This is just a small but important message if you are in a migration or in a situation where you have multiple SCOM management groups of different versions.
When you update the SCOM Console on your server or workstation to SCOM 2022 Console, you can not use it to connect to down-level SCOM management groups anymore (2019/180x/2016/2012). When opening in the Monitoring pane it will give an error. But it looks like alerts screens can still be read. If you select the Administration pane, the console will immediately crash.
The reason is for a big part the new RBAC model, which it tries to enforce and while connecting to the older SCOMs they do not understand it. Also, there have been several changes to the SDK in the background, which can cause some issues. Several SCOM-related add-on vendors are investigating SDK related problems and finding ways to solve that a product has to work with multiple SCOM versions normally.
While doing a migration from 1 SCOM to another version of SCOM, upgrading the consoles on machines outside the SCOM infra itself (tooling servers, workstations etc.), would be among the last steps of the migration procedure. Now it is more important to keep that procedure that way.
As far as I have tested and tried, you can still use a SCOM 2019 console to connect to a SCOM 2022 backend, but you will not see the new options and adjustments show up.
When you find yourself in a situation whereby you need to connect for a while to multiple SCOM management groups and they are not yet all at the 2022 level, make sure you have some 2019 console around. Of course, some changes to make against the new 2022 version for its new features, you can use a SCOM 2022 console installed on a SCOM server to make those adjustments.
A statement I received was that connecting the SCOM 2022 console to another level SCOM is not supported. I have not seen clear statements in the documentation about that yet – since it states there can be coexistence with SCOM2019UR3 (which is of course for the in-place migration scenarios).
At least now we know this happens and the why (mostly) and we can take it into account going forward while doing our upgrades.
Update 25 April 2022: Microsoft added this to the Release Notes here.
Good luck monitoring!
Keep your eye on our upcoming webinars about SCOM 2022, during SCOMathon and Silect MP University, as well!