MMS 2013: News From The OM Front

Today I attended the session IM-B318 - Panel Discussion: System Center Operations Manager. Many of the PMs of the OM team were present, answering questions from the audience. Speakers were Anna Timasheva, Daniel Savage, Daniele Muscetta, Joseph Chan, Tigran Shahbazian.

During this session I felt a positive vibe which makes me believe to have witnessed the rebirth of OM. Why you ask? Let me clarify.

Dashboarding
Even though dashboarding is hugely improved in OM12 compared to SCOM 2007 (R2) there are still issues. These issues are recognized by Microsoft and they’re putting effort, time, resources and budget into it in order to address these issues. In the next Rollup Update these fixes will be present!

Azure monitoring
At this moment the Azure MP misses out a lot of functionality compared to what Azure has to offer today. Microsoft knows that and will publish the updated Azure MP this week. Expected time of arrival is Thursday this week. During the session this MP was partly demonstrated.

Some highlights:

• Support for multiple subscriptions;
• Improved wizards;
• Discovery and monitoring of many Azure components;
• Azure storage monitoring;
• Comprehensive diagrams.

Connector for System Center Advisor
This Connector is released today, allowing SCOM to pull in SCA data and Alert upon it. Want to know more? Read this blog posting and download it from here.

System Center 2012 Console mess
Today the System Center 2012 components are using different Consoles, UI and web based. It has become a ‘console jungle’ which makes it hard for companies, having deployed multiple System Center 2012 components, to maintain. Also the decision to introduce SilverLight™ for the web based consoles is a bad call. Simply because SilverLight™ doesn’t run on many other web browsers.

In todays world people use a myriad of devices to display data. The System Center consoles of tomorrow should be able to work on those devices, no matter what vendor, OS or browser.

Microsoft is aware of this and working hard to make it right. But this is something not to be taken lightly and requires a huge effort, budget- and resource allocation. It will take some time but I hope for the best.

Management Pack quality
Finally there is a new person back on the helm to drive the quality of the MPs delivered by Microsoft. For now some MPs are really good where as other are just plain awful and bad news for the overall SCOM experience.

Daniel Savage is the person on the helm now and is open to comments on any MP delivered by Microsoft. Back in 2008 I met Daniel for the first time (TechEd Barcelona) and came to know him as a person with a huge drive. If there is anyone capable of bringing the Microsoft MPs to a new level of overall quality, it’s him.

For what’s worth it he has my full support and soon I’ll provide him with feedback on the pro’s and con’s of todays MPs delivered by Microsoft.

As you can see it was a good session with good news as well. And yes, not everything discussed is available today but it’s in the heart and minds of the PMs involved AND on their agenda. So this gives me a huge positive vibe!