Monitoring Your Customers System Center Essentials Server Remotely

This month one the core topics we are talking about at the TechNet Live Events is System Center Essentials.  Many times we have attendee overlap with the TS2 Partner Seminar in the afternoon.  It was during a break from the TS2 sessions that I had an interesting question posed to me from an attendee. 

JJ, the TS2 presenter had been talking about System Center Remote Operations Manager.  The question was around the product and if it could be used to remotely monitor a 3rd party's System Center Operations Manager deployment.  I wasn't completely sure of the answer, as far as I knew it was only for monitoring remote System Center Essentials at remote sites. 

I went to our partner website and got some more definitive information about Remote Operations Manager.   There are a couple of great resources available for download:  the Remote Operations Manager 2007 Deployment Guide and the Microsoft System Center Remote Operations Manager 2007 FAQ.

From the FAQ:

"Remote Operations Manager is a separate product aimed at service providers who serve small and medium-sized business customers, focused on monitoring Windows server environments. ROM allows providers to establish a secure connection to customer’s implementation of Essentials and remotely provide real-time management capabilities. All features of Essentials are exposed to the service provider through this secure management channel, and Essentials is required to be licensed at the customer premise."

Bottom-line, it enables IT service providers to respond immediately and remotely to any issues that may affect the remote customers IT environment.