System Center 2016 Operations + Live Maps = A winning combination

Now that we have moved into September, it´s about three weeks until Microsoft Ignite kicks off in Atlanta, and thousands of IT professionals are gathered for break-out sessions and keynotes etc. However, this year isn´t just like any other year. This year, Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 will be made generally available during the conference. This means that we now step into the next generation of Microsoft´s software and we have tons of new possibilities.

A major question when these new generations are being released, is if you´re ready to adopt it or if you´re stuck in the current version, because of dependencies in applications. To help you out with this (possible) issue, I´m going to show some news from SCOM 2016, but I will also try and run Live Maps with SCOM 2016.

Just to show you that I´m really using the latest versions, I have taken the below screenshot, which shows I am running Technical Preview 5 (which is also the final version before RTM) on both Windows Server and SCOM.

Looking into some of the news in SCOM 2016

Before you make the decision on upgrading from SCOM 2012 to 2016, you need to know about some of the changes.

The first thing I like to mention, is the Management Pack section. Not only can you see which Management Packs are installed, but now you can also get help with tuning the Management Packs. Perhaps some Management Packs generate more alerts storms than others. This is what you now can take action on, to make sure those alert floods don´t occur anymore.

The other thing I like to mention is “Updates and Recommendations”, which is a function to let you know what workloads are running in your environment and what Management Packs you should consider to install. This is really helpful if you don´t have full control of what applications are running out there. You can choose to install some or all of the recommended Management Packs.

Another (long wait for) addition, is the ability to schedule maintenance mode within the console. This has been possible before, but then you had to use custom built solutions such as PowerShell scripts to trigger the maintenance mode. Now you can schedule a group of servers to trigger one time or recurring, such as every month or so.

The last new feature I am going to show is the ”Partner Solutions” feature, which showed up in SCOM 2012 R2 a couple of Update Rollups back, but it´s also present in SCOM 2016. This feature highlights some of the third party solutions that are present out there, adding extra value to SCOM.

Trying Live Maps out in the new generation

We have come to the part where it´s time to try out Live Maps with this new generation. If you have been following my blogs for a while, you might have noticed that I have been running Live Maps on SCOM 2016. The installation went smoothly and there weren´t any errors at all, so the installation process is no different than for Live Maps on SCOM 2012. Better yet, with the latest release of Live Maps 8.2, it’s faster and easier than ever before to install Live Maps.

One feature that I´ve looked into a lot with Windows Server 2016, is the possibility to monitor a Nano server. You can read my blog post about this topic here. Once that is done, include the Nano server components in our business services. When browsing for the included components for your business service, you can now choose to look at several new classes, like the “Windows Nano Server Agent” class. This class, as you can see below, will show you only those servers that are running as Nano.

As you can see below, my Nano IIS Web Site service shows up as green, which means that it´s successfully running and I currently have no problems with the service.