SCOM 2012 R2 (Preview) changes

I'm currently looking into the changes coming with the R2 release of SCOM 2012 R2.

A lot of new features are presented with this new release. Features like 360 Fabric Monitoring and better integration with VMM give administrations a complete overview of their private cloud. Extended with the updated Azure management pack, you now can complement this overview.

User experience is enhanced by improved dashboards performance. A very nice welcome feature is Java APM (Application Performance Monitoring), this will have the same experience as the existing .NET APM monitoring capabilities. Java APM allows you to monitor application performance from a server and client side perspective.

For what I've read about Java APM, it's not exactly the same as .NET APM, (byte-code instrumentation as someone called it)

Together with enhanced IntelliTrace support and improved TFS integration this will help your DevOps strategy to bring development and application management closer together.

Microsoft decided to change the cross-platform management interface. This could impact you, if you develop cross-platform management packs. See my next blog for that.

Want to see it for yourself? Download the evaluation package: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/evalcenter/dn205295.aspx

Need to convince your manager to get budget for upgrading to R2? Get the white paper here :)

SCOM: 2012 Wish List

Last week I was present at the first SCUG (System Center User Group) meeting for this year. It was a great source of information. Two speakers from Microsoft USA were present to tell us about the application monitoring feature (AviCode) and Network Monitoring feature. It looks great and promising!

As SCOM 2012 is going to be released and everyone is wondering what new features it might bring, I would like to share my ideas/wishes for the next SCOM releases. I'm pretty sure these are not available in SCOM 2012.

• Remove boundary for sealed en unsealed MP's.
  • Microsoft Best Practices for SCOM conflict with available functionality in SCOM.
    
  • Using one management group all self developed MP's are unsealed and their is no way to include objects from those unsealed MP's in a distributed application.
  • Currently sealing is the only solution. However sealing breaks MP's in which MP templates are used. Yeeh!
    
• Light-weight Operator Console for better performance
  
• Scale down Authoring in Operator Console, move functionality to Authoring Console.
  
• Increase usability
• Decrease complexity
• Create intuitive GUI layer on top of current console.
• Ease up using the Authoring Console as it was easy to create MP's in MOM 2005 with the adminstrator console.
• Possibility to use templates in the Authoring Console.
• Allow role 'Author' to make use of the Management Pack templates. Currently only a SCOM Administrator is allowed to make use of them.
  
• Dynamic component groups for DA's from the GUI to avoid XML usage.
• Log file monitoring for circular log files
• Out of the box better alert message possibities (read property bag definition from script, alert message templates)
• Possibility to use XPath expressions in alert suppression or a GUI layer for xpath dummies, like $Data/Context/Params[Contains(Param[1],"Fatal"). This can be handy when monitoring error events in logfile
• Review the current class model. There so much classes now. Is this really necessary? The new Network Monitoring features add classes for each component and each brand. Why not using multiple discoveries for 1 class?

If you have other good ideas/wishes, let me know!