One of the many announcements to come out of the recent Microsoft Management Summit was System Center Advisor. Essentially this is Operations Manager (SCOM) in the cloud, so a sort of InTune for servers. 

I had a look at the precursor to this, Project Atlanta back in January, but at the time it was just focused on SQL Server management. However in the new Advisor, you can also manage Windows Server health, specifically Hyper-V and Active directory as well as the general health of the operating system.

Of course this means my Atlanta screencasts are now obsolete so here’s the replacement screencast on setting up Advisor if you haven’t tried it before..

 

Here’s the things you need to know if screencast aren’t your thing:

  • Obviously you aren’t going to want to connect all your Windows Servers to the internet, so you can set up a gateway in advisor which does connect to the Advisor cloud service, and then you configure the agent on each server to be managed to point to this gateway.
  • The gateway sends the data gets to the service once a day in the release candidate.
  • You can access the service from IE7 and later or Firefox 3.5 or later , but in both cases you must have Silverlight installed.
  • The agent needs to have .Net 3.5 sp1 or later installed
  • SQL Server 2008 and later can be managed for all editions including Express for both 32 and 64 bit installations.
  • The data collected is private to you protected in the same way to the same standard as other Microsoft OnLine services like Azure, Office 365 and InTune.

This is just a release candidate so I expect that more and more environments will be included in much the same way as there are numerous management packs for on premise SCOM today.  So this could be well worth looking into and for now it’s free as well as being very easy to setup.

If that’s too much trouble then you might want to come to our Private Cloud TechDay on 24th may in London for more on this or tune into the the Managing the Private Cloud TechDays Live session on 19th April with Gordon McKenna(from Inframon) and me.