I am a big fan of active monitoring of Lync Server through System Center Operations Manager. In january I did a talk on this topic at the Nordic Infrastructure Conference (NIC) 2013 with an extensive demo. May 2013 I got the honour of publishing an article on this topic at the official Microsoft blog, NextHop. It is ranked in the top 1% most visited Microsoft blogs so there is a lot of activity there.

My key takeaways from the article is that Operations Manager, tuned and maintained correctly, will ensure Quality of Life for the administrators as well as the second and third tier support engineers. I strongly believe this, and I love what they have done with the Synthetic Transactions and improved them in the Watcher Node with rich error reporting.  Head over to NextHop to read more :) http://blogs.technet.com/b/nexthop/archive/2013/05/17/notes-from-the-field-lync-server-2013-and-active-monitoring-with-system-center-operations-manager.aspx

You can also view my NIC talk and download my deck from SlideShare