System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 CTP2 is AVAILABLE!

Since a few days Microsoft has released CTP2 of Service Pack 1 for System Center 2012.

Before you start to download and install it however there are some SERIOUS issues you need to reckon with though:

1. CTP1 cannot be upgraded to CTP2 and CTP2 will not be upgradable to Beta.
2. CTP builds are not supported for production use, even for TAP customers.
3. All components now support Windows Server 2012 RC and SQL Server 2012.

So think before you click.

CTP2 contains these improvements for OM12:

1. Support for installing the product on Windows Server 2012 for all components: agent, server, databases, etc;
2. Support for using SQL Server 2012 to host the databases;
3. Support for IIS8 / Windows Server 2012 RC in APM (this requires the monitoring packs for Windows Server "8" beta that are released to TAP customers);
4. Support Monitoring of Windows Services built on the .NET Framework with APM;
5. ASP.NET MVC3 and MVC4 applications are discovered automatically by APM;
6. New Transaction types in APM for MVC pages and WCF methods; it is also now possible to define transactions on WCF endpoints;
7. Enhancements in the way WCF parameters are displayed in APM events;
8. Monitoring of applications that make use of Azure Storage with APM is now aware of Azure tables, blobs, queues as SQL Azure calls;
9. Dashboard showing combined health and SLAs for an application monitored thru both Synthetic transactions as well as APM.

And it introduces GSM as well:
a new cloud enabled capability called “Global Service Monitor” (GSM) extends the application monitoring in System Center 2012 to enable you to add “outside-in” testing to incorporate a true reflection of users’ experience of your web site or web application. To evaluate System Center 2012 SP1 with GSM, sign up for the customer preview of GSM.

Reminders

• CTP builds are not upgradable and not supported for production use.
• Procedures not covered in the documentation might not work.

Downloads

1. Service Pack 1 CTP2 for all System Center 2012 components;
2. Technical documentation for Service Pack 1 CTP2.

Remark:
Much of this posting has been copied and pasted from this posting written by Daniele Muscetta. I don’t think he’ll mind but just for the records :).