As stated in the previous post, there was a SCOM CEP meeting last week which I wanted to discuss as I am enthusiastic about the CEP program and even more about the upcoming product and its possibilities. So lets continue with what Justin Incarnato discussed as new features and my personal opinion on those. Some of these will be more extensively blogged by several in the SCOM community and I will do so too.
There has been a big investment into dashboards and visualization. O yeah and the web console is now written in Silverlight 🙂 One of the things that has been requested a lot by SCOM admins has been a better quick view dashboard into the health of SCOM itself. This is now provided. It is better possible to publish dashboards to the console, web console and SharePoint. There are howto guides available for this in the documentation.
Cross plat. The discovery wizard changed a lot. Added su and sudo possibilities, so no direct root password is needed anymore. This should help in the discussions with the Linux/Unix guys in order to get these machines monitored in SCOM. RedHat 6 and AIX 7.1 support is now included as well (RH6 support is also included in CU5 for SCOM2007R2 which has just been released).
Personal note from Bob -> this is absolutely great as we have run into many discussions, but also some problems due to these possibilities not being included until now.
JEE (J2E) monitoring support (Jboss, Tomcat, Websphere, Apache) for the middle tier monitoring. Justin included a table with current supportability for certain products monitored on certain platforms (for example Jboss on Windows and Websphere on SLES). Will include it below.
Note from Bob -> I am guessing the list of monitored products and supported platforms will be expanded as we move along. I really like that the product is now moving more and more into the middle tier as well as this is where application owners and part of the business is focussing and quite simply these programs do exist in many environments and they do run important parts of the business.
Application Performance monitoring (APM). Previously known as Avicode. All parts of Avicode are now included into the main product. the SEviewer is now included into the console. There is a wizard based APM setup now which makes the process a lot easier! One part is still there and that is the required restart of IIS the first time avicode bits are included in order to monitor applications in IIS. The .Net Application Performance monitoring can now easily be setup as a template (like the other existing templates in the
authoring pane of the SCOM console). Just select the webapp you want to monitor and specify some options. If an IIS restart is needed SCOm will let you know.
Note from Bob -> To be honest I have been waiting for Avicode to be bought by Microsoft and for their functionality to be included into the product for a long time. Its all about .Net and getting all the way into depth with IIS applications, .Net and SQL queries behind it and a full analysis. It is great and this will certainly help again into the application layer monitoring.
The next post in this series will continue about whats new in the product (as discussed by Justin Incarnato in the mentioned CEP meeting) and my personal opinion on those.
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