OM12 R2: What’s New?

First of all, when comparing the speed of the release cycles with trains, Microsoft is becoming a high speed train. In order to make it more clear, simply take a look at these SCOM 2007 products and their GA dates:

• SCOM 2007 RTM: April 2007
• SCOM 2007 SP1: February 2008
• SCOM 2007 R2: July 2009

And compare those dates with the GA dates of OM12:

• OM12 RTM: April 2012
• OM12 SP1: January 2013
• OM12 R2: Q4 2013

As you can see, the R2 edition comes out way much faster compared to the R2 release for SCOM 2007!

This posting is about the new or updated features of OM12 R2 in a nut shell the most important ones:

Fabric monitoring > Cloud Hybrid Monitoring
VMM 2012 R2 and OM12 R2 will be better integrated, enabling Cloud Hybrid Monitoring, basically meaning the monitoring of the physical and virtual layers of hybrid cloud environments. For this an additional MP is required which I haven’t found on the download location yet. When I have located this MP I’ll update this posting accordingly.

Microsoft Monitoring Agent
This is a new version and a stand alone edition of the OM12 R2 Agent which includes the full functionality of Visual Studio IntelliTrace Collector. This tool can be used with OM12 R2 or as a standalone tool for collecting application traces locally.

IPv6 support
Network devices running IPv6 can be discovered now by OM12 R2. Their IPv6 addresses will be shown as well in the related views.

Integration with System Center Advisor
System Center Advisor (SCA) is a product which is based on the same architecture as SCOM/OM12. Only the functionality is different.

Where as SCOM/OM12 are real time monitoring products, SCA is more like an advances Best Practices Analyzer tool. It scans the monitored systems and uploads once per 24 hours the collected results to a cloud based solution running in Azure.There the uploaded results are compared to the best practices AND the findings of Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS). When any differences are found, you can check them out in a sharp looking web based dashboard which is also hosted in Azure.

So it wasn’t a question whether SCA and SCOM/OM12 would be integrated, but when. Now with OM12 R2 SCA will get it’s own place in the OM12 R2 Console.

Application Performance Monitoring for Java
Microsoft means business with cross platform support. So APM is extended to Java as well now.

Not listed, but present as well: fixes for known bugs
And yes, OM12 R2 will contain a list of bug fixes as well.

Overall impression
Looking at the speed of the release cycles (OM12 RTM > OM12 SP1 > OM12 R2) it’s surprising to find that many new or improved features in the R2 release. It makes clear Microsoft means business with System Center 2012 as a product, OM12 being the component for monitoring all the aspects related to running one or more clouds or on-premise hard- and software. When looking at the new features it makes clear Microsoft aims at the cloud, application development and cloud based services. This makes OM12 R2 more and more a product for the enterprises.

Check out this website for more detailed information about what’s new in OM12 R2.