We recently held an online session on SCOM 2016. Hosted by Savision’s Support Manager, Chris Malay. The session featured top industry experts: Microsoft Product Manager – Mahesh Narayanan, Microsoft Program Manager – Aditya Goda, Microsoft MVP – Marnix Wolf, and Microsoft MVP – Damian Flynn. The experts focused on what’s new and what lies ahead in SCOM 2016. We had over 40 great questions from attendees during our Q&A session. We compiled the top 10 questions that popped up, below:

1. Is there an in-place upgrade plan to migrate to SCOM 2016 from SCOM 2012 R2 CU12?

Yes, you can upgrade from SCOM 2012 R2 UR 12 to SCOM 2016 as long as the underlying components (SQL, Server OS and so on) are on par with SCOM 2016 requirements. On TechNet there are multiple documents on how to upgrade from SCOM 2012 R2 to SCOM 2016:

Get started: Upgrade to System Center 2016 & Upgrading to System Center 2016.

2. Will Maintenance Mode Scheduling be brought to the Web Console?

At this point in time, the Microsoft team’s focus is on having the HTML5 dashboards as a replacement for the Silverlight dashboards. Posterior to that, the MSFT SCOM team will evaluate bridging any functionality that IT operators think is missing from the Web Console.

3. Are there going to be improvements to the Office 365 Management Pack?

Initially, with the Office 365 management pack, Microsoft offered very basic metrics of some of the trackers of the Office 365 service quality. All other core and auxiliary monitoring scenarios pertaining to a customer’s subscription and experience of the O365 service requires further evaluation.

4. Can you please provide some more details about App Insight integration with SCOM 2016? Are you referring to OMS integration with SCOM or are you saying that the Azure MP now gives us the possibility to tap into the APM capabilities in App Insight?

App Insight will be publishing an MP, by which you will be able to visualize the App Insight’s application monitoring experience out of SCOM (like alerts and metrics). And with its integration with Azure MP, you would be able to consolidate the data collection experience from the ARM interfaces exposed by Azure for App Insights, like is the case for other Azure services.

5. Can or will OMS fully replace SCOM alerting and report capabilities?

Microsoft is still gathering customer interest around this request, as there are certain customers who want to leverage OMS for alerting/reporting capabilities that complements with their SCOM. For further information, you can contact the SCOM team.

6. What is the difference between a SCOM assessment available in OMS and a SCOM RaaS?

The SCOM Run as Account Assessment (RaaS) is a premier support offering that helps prevent serious issues from occurring by analyzing the health and risks present in your current environment. Major rules/checks, which are part of RaaS, are now available to all customers’ SCOM assessment. By using the SCOM assessment, SCOM customers can get critical insights about their environment regularly.

More details on SCOM assessment are available here.

7. What is the future of SCOM, now that OMS Log Analytics is here? Why use SCOM instead of OMS Log Analytics?

OMS isn’t SCOM and SCOM isn’t OMS. SCOM is all about monitoring and OMS is all about log analytics with basic monitoring capabilities. OMS Log analytics offers a platform for diagnostics and analytics workflows, with query-based alerting.

At this moment, OMS lacks (for instance) the service model and health model, being the heart of SCOM. As a direct result, OMS doesn’t do State Changes, and doesn’t do Classes, Relationships and so on. OMS is perfectly fit for machine learning, enabling it to gain an understanding of your environment, automating the tuning process significantly.

8. Will SCOM 2016 be the last version of SCOM? There are lots of rumors out there claiming that OMS will completely replace SCOM. With more and more companies using cloud services, does OMS provide all solutions provided by SCOM 2016. Can we use OMS instead of SCOM 2016?

There are SCOM customers who are averse to cloud migration (especially certain industry verticals), and there are customers who are cloud savvy and ready to migrate or expand their IT into the cloud. SCOM will continue to exist and improve to be a monitoring platform for the former category of customers. Microsoft will also evolve their portfolio of cloud based monitoring for the customers who are ready to subscribe to cloud for their IT needs.

As shared during the session, Microsoft is heading towards the current branch model (currently implemented by SCCM) where they will have regular releases at shorter cadence. These releases will have all the feature updates to the product. This way, both customer segments will get the value-additions for the respective solutions in a shorter cadence.

9. Is the 2016 Web Console mobile friendly (iPhone and Android)?

Currently, the Web console is not mobile friendly, it opens the full view when accessed from a mobile. This is one of the areas Microsoft is exploring to fix. Microsoft believes in strong partner engagement, so they are, as of this moment, letting partners like Savision optimize the overarching, larger experience with the SCOM console.

10. Will the native Dashboards be improved in regards to speed and functionality to enable showing information to other relevant stakeholders, besides Engineers? Fortunately, Savision are addressing this but it would be good to see this addressed natively.

Microsoft will improve the experience for a set of scenarios that are much required by IT operators. The SCOM team is currently working on the HTML5 dashboards to replace the Silverlight dashboard. They are also planning to work on a few improvements in the overall dashboard experience. As of now, Microsoft strongly looks forward to work with partners like Savision, who bring in an added advantage in regards to the customers’ dashboard experience.

If you would like to receive the full list of questions and answers from our experts, send an email to marketing@savision.com and we will send you the full list.

Did you miss the live online session? The on-demand version is now available. You can register to watch it here.