What’s New In SCOM 2016?

SCOM 2016 brings new features and options. Evn though it’s hard to say exactly what they all are, I’ve made a shortlist, based on the Microsoft Ignite 2016 video’s all about System Center 2016, 144 in total(!).

No, I haven’t seen them all. However, during my weekend I scanned about 30+ of them in order to get a deeper understanding of what’s all new in SCOM 2016 and the related Management Packs (MPs).

This is the list I made, which isn’t complete yet. My comments are between brackets:

Improved operations

• Maintenance Mode Schedules (can also be done through PowerShell);
• MP Updates & Recommendations feature (hopefully the underlying MP Catalog will be maintained properly now);
• VSAE for VS 2015 (for the MP author a hard requirement);
• In-place upgrade (will write a posting about this one soon);
• HTML5 Web Console (partially for now, with a UR/CU it will become 100% HTML5 based. Dashboards still have the Silverlight dependency);
• Tune MPs in an easier manner (easier to single out the alert storm culprits).

Integrated network monitoring

• Extensible network device monitoring (still have to test drive this new feature. Sounds hopeful though);
• Network performance monitoring with OMS integration (as expected. OMS is the new future or even the new presence as well).

New MPs

• Azure;
• Office 365;
• Exchange Server;
• Server OS, also for DNS, DHCP, IIS, NLB, IIS etc.;
• Nano Server & related workloads;
• LAMP stack;
• Storage monitoring;
• CPS monitoring.

Integrated network monitoring (or better: Enhanched OMS integration)

• Extensible network device monitoring;
• Network performance monitoring with OMS integration.