Fine-tuning. A phase that might involve monitoring the MP alerts and behaviors in the production environment to reduce alert noise or adjust threshold.
 * 7) Updating. A continual improvement of the MP when a change, a fix or an update is required within the organization.

Tools
Different solutions are available to work with Management Pack. Each one providing different levels of complexity, capabilities and easiness of use.

Operations Console
The most basic way to work with Management Pack is directly in the Operations Console. The Monitoring workspace offers features to create overrides for existing workflows (Rule, Monitor). The Authoring workspace provide more options allowing a user to create new elements using Management Pack Templates or directly elements listed in the workspace: Monitor, Rule, Discovery, Attribute, Override. The interface make it easy to work with Management Pack with little or average knowledge. It is also limited in features and cannot let an author work with more complex scenarios (Modules, scripts, classes, relationships).

Authoring Console
The authoring console is a software provided by Microsoft dedicated to the creation and modification of Management Pack. It is significantly more complex and powerful than the Operations Console for Management Pack manipulation.

XML editor
An XML editor provides the deepest level of flexibility by allowing an author to modify directly the XML code of a Management Pack. It also requires the author to have a better understanding of the Management Pack structure.

Visual Studio Authoring Extensions
The Authoring Extensions is an add-in that can be installed on a Visual Studio installation. It provides the same level of flexibility and capabilities than a XML editor, plus all the features offered by Visual Studio.

Visio Management Pack Designer
An add-in provided by Microsoft to develop the structure of Management Pack service model using a graphic interface.