Operations Manager, a component of Microsoft System Center 2012, is software that helps you monitor services, devices and operations for many computers from a single console.

Key features include:

• Network Monitoring: provides the ability to discover and monitor network routers and switches, including the network interfaces and ports on those devices and the virtual LAN (VLAN) that they participate in.
• Application Monitoring: you can monitor Internet Information Services (IIS)-hosted .NET applications from server and client-side perspectives to get details about application performance and reliability that can help you pinpoint root causes of incidents. 
• Resource Pools: contains only management servers and provides the ability to distribute workloads across multiple management servers, such as availability, network device monitoring, distributed monitor health rollup and group calculation.
• Removal of Root Management Server: management servers are peers; there is no root management server. The workload is split among all management servers in a management group, which provides high availability without requiring a cluster.
• Web Console: introduces a new web console that is optimised for faster load times and provides you with access to the new IT pro dashboards.
• Dashboard Views: includes new comprehensive dashboard views that combine multiple panels of information into a single view.
• Creating Dashboard Views: have been significantly upgraded in Operations Manager from their capabilities in System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, including custom layouts and nested dashboard views.