potential problems are detected or when best practices are not being followed. Often
customers object that when first implemented, Operations Manager floods them with
alerts. This could be for various reasons (perhaps the environment has a lot of
problems that should be fixed), but often Operations Manager will be tuned to ignore
configurations that perhaps are not best practice but are nevertheless accepted by the
organization.
Many third parties provide management packs for their applications and hardware
devices. When I think about “it’s all about the application” as a key tenant of the
private cloud, the Operations Manager’s ability to monitor from the hardware, storage,
and network all the way through the OS to the application is huge, but it goes even
further in Operations Manager 2012.
System Center Operations Manager 2012 introduced several changes, but two huge
ones were around network monitoring and custom application monitoring. First,
Microsoft licensed technology from EMC called SMARTS, which enables a rich
discovery and monitoring of network devices. With the network discovery and
monitoring functionality, Operations Manager can identify the relationship between
network devices and services to understand, for example, that port 3 on this switch
connects to server A. Then, if a switch problem occurs, Operations Manager will know
the affected servers. CPU and memory information, among other types of information,
is available for supported network devices.
The other big change was the acquisition by Microsoft of AVIcode, which is now
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) in Operations Manager 2012. APM
provides monitoring of custom applications without any changes needed by the
application. APM currently supports .NET applications and Java Enterprise Edition
(JEE).
Like SCVMM, Operations Manager 2016 investments include supporting all of the
new Windows Server 2016 features but also extending monitoring support for LAMP
stack, Azure, Office 365, and more. Additionally, Operations Manager has focused
significant effort on easing the workload for administrators in understanding what
management packs (MPs) are needed and if new versions are available. This now
surfaces as Updates and Recommendations in the Operations Management console
that will advise on new MPs and updates to MPs that will bring benefit to the
environment. Additionally, the amount of “alert noise” (large numbers of alerts that
muddy the data being viewed and therefore obstruct the viewing of alerts that you
really care about) has been reduced, with more intuitive tuning via tune management
packs.
System Center Data Protection Manager
System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) is Microsoft’s best-of-breed backup,
continuous data protection, and recovery solution for key Microsoft workloads,
including SharePoint, SQL Server, Dynamics, Exchange, Hyper-V, file services, and
desktops. DPM allows granular recovery of information within the supported options