Cloud on Your Terms Part 13 of 30 System Center Operations Manager

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180-day evaluation of Operations Manager 2007 R2

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, Microsoft’s end-to-end service-management product, is your best choice for Windows environments. It works seamlessly with Microsoft infrastructure servers, such as Windows Server, and application servers, such as Microsoft Exchange, helping you to increase efficiency while enabling greater control of the IT environment.

As a significant step towards fulfilling Microsoft’s common management vision, Operations Manager 2007 R2 also helps you monitor Windows Azure applications, thus allowing you to extend your familiar on-premises monitoring solution to public cloud scenarios.

Key Benefits

  • Exceptional application performance and availability for Microsoft environments
  • Provides end-to-end service management for your datacenter services
  • Helps increase the efficiency and control of your datacenter environments
  • Unified monitoring across your private and public cloud services

Information on SCOM can be found at: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/operations-manager.aspx

 

We also have a Tech Center for System Center Operations Manager on TechNet  it is located here:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/systemcenter/om/bb497976

 

As I was starting to write this blog post on System Center Operations manager, I was reading today on the System Center Blog posted by Kevin Holman.

 

Details on System Center Operation Manager 2012 Release Candidate released 11-10-11

Details at: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/operations-manager-2012.aspx

Download from: https://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=27974

Full set of product documentation is available: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh205987.aspx

Details and features of the OM2012 RC:

Feature Summary

  • Setup Improvements
    Operations Manager 2012 has a new Setup wizard.
  • Highly Available Management Group Out of the Box
    In Operations Manager 2012, all 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.
  • Resource pools
    A resource pool provides the ability to distribute workloads across multiple management servers, such as availability, network device monitoring, distributed monitor health rollup, and group calculation.
  • Agent Configuration
    Operations Manager 2012 provides an easy method for configuring agents to report to multiple management servers by adding an Operations Manager Agent application to Control Panel on each agent-managed computer.
  • Operations Console
    You will notice some subtle changes to the Operations console. The Actions pane is now the Tasks pane, and includes a new section called Navigation Tasks that makes it easy for you to open views for a selected object. The Tasks pane offers two tabs: one for actions and one for resources and Help links. The Navigation and Tasks panes can be hidden or revealed instantly by clicking the arrow in the title bar of the pane.
  • Web console
    Operations Manager 2012 introduces a new Web console. In Operations Manager 2012, all Operations Manager views are available in the Web console.
  • Network monitoring
    Operations Manager 2012 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. You can also delete discovered network devices and prevent the deleted network devices from being rediscovered the next time discovery runs. For more information, see Monitor Network Devices.
  • Application monitoring
    In Operations Manager 2012, you can monitor ASP.NET applications in server- and client-side environments to get details about application availability and performance. Configure monitoring settings, such as polling frequency and transaction threshold. Then use results, including how frequently a problem is occurring, how a server was performing when a problem occurred, and the distributed chain for a transaction in question to pinpoint problems and solutions. For more information, see Monitor a .NET Application.
  • Dashboard views
    As part of the network monitoring and application monitoring capabilities, Operations Manager 2012 includes new comprehensive dashboard views that combine multiple panels of information into a single view. In Operations Manager 2012, you can add the new dashboard views to My Workspace.
  • Display dashboard views using SharePoint
    The Operations Manager web part displays specified dashboard views and can be added to Microsoft SharePoint 2010 sites. For more information, see Add a Dashboard View to a SharePoint Site.
  • Creating dashboard views
    Dashboard views have been significantly upgraded in Operations Manager 2012 from their capabilities in Operations Manager 2007 R2, including custom layouts and nested dashboard views. For more information, see Create a Dashboard View.
  • Operations Manager Module for Windows PowerShell
    Operations Manager 2012 provides a Windows PowerShell 2.0 module containing a full set of new cmdlets. The cmdlets in this module are only compatible with Operations Manager 2012. You can recognize the Operations Manager 2012 cmdlets by the "SC" preceding the noun. For additional information about the Operations Manager 2012 cmdlets, open the Operations Manager command shell and type Get-Help about_OpsMgr_WhatsNew. For information about how the Operations Manager 2007 cmdlets map to the Operations Manager 2012 cmdlets, type Get-Help about_OpsMgr_Cmdlet_Names.To use the Operations Manager 2012 cmdlets, you must establish a connection to an Operations Manager management group. You can establish either a persistent connection in which you can run multiple cmdlets, or a temporary connection when running a single cmdlet. For more information about connections, open the Operations Manager Shell and type Get-Help about_OpsMgr_Connections.
  • UNIX- and Linux-based computers
    In Operations Manager 2012, the Discovery Wizard is easier to use for discovering UNIX- and Linux-based computers. You can now use Windows PowerShell to manage UNIX- and Linux-based computers, for more information, see the UNIX and Linux section in the release notes. High availability is also supported.

UNIX/Linux Shell Command Template Management Pack
This Management Pack implements authoring templates that allow the creation of rules, tasks, and monitors based on execution of shell commands on UNIX/Linux agents.
JEE Management Packs
These management packs monitor JEE (Java Enterprise Edition) application servers. Management packs are available for IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, Red Hat JBoss and Apache Tomcat.

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