A welcome change in Service Manager 2016 is a new HTML5-based self-service portal
that was previously a huge pain point for using Service Manager. Service Manager also
integrates tightly with OMS.
System Center Orchestrator
System Center Orchestrator is the result of an acquisition of a product called Opalis,
which has been renamed System Center Orchestrator as part of System Center 2012.
Orchestrator provides two key capabilities that, as with Service Manager, I dive into in
more detail in a later chapter.
First, Opalis was acquired because it had connectivity to many of the major datacenter
applications and systems that exist, which with the acquisition now includes the
Microsoft solutions. Integration packs exist for many systems and provide activities
that are specific to the integration pack target, but Orchestrator can talk to targets that
don’t have integration packs, using many types of communication, including WMI,
SSH, PowerShell, SNMP, and many more.
Second, Opalis had powerful runbook automation capabilities that leveraged all of this
connectivity. Runbooks that were typically manually actioned by IT administrators
and business users can be migrated to Orchestrator using an easy-to-use flowchart-
type interface and can be completely automated. One shortcoming of Orchestrator is
the limited capabilities of integration packs that would often result in having to use
.NET activities to use PowerShell commands to complete functionality.
A PowerShell-based alternative is also provided, Orchestrator Service Management
Automation (SMA), which enables standard PowerShell modules to be used as part of
runbooks instead of the Orchestrator proprietary integration packs. It is Orchestrator
SMA that is the future of Orchestrator and provides the greatest consistency with
Azure Automation.
It is because of these capabilities that Orchestrator is shown as the foundation of the
System Center product. All of the other System Center components can leverage
Orchestrator for action requests made to other systems and complex processes.
Orchestrator can talk to the rest of System Center, enabling automation of processes
that use many components of System Center and other systems through a single
runbook.