In this chapter, we began with an overview of what a distributed application is and how it applied to OpsMgr. We then discussed the different pre-built distributed application templates that you can use before walking you through creating a new distributed application using the Blank (Advanced) template.

We also gave you an understanding of health rollup policies and how to configure them before demonstrating how to create service level objectives that mapped back to SLA's defined by the organization. At the end of the chapter, we showed you some typical examples of views that you can add to the Monitoring workspace to make it easy to manage and interact with your monitored IT services.

In the next chapter, we will show you some tips and tricks for tuning your alerts – including how to use distributed application model views to help reduce noise based on the context of your IT services.