I just attended the System Center Influencers Live Meeting session. It was the first session by and for the group.
A quick link to the announcement: http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter/archive/2009/09/08/don-t-miss-end-to-end-monitoring-of-it-services-in-the-datacenter-live-meeting-on-9-15.aspx.
The presentation was given by Sasha Dawes. It started out with some SCOM 2007 R2 features and extra’s and possibilities to interact the SCOM with other System Center products. The System Center provides a way to tackle some of the requirements for datacenter management, such as reliability and performance of services, operational efficiency and optimized use of resources. System Center aids this by lowering the cost of delivering datacenter services by using automation, optimization and simplification. Also curently the SCOM R2 has pushed towards more end-to-end service monitoring by leveraging heterogeneous system monitoring (windows and linux/unix) with Management packs from Microsoft and partner vendors. IT service level tracking was mentioned of course with reporting and sharepoint integration possibilities. Cross platform monitoring was mentioned of course as one of the cool new features of SCOM R2 and also the interop connectors. A brief demo of Service Manager was shown and how for instance an alert generated by SCOM would end up through a connector in Service Manager. Of course more and more System Center products extend into eachother, for instance the management packs for DPM, VMM, SCCM for SCOM. Visio add-in and Service Level Dashboards were also noted upon as ways to make SCOM even more cool especially for non-systemadmins.
So in short it was a very enjoyable session.
And… the presenters also got to learn about dealing with sound issues during a presentation, so all who attended got something out of it B)!
Looking forward to the next session.
